Leap-frogging along the Iseji III

 

 

Kii-no-Matsushima had been our quiet base for the night.  Dinner proved particularly entertaining, as our hostess regaled us with charming stories.  Good manners dictate that one doesn't eat while being addressed like this, but you could drink.  With each sip of my beer I was laughing inside, thinking that perhaps this is a ploy.  The longer she talked, the longer you'd drink, and ultimately would need another in order to wash down the immensity of courses that was dinner.  A clever strategy I thought.  And it paid off in our ordering not one more sake, but two. 

I woke early and well rested, so decided to have a look at the town, still asleep at the dawn hour. The beach was quiet and had the day been hotter, I'd have started it with a dip.  I regretted missing the town's onsen, which sat in a quiet grove of pines at the other end of town.  But I'd be back, perhaps as early as winter, a time when the warmth of its waters would be far more welcome. 

After a lavish breakfast, we leap-frogged ahead to the trailhead for Magose-toge.  The stone stairs began right at the base, and didn't cease until the pass itself.  I've seen a lot of these ishi-tatami paths throughout Japan, but never one the went from head to toe.  We rested a few minutes at the pass, then pushed up an even steeper set of steps to the summit of Tenkurayama, the path wild and rough like many of those I'd climbed in China.  The summit was rocky, with one incredible boulder that was as big as a three-story apartment building.  A long iron ladder led to its smooth surface, and from here we gazed awhile at the sea off to one side, and on the other, the towering Omine peaks running down toward us.  Amongst these, the smooth grassy head of Ogai-ga-hara stood mysterious and proud.     

It was the usual long descent that brought us to Owase. We had a noon-time meet with a couple of people from the tourist board, but had done our traverse in ridiculous time.  Keiji stayed in the A/C of the Tourist Info building, but I set off in search of a coffee, not wanting to put on the mask (both literal and figurative) and make small talk.   But this proved elusive.  I wandered a number of streets, past dozens of shuttered businesses, finally giving up and grabbing an iced joe at a convenience store.  A line of preschool kids stood across the street from me, gawping.

I returned at the appointed hour to meet the folks from town, who led us around on a food walk, where we would pop into a business to be given a small bite, the cumulative half dozen building to the equation of lunch.  We sat later in a restored old home and discussed what the town was doing to regenerate itself.  I asked question after question, aiming the usual things that communities were doing to attract young people, but to each of these they answered in the negative.  The work-from-home ethic had been a boon to many parts of Japan, but these people had done nothing to capitalize on it. 

As such, I'd never seen a town so dead.  Naturally I pass though hundreds of such communities on my walks, but while many look to be teetering, these is still some semblance of life.  But Owase was as bad as I'd ever seen, and even a well thought out gimmick like a food walk would change that.  Who know that the large cemetery I'd passed though on my way out of the hills would be a foreshadowing of the town to come. The company that I was consulting for this week operates in the spirit of trying to revitalize rural communities, to bring them new life.  But this one had just gone to far, as if the citizens themselves had declared a DNR.  I just couldn't see bringing clients here.  The food walk was a fun and innovative idea, but in walking around, tour clients would get too good a look at the town, and how dire the situation was.  It was written in the patterns of rust upon all those shuttered shops. 

 

On the turntable:  Husker Du, "Zen"

 

Leap-frogging along the Iseji II

 

 

I started the day far away beside the sea.  Being summer, I missed sunrise by about half an hour, but it was still early as I watched the light come up behind Meoto-iwa, the rope between cutting through the orange sphere as if slicing fruit.  The wind was up, and every fifth or sixth wave would throw spray onto the concrete trail.  This Futamiokitama Shrine had an Ama-no-Iwato, somewhat fakily man-made, and facing the wrong direction.  The Ama-no-Iwato cave in the hills not far from here was smaller but had more authenticity in being a bit of work to hike up to.  But the Ama-no-Iwato in Kyushu's Takachiho was most impressive of all.   

