Nara Kaido

 

 

The Kyō Kaidō map I recently found kept me busy throughout June, and this morning I would set out on the last of the walks it detailed.  My plan all along had been to do it before the heat of summer truly set in, under the umbrella of overcast skies of rainy season.  And this final walk was in some ways most important.   

When I'd set out 18 months ago to follow Akechi Mitsuhide on his wild ride from Shōryūji Castle to his safe haven beside Lake Biwa, I'd followed a route that was the most direct, or looked the most interesting.  But knowing now that this final route does exist, it would have been his most likely route, had he not been murdered in the thickets en route.  

As my feet fell upon it, I wasn't yet sure what this particular route had been called, and it was to my surprise that I later discovered that it too was known as the Nara Kaidō, the pseudonym of last week's Fushimi Kaidō.  Further research showed that the Nara Kaidō was a collective name of roads emanating toward the eponymous old capital.  I presumed that this particular one had served as an old bypass of sorts, allowing travellers from Osaka to head directly to the Tokaidō, without passing through Kyoto. 

I'd started tired from a physically busy week and it showed in a lack of enthusiasm.   Not long after leaving Yodo Station, I passed an off-road motorbike with two flat tires almost melded to the sidewalk. I felt nearly as flat.  The massive behemoth being built beside JFA racetrack was a forest of cranes, and I felt for the toddler I saw in his mother's arms, young enough that this accompanying din of construction right off his doorstep would have always been part of his short life. 

All in all it was pretty industrial along this first stretch.  The houses that did exist were down little stumps of alleys, but a good many had a faux-brick look with trellising that took me to the antebellum South, the look of New Orleans, of Columbia, South Carolina.  At the head of one of these stumps was a single grave, for warriors killed in the Battle of Toba-Fushimi, though the actual dead were still somewhere beneath the race course across the way.  

Where the houses let up a mountain arose.  This enormous pile of slag was many stories tall, with a bulldozer pushing the grey stones around and around.  The smoke rising from its vertical exhaust pipe, set against the grey of earth and sky, was a scene right out of the English Midlands in the 1970's.   It was a far cry from the many centuries when all of this was rice fields.

The road led me over the tracks to a smaller lane that took me along a berm that towered above the Uji River.  This confirmed my feelings I'd done this walk 15 years before, albeit in the other direction. The scenery certainly hadn't gotten much better in the interval.  I did like the look of the river when it receded to the point that its banks looked like the walls of a canyon, the water running listlessly through it.  Here too was a landscape from another place, a beautifully self-contained little ecosystem.  The riverbed itself must have been 300-400 meters across, but it had been whittled down to this little canyon.  

I passed a group of a dozen men in JR jackets, collectively overseeing the flight of a drone.  It probably caught me on camera as I squeezed through a do not enter barrier that tried to prevent me from crossing a narrow concrete pedestrian bridge that spanned the river.  Every step was accompanied by internal visions of breaking through and falling into the water below.  

I was just across the river from the park where I'd found Nobunaga's gravestone.  What I hadn't seen that day was a series of floodgates, which had high pilings above, much like Tower Bridge in London.  I assume they were Meiji, or perhaps early Showa, to judge from the matching buildings (now a technology museum), and the wrought-iron bridge further along.    

Into Chushojima again, along an attractive tree-lined path following the canals.  Here and there were old Tateba, places that allowed feudal period travellers to take a rest.   This was a far better route than that of last week, and led me straight into the quaint heart of Fushimi town.  I had my obligatory lunch and beer at Yamorido, a perfectly timed break one-third of the way along.    

Getting out of town though proved a horrible slog.  I circled back around to the Kangetsu Bridge, named for one of Toyotomi Hideyoshi's moon viewing parties, then straight arrow to the east, passing near Sanyaso, where that same warlord had built a platform for viewing that same celestial body.   Above me in the hills somewhere were the tombs of two emperors, and the remains of Hideyoshi's Fushimi Momoyama castle. 

These ruins lined the next half hour of my walk, though nothing really remained, but for the odd marker, included one buried to the hilt in concrete.  More prominent were suburban homes, and the JR line.  These escorted me through Rokujizo proper, before biding my leave at a built up shopping street at that station's far side. 

The road narrowed and grew busy, with no sidewalks to protect from the rushing traffic, especially the wing mirrors of trucks which brought the danger of imminent decapitation.  I was given reprieve by the quiet and shaded canal frontage of Daigo-ji.  It was just to the west where Mitsuhide had met his demise.  

The road undulated gently as it moved along the hillside.  I was growing weary now, the humidity high.  I jaywalked before a unnoticed police box, and not long afterward was a faded billboard for a college for police dogs.    I sleepwalked past Zuishin-in and its famous plum garden, the road growing narrower, quieter, before meeting Higechaya Oiwake and the Tokaidō. 

From here Mitsuhide's troops would have continued west along the Tokaidō, rather than cut over the mountains as I had.  Though at that time, the road would have been a mere shadow of the grand trunk road it would become a decade later.   But I've already twice followed routes into Ōtsu, and quite frankly, I'd had enough for the day.  

On the turntable:  The Beat, "Special Beat Service"