Lands of green and golden silence: this is Japan but not as you know it

The fading light creeps across the rice paddy terraces as the sky broods into a chalky shade of violet. There's an unearthly silence as I pan slowly from one end of the valley to the other - it's like the whole scene might be in a vacuum. In stark contrast, earlier that day, I had navigated the stifling Tokyo Metro to Haneda Airport, where tides of people ebbed and flowed with each station stop. I was told Oita prefecture and, in particular, the Kunisaki Peninsula were quiet parts of Japan, but nothing had prepared me for this level of stillness.

"Follow me. Your accommodation is right this way. I will bring you dinner at 7 o'clock, but let me know if there is anything I can get for you in the meantime," beams my host, Fusako Kamihira, peeling back the door to my farmstay cottage. I'm met with a glowy bare wood interior across a kitchenette, dining room and bathroom before a narrow staircase takes me upstairs. It's here where the true smallness of the dwelling hits, forcing me to stoop on entering my attic bedroom. Later, I'll limbo under chunky beams before slipping into my futon bed.

Between oversized dragonflies zipping by and baby frogs bouncing off my shins, I'm given an early-morning tour of a vegetable plot. It's beautifully lush and teeming with life, as I learn about organic practices that go into the 60-odd different vegetables, fruits and mushrooms they harvest.

"In this valley alone, we have some of the oldest people in our prefecture," Masa, Fusako's husband, says with a knowing look.

I meet a young Austrian couple lodging on the farm part of a WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) exchange, working several hours daily for accommodation and meals. They happily tell me this experience - their summer break from hectic lives as TV producers back in Austria - couldn't be any more relaxing yet culturally interesting at the same time, and they don't look forward to leaving.

Over a breakfast of fluffy scrambled eggs, a vibrant salad, rice and miso soup, I sit outside and absorb the same landscape from the previous evening, only now in resounding colour. Despite undeniable flavour, there's a tangible honesty about sitting within a kilometre of where my entire meal has been grown and cultivated. And in the 45 minutes I sit relishing each bite, just one car drifts slowly by this whole scene.

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Eager to expel some energy, I hike to the top of nearby Kyu-Sento-ji temple grounds, extending dramatically from the canopy-covered valley floor to the cliff-face-perched shrine of Itsutsuji Fudo. At the top, I am met by a lone figure. Installed a decade ago, famed British artist Antony Gormley's sculpture Another Time, is a striking two-metre-tall cast iron effigy looking out over the Seto Inland Sea towards Himeshima Island: a pixel-perfect screensaver view. There are few places where culture, nature, food and art collide as casually as this.

Where: Maruka 3 Farmstay, Kunisaki Peninsula, Oita, Japan

How much: Prices start at $90 per person per night year round, and include dinner and breakfast

Explore more: maruka831.com

The writer was a guest of Tourism Oita.