My pick-up was early, and for much of the morning we'd followed the trail I'd left a couple of days before. I showed my colleagues the Bakamagari, and was surprised when they wanted to go through.  After the previous visit I'd thought it a miracle I hadn't picked up a leech.  And sure enough, back in the car I noticed one wriggling off my ankle.  I hollered for the driver to stop, thinking the leech hadn't yet locked its jaws on me, but I was too late.  Oddly enough I'd received some sacred salt at my inn the night before, but not wanting to kill the little bastard, I asked the driver for his ETC credit card.  When he asked me why, I joked that I wanted to bribe him into letting go.  But I found that I could use the card to laterally scrape away the leech's mouth without breaking his head off under the skin, which tends to get infected and itchy later.  Incredibly, the leech then fastened itself to the card,  making it quite a chore to flick him away as he maintained a strong grip into the plastic.  

We continued our drive south.   Gone were the days of the beautifully photographic image of the mini rice stalks beneath glass, as the water had by now mainly drained away.  It was up to the rains now.  But those seemed far away today.  The weather was pleasant with a cooling breeze that ruffled the tips of the stalks, like the tousling of hair.  

The shops we passed were the usual chain stores found only in the countryside, places familiar to me from my years up in the 'Nog, places I had 'grown up with' and assumed were everywhere.  Now living in urban Kansai, I recognized them as country cousins, as old friends.     

We finally pulled up at Umegadani Station, where I'd begun my ascent of Nisaka-toge three years before.  Today, we'd go up the parallel Tsuzurato-toge that crossed over a ridge to the north.  This had been the older pass, until replaced by the Nisaka 300 years ago.  Before walking away from the car, I was kitted out in pilgrimage gear:  red vest, wooden staff, conical hat.  The later proved a bit of a nuisance since it would get jostled by my pack, so after an mere hour I simply hung it from the bag, where it would stay for the rest of the week.

I was kitted out this way so as to be the model for a video being shot to promote the tour.  We'd filmed at the Ise shrines the day before, much to the amusement of other visitors.  One old granny asked to take a photo together.  I wondered what others thought when I was walking alone, far from the camera.  But after awhile I forgot about it, much in the way that I tend to forget that how much my height and features make me stand out, how I don't look like everyone else in this country.

Thus attired, I moved out along the rice-laden villages strung along the valley floor.  It was a warm day and the clothing didn't breathe well, so it was a relief when we eventually returned to forest.  The locals had used the pass until the 1930s, when the road was built.  It was a good well-marked trail, with stone steps rising steadily upward like toward Machu Picchu.  Now and then I'd have to act out a scene, and I was surprised how much I've missed film acting. There's an awareness that's not self-conscious per se, but more a hyper-consciousness, a focus on every movement and gesture that bespeaks the zen of tea ceremony, or martial arts. Not an action is wasted. 

After a brief rest and some off-the-cuff narration at the pass, we began the long walk down.  I remembered Nisaka as being similarly long, but this one went on and on.  It would be the character of all the passes we'd eventually go on to cross, and pity the poor walker doing this pilgrimage from the other direction.   The villages in this next valley were a bit more built up but had a pleasant feel, and its primary canal led us into Kii-Nagashima.

Lunch was fried sunfish eaten outside the michi-no-eki, just as it had been in 2019.  We jumped forward then to meet Ueda-san, who would lead us around on a tour of Uomachi.  A hipster surfer of sorts, he had a light touch about the whole thing, shooting the bull with fishermen repairing their nets, or flirting with the aunties serving us fish-related bites in the local shops.  It was all a reminder of how I've missed spending time with people in rural Japan. There was not the slightest hint of chill in their demeanor, unlike my stone-faced neighbors in Kyoto.  

There was a quick climb to the village shrine shadowed over by an immense camphor tree, followed by a long sit in an old house filled with funky Showa-retro delights.  Here they screened for us a shadow-puppet version of the village's local legend, cleverly rear-projected onto the shoji screens at the end of the room.   When it was finished, we turned in surprise to find standing behind us the thirteenth generation descendant of the film's heroic and long dead samurai.  He didn't have much to say, and I felt a little sorry for him, assuming that he is often trotted out to meet and greet passing tourists. 

In the temple grounds nearby stood two stones marking the victims of a pair of tsunami.  Surprisingly, one of these waves had been caused in the Hōei eruption of far-off Fuji, an event that birthed the eponymously named Hōei pimple that is now a prominent feature on Fuji' eastern flank.  

