I wanted to experience the real Japan, so I followed the locals

A giant dancing bowl of ramen cavorts and jives to a tooting brass band, while egging me on to finish my bowl of fat noodles, to a round of encouraging cheers. It sounds like a frat-party competitive eating competition, but actually, it's simply the people of Saiki showing me how happy they are to meet me.

Here, on Japan's southern island of Kyushu, they've turned out to welcome our Mitsui Ocean Fuji cruise ship to their little-visited docks.

Japanese visitors know Saiki has some of the best seafood in the country, and come for its seafood sushi and - obviously - its tonkotsu ramen. But to get here, we've sailed south from Tokyo, beneath bridges of seemingly endless spans, past cat islands and into the Bungo Channel, which links Japan's Seto Inland Sea to the Pacific Ocean.

Mitsui Ocean Cruises' ships have been exploring these ports for 30 years with a local clientele. Now, the Japanese liner has added two former Seabourn ships to its fleet, refitted for the Japanese market, and is welcoming English-speaking tourists on board. It's a canny move: cruising in Japan combines two of travel's hottest trends, and plenty of international liners already sail between the larger, better-known ports. But why not travel with the locals?

On this cruise in late spring, I'm one of 30-ish Australians on this seven-day sail, dubbed its Petals and Ports cruise. Here, in the south of the country, we've caught the last days of the cherry blossoms by our fingertips, as the pink wave rolls northward.

The cruise sees us visit Kobe for the beef, Saiki for its seafood, Wakayama for its castle. Thanks to international shipping laws, we're also required to spend a night in international waters, so the itinerary includes a day in South Korea's eye-poppingly colourful port city of Busan. Unfortunately, bad weather sees us skip our final port, tiny Toba, home of the Ama female free-divers and cute Edo-era streets, creating an unexpected sea day.

Instead of the traditional array of international staff on cruise liners, there's a strong showing of Japanese crew alongside the omnipresent, ever-smiling Filipino contingent. Importantly, Mitsui aims to keep the ship's guest list at 70 per cent Japanese to 30 per cent foreigners. What it means is that when you accidentally stay up too late and end up at the '70s disco party (guilty!) you're doing the hustle with Japanese holidaymakers.

Yes, you can lie by the pool ordering burgers and pizza while the house band does '80s power ballads and World Cup anthems, or you could play giant jenga, dress up in a yukata or join a "crafternoon".

One sea day finds us wrestling with shugi-bukuro, Japan's ribbon-garnished gifting envelopes. The salon is full of Japanese women, chatting and laughing quietly as we all follow the instructions to create decorative ties. One woman, who is happy to speak English to us, comes over to inspect the admittedly rather shoddy work at our English-speaking table.

"We're not used to this, unlike you," says one of our group.

"Oh no," she says, laughing. "We buy them from the shop! Who has time for such things?"

Equally, the food on the ship allows us to be as immersed as we please - scrambled eggs and croissants sit alongside the miso stand, a giant rice cooker and natto, the funky, fermented soy beans that are said to cure all ailments from cancer to old age.

To my mind, there's only one thing Japanese people love more than natto, and that's watching foreigners eat natto, so pungent, the fetid yellow strands wrap a malodorous hand around your throat.

Following my long-time commitment to eating only the food of the country I'm in - natto included - I sign up for the omakase nigiri dinner, whose miso-marinated grilled black cod paired with sake stays long in mind, and Tamatebako, the sweet, and sweetly educational afternoon tea, served with green teas in the observation bar.

And on our two sea days, I order the Japanese breakfast set through room service. It arrives with small ceremony, a large black lacquerware box from which drawers and compartments reveal a vast array of pickled and fresh vegetables, petite fruit salads, slices of glazed eel and warming miso. It's like unwrapping a beautiful, unexpected Christmas present, and takes more than an hour to enjoy, with cups of yuzu-scented black tea as we sail between some of the 700 islands of the Seto Inland Sea.

Off the ship, we wander through Kobe's Chinatown, perching on stools at street stands to watch its famed beef flash-fried and served with giant tankards of beer. In Wakayama, it's a leg-stretching walk with a local English-speaking guide up to the 16th-century hilltop castle and the gentler 19th-century Yosui-en gardens. It's followed with an art class to make pretty lacquerware plates and a kaiseki lunch at Ganko Kakayama Rokusanen, with an extraordinary number of tiny ceramic dishes in each setting - all around me, there are prayers sent skyward thanking the gods we're not doing the washing-up.

After our guided tour, six of us break away for lunch at the famed 54-year-old Kamehachi Sushi restaurant, our low table loaded with platters of the freshest prawns, eel and cuttlefish from the Bungo Channel. At the end of the meal, the delighted owner, Hideyo Todaka, starts up an impromptu photo shoot with us, complete with fan signs we hold up to announce, "Welcome to Saiki City!" The photo's been well received on social media.

Cruise ships can sometimes feel like an international zone, a world apart from what's on shore, but the free time lets us roam (and shop) then come back to the ship to unpack our finds and question the Japanese crew while continuing to explore the country on board ("Oh, hello, Japanese gin cart!").

Aside from Kobe, these ports are mostly off the cruise routes, and the Mitsui line visits more than 70 ports across the country, for a deeper glimpse into Japan's nature, culture and people.

"Our mission is to bring tourism to lesser-visited regions of Japan," the ship's hotel manager, Kana Hamada, tells me. If real Japan is a 30-piece table setting for one or a giant dancing bowl of ramen, then count me in.

The writer was a guest of Cruise Traveller