Driving from Hiroshima to Fukuoka with minimal tolls

Hi everyone! I'm on a roadtrip right now driving around Japan, and we're down in Hiroshima and heading to Fukuoka tomorrow. We're trying to avoid toll roads so that we can see more of Japan and to also avoid how expensive they can be. This has been an amazing trip so far, yep a lot more driving, but we've had experiences we wouldn't have had if we'd taken the toll road.

The drive from Hiroshima to Fukuoka looks like it's going to make be take a least a small part of a toll road (which is totally fine if it's highly recommended to do so). I'm wondering if anyone has any recommendations on which routes I should take for this drive tomorrow. The past few days I've been manually adjusting the Google Maps directions to take me off route 2 because that has been such a boring route to take (no rest stations, skips over towns like they don't exist, bumper to bumper traffic, etc).

Keen to know if anyone has done this drive before and any specific spots they recommend hitting up/any beautiful routes they drove on that we should take!

Thanks!