Next to the temple was the house of a woman who had spent most of her young adulthood in New York City, where her husband had been sent for work.  Now a widow, she seemed the town celebrity of sorts, leading us on a rapid-fire tour of her home, moving with the grace of true hostess,  There was an ease in her being, along with a definitive flirtation.  I wondered how she feels now living with her elderly mother in this small village, far from Manhattan and all that the metropolis contains.  But she had certainly created her own reality here, teaching English to the local children, and charming foreign visitors who pass along the Kumano Kodō running past her front door. 

 

On the turntable:  The Beat, "I Just Can't Stop It"

 

Leap-frogging along the Iseji

 

I'd made three attempts at this particular walk.  The first had been in 2009, when I walked all the major sections of the Kumano trails.  By the time I got to Shingu, I'd had enough of concrete and cars, and decided to begin the Shikoku pilgrimage a little earlier, assuming it would have more natural bits. (Spoiler alert: It didn't.)   I'd twice gone so far as to develop an itinerary and book accommodations, in May and December 2020, but the pandemic had different ideas.  

Good things come to those who wait, I suppose.  An adventure tour company approached me to help them revamp some of their tours, and so it was that they sent me to explore the forested parts of the Iseji.  As they paid for my transport down and back, I decided to leave a day early, for a bit of extra credit.  

A very early train took me to Tamaru, and a very short walk brought me to the true start of the Iseji,  While the trail technically continues another 13 km to the Ise shrines proper, I'd done that walk already as the final stretch of the Ise Hon-kaidō, which I walked back in 2015.   Yet despite the familiarity, it took me all of a minute to follow the wrong road, but I quickly figured it out and backtracked to the true path.  

Tamaru was one of those in-between places characteristic of Japanese towns connected by rail line.  With a character neither rural nor urban, history and charm seem to have hopped a train toward other places.  I longed to do the same, after a looping masugata detoured me through a quiet neighborhood, then dumped me onto the unpleasant and busy Route 13.  This stayed unpleasant and busy for far too long.  

Over the hour I walked the highway it grew narrower, and only slightly less busy.  These are exactly the moments that I put on the headphones, to drown out the roars as they roll by.  Today was a Leonard Cohen kind of day, and when "Sisters of Mercy" came on, in this part of the world it reminded me of the bikuni nuns, those sisters of mercy who walked the pilgrimage route in order to raise money by selling subscriptions for the upkeep of their home temples.   Legend dictates that some also raised money from prostitution, but this could be hyperbole, in the way the same misunderstanding is associated with geisha.    

Despite the road, it was great to be out.  This was my first multi-day long walk since Covid, the first time in the deep countryside for a month or so.  It was great the way the hydrangeas were coming in, and how the fading beauty of the azaleas still commanded equal attention.  

Big concrete Fudō-ji temple failed to move me.  But it was development's last hurrah, and I moved deeper away from the symmetry of structures to follow the curves of a more natural landscape.  I finally left tarmac and began the climb over Meki-tōge, whose name bears the curious characters of Female demon.  Recent legends state that there was a demon who ate travellers along this stretch, but all I saw were traces of ox-cart wagon tracks, which led to the deep cutaway of rock that marked the pass. I had my lunch at a small Kannon altar, then descended to pop out of the forest beside a dam that looked more like an alpine lake.  After the labor of the albeit brief climb, a swim would be in order, but on a day hotter than this one.   

There is something wonderful about walking low passes in Japan.  You follow a long valley out to its farthest reaches, and after the up and over, you enter a new landscape, with another broad valley opening before you.   This next section was through a quiet village, stretched high above the river which wended slowly below me.  

I passed plenty of ruins: a temple founded by Shotoku Taishi; an old feudal school; an old tea house which sold famous steamed buns.  There was also the open grounds of a modest temple complex, a sake brewer, then a long walk down an arrow-straight road lined with cozy looking homes.  At the far end was Tochihara, known to walkers for its Edō period inn that marked the first overnight for those who'd started at Ise proper. 

