Kyō Kaido (Slight Return)

 

 

Time wounds all heels. Then time heals all wounds.  The months pass, memory dulls.  Forgotten is the monotony, the blisters, the pain in shoulder and hip.  Then suddenly a new map pops up, and I'm once again lacing the sneakers in the genkan, one leg up like a stork.

Again, maps are the key.  I've already walked so many of Kansai's old roads, but digital technology has improved exponentially upon my old guidebooks with their minute, hand-drawn attempts devoid of any scale. A recent online discovery shows that I had been misled a great deal along the Kyō Kaidō, and my curiousity (or perhaps ego), demands a rematch.  I'd done two sections back in 2009 and 2013 respectively, and decide this time to orient myself toward Osaka, and walk into that city's heart.       

I grab my buddy Joel to join on the first leg, as he is as keen on discovery as I, and we can stave off monotony with a flow of conversation that will carry us away from the more dismal sections.  We leave the train at Kujō station, and walk west.  I am happy to see that the old Minami-Kaikan has once again reverted to screening old classics of Euro-cinema, albeit in a new location.  We decide to give Tō-ji a miss, taken more with the heron that peers into the murky moat, unperturbed by the steady flow of passers-by.  We reach the small park that marks the site of the old Rajomon gate, the bare earth and lonely children's slide makes it seem almost as forlorn as the epic reproduction in Kurosawa's near eponymous film.  Then again, it might just be the glooming overcast weather.

The road lumbers due south from here, along a diminished Senbon-dōri.  At the dogleg stands little cluster of Jizō statues, probably moved here due to some past road construction.  I had just been commenting to Joel about my love for old cities such as Rome, Athens, and Istanbul, where even the most casual of strolls has you stumbling over ancient stone relics.  I had been pondering why a city as old as Kyoto doesn't have these things, but I'd indeed forgotten about Jizō.     

Senbon proves a mismatch of architectural styles, as is common in modern Japan.  This stretch has a good number of old Edo period wooden delights, and it also has bland, post-bubble cookie cutter clones. I'm quite taken with the rustic wooden Little Church on the Prairie look to the Assembly of God. The more I do these road walks, the more it dawns on me that rather than fret about the mundane nature of some of these places, particularly in the cities, I should appreciate that they express the variety of building styles that have arise over the last 150 years.  Is that not in itself historic? 

We cross the Kamogawa, then pass a stele marking the opening salvo of the Battle of Toba-Fushimi and the greater Bōshin War, that mopping up operation to root out the remaining Shogunate loyalists. Jōnan-gu Shrine is not far to our left, but we are more interested in getting to the river.  Hunger is looming, and we hope to find a good grassy spot to picnic.  There are a fair number of Edō-period houses, along the telltale four-meter width that marks a feudal road. Many properties have large, high walls surrounding their gardens.  One wall has open gaps that lack the usual latticework, and I find its seeming lack of completion troubling somehow.  Lush crops fill a garden of another sort, and it is refreshing to see that rather than with the usual plastic mulch, the stalks of the plants have been covered with straw in order to keep weeds at bay.   Black plastic sheets do appear soon enough a short walk away, where the only crops at the moment are human boot prints.

We get to the river and our lunch spot, as storm clouds build over the mountains to the city's north.  The air grows muggy as we continue along the high flood-control berms that protect the suburbs below.  The humidity will rise to become slightly uncomfortable, as the early days of summer begin to assert themselves. There is a thatch-roofed temple, and a home built like an medieval castle, flanked defiantly by a neighboring window decorated in French Ironwork. 

The Kaidō drops us back onto the tarmac again, which alternates between open vegetable fields and more clusters of little, two-story homes.  The latter are almost cottages, colorfully attractive though standing linked shoulder to shoulder.  While they face the river, the four-meter high berm prevents any chance of seeing water.  I sense that this is a neighborhood for Japan's unmentionable untouchables, which is more or less confirmed by a stone marking the burial place of the war dead of the eastern army of the Battle of Toba-Fushimi.  An old couple pulls down freshly cut boughs from a tree overhanging one house, while behind them, trash is piled high in the doorway.  I sense that they are family to the owners, who are no doubt just as dead as the soldiers buried beneath the soil here.  

We move inland at Yodo, where the odd historical signage reveals that this might have all been river at some point. We find the place where the Korea diplomatic dispatches disembarked their river launches prior to the long walk to Edō.  There is the landlocked site of the Yodo Kobashi, and the equally high and dry Yodo waterwheel, documented by Engelbert Kaempfer when he accompanied the Dutch on an Edō-bound procession of their own.  Our own road takes us through more and more modern suburb, whose main charm is in an ancient sakura standing atop a quiet bridge.

The next bridge is immense, spanning the Uji river racing in from the east.  We follow it for the rest of the walk, an hour spent below the massive berm that rises to our left.  The true road is atop it, but it is featureless, with a glut of cars.  Far more preferable, and safer, to be down here with the reeds, and the resident birds.  Joel is something of an amateur ornithologist, and he stops from time to time to hone in on a particular call, before whipping out the binoculars to get a better look at the soloist.  His bird app provides the liner notes.  

Just shy of where the Uji meets the Katsura, moments before their manage-a-trois with the Kizu, we exchange the road for a pair of rails.  From here, the offspring of the three rivers is christened the Yodo.  I walked this exact stretch in 2008, though I favored the riverbank itself.  I'll be back before long, to see what she bears on her eastern shoreline.   

On the turntable:  The English Beat, "Bonus Beat"