I'd been waiting for a hole in the weather, and being rainy season, I'd been waiting a week. All the rain seemed fitting, as what I had in mind was tracing a river. Due to that week of bad weather, the water I was now walking above was literally racing down toward sea level, Yet the water I was after was in the next watershed. I didn't expect to reach it until later in the day.
Maps of the region show that the source of Kyoto's famous Kamogawa has its origins on the slopes of Sajiki-ga-take, a 895 meter peak just north of the city. The river could be considered the origin of Kyoto itself, as its Imperial founding fathers found it fit ideally within the dictates of Chinese feng shui that dictated the preeminent architectural principles of the time. And as feng shui can have varied interpretations, so too can maps. I decided to seek a place furthest up the mountain, one I'd approach from above, following the tenets of gravity. I'd loop around to approach the peak from the back, then follow the ridgeline down. That was the way the rains would fall.
For the first half an hour or so I walked up the logging road built on the bank of the Sofutani-gawa, which joins the Kamogawa lower down where I parked my car. It proved to be a lovely walk, despite the tarmac beneath my feet. The river in particular was ever rushing to my left. On this day, the waters ran fast and white.
Despite man's best efforts to maintain these forests, a large number of trees were down, fallen across the river, and crushing the guardrails at the side of the road. I've wondered before at this, whether this is due to the increasing strength of summer storms, or to the trees being left to grow to such unweildly heights that they topple in high winds, while beneath them, their shallow roots are unable to cling to the sodden soil that slips away beneath. There was a strange beauty to the crosshatch of trees down the hillside, an infinite number of geographic angles to be found in their corpses.
This was a death sentence pure and simple, stemming from improper forestry practices. After the war, extensive logging had been undertaken nationwide, in order to rebuild the bombed out cities. They'd decided to replant with cryptomeria and cypress, "junk wood" that grows incredibly quickly, and therefore could be utilized for the rebuilding of the subsequent generation. Somewhere along the line it was found to be cheaper to log the old growth forests of Indonesia, Australia, and British Columbia. These coniferous forests (or more aptly, plantations), make up 40% of Japanese woodland, and have been essentially left to themselves. Which has given rise to new problems. The pollen they give off in spring now causes millions of dollars in absenteeism due to allergies. And the overcrowding of the trees doesn't allow enough sunlight to penetrate to grow any vegetation at ground level for animals to feed upon. (You hear very little birdsong or insects there.) As a result, wildlife has begun to move closer to the neighboring villages for food, which has given rise to more and more bear encounters, and animal raids of gardens and fields. I rarely saw electrical fences before about 15 years ago. Now they are nearly everywhere.
The forestry industry's approach to greater risk of storm damage appears based on the old Vietnam strategy of burning the village to save it. About halfway into my ascent up the road, the forest nearly disappeared completely. Enormous stretches had been razed. (Online photos accompanying reports of recent hikes here show that this forest came down in late November last year.). This act of aggression went beyond a mere thinning before the return of typhoon season. Like the high walls built along the Tohoku coastline after the 2011 tsunami, it had the feel of an act of revenge. This was no trim; this was a complete buzzcut. Where was the Lorax when you needed him?
I passed the most commonly used route up Sajiki, marked by a hand-carved sigh tied to a stump, pointing up past hundreds of other stumps. My own route was unmarked, which I would have missed without the GPS. My 'trail' was now a dirt road hastily cut into the slope. It led soon enough to an older track, which I followed to a large clearing called Saru-toge. The trail all but disappeared down the far side, a creek bed with more water than earth. Footing beneath was all a jumble of moss-covered fallen logs. I made my way gingerly, taking care not to slip, and ever mindful of vipers who may be hungry and cranky after days hiding from the rain. (In my concentration I didn't notice the leach that fastened itself to my shin. It was only hours later at home that I noticed the blood flowing through a smaller forest of leg hair.
The rest of the day was relatively perfunctory: up and over Ishibutsu-toge (disappointingly missing the stone Buddhas of its namesake); along the ridge to Sofu-dani and its quartet of ancient trees (a place right out of a samurai film, the type of place for ambush); and further on to the summit. The route down was a potpourri of Japanese trails: wide paths, broad forest roads, narrow animal tracks down steep hills. The ridge gradually led downward, and with a sharp left turn, began to level off.
This was the headwaters of the Kamogawa. There were a handful of graves here, no doubt priests from the Iwaya Shimyō-in temple further on. A half-dozen Roku Jizo stood watch from atop a stone wall, and another, standing alone, had luckily been missed by a toppled tree, its calm face beaming innocently from through the boughs.
The trail now followed the Kamo, criss-crossing the stream a number of times. The skeleton of a massive tree lay across the stream bed, from behind which a deer ran out, stopping uphill to look down at me as I passed by. Beyond this was the new growth of an old clear cut. While one quarter of the slope had been reclaimed by juvenile conifers, the rest had been allowed to grow wild, now a riot of varied shapes and shades of green. It gave one some hope that those horribly decimated places could eventually reclaim themselves.
Around the time when the temple roofs appeared, the temple priest himself popped up from the river, clad in heavy wellies and a mask in his breast pocket. We chatted awhile, he worried about leeches, though assured by my long trousers. I'd meet his wife a decade ago, finding we made mutual friends within the Kyoto Journal contingent, and as we talked about Gary Snyder and Royall Tyler, I thought that these must be interesting people indeed. When I mentioned this conversation to the priest, he said, "Ah Snyder! That brings back memories."
And Shimei-in temple itself was quite memorable, with its rocky precipices behind, and the massive moss-coated boulders I'd been passing all the way down. The temple was said to have been built by Kukai in 829, though the roots go back to 650 with En-no-Gyoja, founder of the yamabushi sect. This went on to become a place of training, once so grand that by 1550, forty buildings filled the valley. The principal figure of worship for the yamabushi is Fudo-myo, and his statue here is supposedly the oldest in Japan, carved by Kukai himself (that jack-of-all-trades). More recently, renowned writer Shiba Ryotaro wrote an essay described an unusual night spent here, and a later conversation he had about it with Miyazaki Hayao served as inspiration for the latter's "Princess Mononoke."
Most relevant to this piece is that the water deity was enshrined in a cave here, which legend has it as the true source of the Kamogawa. Perhaps symbolically, it was to this temple that the last of Japan's many demons was chased from the new capital of Kyoto. It was known as Chimimori, a spirit of nature, one beyond human knowledge. The pure waters of the Kamo prevailed.
I followed these waters along the temple's entrance road, lined with ancient Jizo under protective structures of wood and stone. A trio of small inns surrounded a fork in the road, each with terraces that allowed one in summer to dine above the cool of the flowing waters. And it is from here that I'd continue to follow the river toward the city another day. For above came the gathering of rain clouds, ensuring that the Kamogawa will continue to flow on.
On the turntable: Miles Davis, "Jazz Classics"
On the nighttable: Max Boot, "The Road Not Taken"
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