Not far beyond was the unusual Bakamagari, where the trail left the main road and passed beneath it through a long drainage pipe, over a set of raised rails so that people could keep their shoes dry.  At the far end however, you were forced to wet your feet crossing the riverbed itself until reaching the trail again on the far side.  I thought this all a tad bizarre.  Why would pilgrims bend at the waist and walk through a pipe?  But it hit me that historically they never had, at least until the road and railway were built.  

I was led off-road twice more before the day was done.  Saruki was similarly brief, the trail clear but beginning to be overgrown as rainy season bore down.  I wondered if these brief sections had been open when I did my big Kumano walk in 2009.  I imagine that many sections that I'd unwittingly strolled right past during that walk had since been discovered and cleared and were now open for traversing.  What motivation a little world heritage status can bring!

My enthusiasm for, and expectation of, finishing 28 km today was beginning to wane as the humidity rose.  It came back to that psychological game where, if I see the distance of what I've already covered, in the subtraction lies the fatigue.  The markers, helpful as they were, handicapped in reminding me of how far I'd already come, and what still remained.  

I missed one train by about half an hour, and it would be over two hours until the next one.   I was tempted to catch that train at the next station up, but it was just out of the realm of possibility. I could possibly make it, but would need to race to get there, diminishing the enjoyment of the journey along the way.  So rather than at Misedani, I would call it quits at Kawazoe. 

With such minimal train service on the line, how odd that during the final rail crossing of the day, I was stopped by a passing train, forcing me to wait.  From there, it was a pleasant walk amongst tea fields, then along the quiet lanes into town.   Kawazoe was again one of those in-between places, rural, but with a railway stop.  The former meant there was little in the way of amenities, or things to engage the traveller.  The latter meant that it was too built up to have any rural appeal.  But it did have a lovely old school where middle school students were getting the pool ready for summer swim classes.  And there was a bizarre little toy shop showing Showa era memorabilia, which multi-tasked as a temple of the Tenri sect.  Kawazoe also had the cleanest, shiniest, honey wagon I've ever seen.   

I confirmed the train schedule, then walked over to the bus stop to see if there was anything leaving sooner.  And how like Japan, in having this similarly infrequent service leave just a few minutes before the train did.  For every train.  All day.  The verb "to stagger' must not exist in the local dialect.   I was in no hurry to get up to Matsuzaka as my dinner meeting was not until 7, so I toyed with the idea of sitting somewhere to await the train.  But there was no place to do so.  There was no coffee shop, but there were dozens of vending machines, all in the shadow of the massive Dydo distributor that had colonized the town.  So I stayed at the bus stop, thumb out, in a half-hearted effort to control my destiny.  Traffic was steady, but no one seemed interested in stopping. I was considering giving up when I got a lift from a man commuting to his job as night shift in a car factory.   His act of generosity ensured me an early bath, and even better, a nap. 

 

On the turntable:  Husker Du, "Flip your Wig"

 

Jazz & The Spoken Word, set two

 

 

With the Joshua Breakstone group, Bonds Rosary, July 01, 2022

 

On the turntable: Rolling Stones,  "Beggars Banquet"

Jazz & The Spoken Word, set one

 

  

With the Joshua Breakstone group, Bonds Rosary, July 1, 2022

 

On the turntable: Rahsaan Roland Kirk,  "Here Comes the Whistleman"

 

Sunday Papers: Ken Knabb

 

"Patriotism is extremely seductive because it enables even the most miserable individual to indulge in a vicarious collective narcissism." 

 

On the turntable:  Pentangle, "The Lost Broadcasts"

Jazz & The Spoken Word II

Jazz & The Spoken Word returns to Kyoto on July 1st. My own words (and the Rexroth intro) last time...

https://www.writersinkyoto.com/2022/06/jazz-and-the-spoken-word/

 

On the turntable:  Hasil Adkins, "Chicken Walk"

 

Sunday Papers: Ralph Steadman

 

"I think America is where all that was going wrong in the world was being nurtured." 

 

On the turntable:  "Bullitt OST"

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"

Down the Fushimi, Up the Takeda

 

 

On the surface it looked to be just a nondescript grassy hill, though a bit incongruous standing as it was in a quiet neighborhood.  As ever, the truth lay beneath the surface, in the form of 38,000 ears noses taken in the late 16th century Korean invasion, by Japanese troops who had ultimately fought to a stalemate.  War trophies were important in those days, and noses proved much easier to bring home than entire heads, as was the practice of the time.  

Kyoto's Mimizuka was quiet this morning, as the Korean tour buses that were often parked in front had been missing since the early days of the pandemic.  I passed the mound heading south, following the Fushimi Kaidō, a medieval post road built by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, whose same aforementioned troops had attempted to invade the Asian mainland.  I wondered if the mound had been a point of pride for people during the time of that war.  (And the one after.  And the one after that, ad nauseum.)  But the only nose I was interested in was my own, hoping to protect it from burning under the early summer sun.     

For most of its length, the Fushimi Kaidō is also known as the Nara Kaidō, as it ultimately led to that grand old city.  I doubted that the woman walking ahead of me would make it that far, wearing a leather skirt and black tights, on a day that would hit 30° C.  

I detoured over to Yōgen-in temple to have a look at its famous wooden doors, designed by Tawaraya Sōtatsu, one of the co-founders of the 16th Century Rinpa School of painting     Most impressive was a pair of white elephants, though there was no mention of their cost.  The temple had been built from the remains of Hideyoshi's Fushimi Castle, right down to the blood-stained hand prints clearly visible on the ceiling above.

Returning to the old road, I moved through a quasi-urban neighborhood broken by the odd temple or antiquated hotel.  It was too early for the Sloth hookah cafe, but a few baseball cap-wearing old timers were moving slowly to destinations all their own.  Perhaps one of these was an old porn theater, whose type you don't see much anymore.    

The rail line called for an up and over, and from here I was in the Tofuku-ji area.  I caught the scent of sawdust from a now-flattened house.  Besides the famed eponymous temple, there weren't many traces of history, and the neighborhood looked pretty poor.  More than preserving a historical aesthetic, the emphasis here was no doubt more on survival.     

A cluster of restaurants grew around the temple itself, to form a village of sorts.  The first sign that this was a post road was the marker for an old bridge, now buried beneath a concrete overpass.  Google Maps let me down in directing me up a few dead end alleys, and it took a fair amount of backtracking and circling around to get to Reiun-in.  And found it arbitrarily closed, as seems to happen in Kyoto and nowhere else. Impermanence as expressed by indifference.

I attempted to drown my sorrows in lunch at Dragon Burger, but they've discontinued their wonderful sliders, which was my main impetus in the first place.  Then further along around Inari station, I found that a favorite coffee shop, run by Pico Iyer's 'daughter' had temporarily closed to ride out the pandemic.  I had chosen this particular day around the fact that all my waypoints should have been open, so was by now beginning to slide into one of those dark moods all too familiar to the long term expat.  Yet in front of that Christian church south of Fushimi was the famous photo of a preteen survivor of the Hiroshima bombing, carrying his infant brother dead on his back.  Things rapidly swung back into perspective.

I'd often walked or driven this section from Tofuku-ji down to Fushimi town, and had always liked its blend of old homes and Showa arcades.  The problem with that familiarity was that my mind was frequently straying, and I wasn't completely keyed into the details.  A few things did jump into eye. Like the Maison Noir painted a lovely shade of grey.  Or the odd stones marking the former red light district near Tambabashi, some of the 'tea houses' hanging on until the 1990s.

Most noticeable was the interesting mix of the masked and unmasked, now that those particular health measures had been lifted. The people who weren't wearing masks were those who looked like they needed them most: unhealthy, damaged-looking characters.  And everyone stuck to the shade.  There is no such thing as social distancing on a hot sunny day.  

The real action was happening in Fushimi proper.  And yet again, I found myself skirting it.  I traced the canals, but determined to return someday to walk the elaborate riverside trails themselves.  I left the water and walked over the unpaved back alleys of Chushojima, arriving finally at Fushimi Port Park which I'd chosen as my southern terminus, though the Kaidō had ended a kilometer or so before.

 

 

I rested in the shade beside what is apparently one of the graves of Oda Nobunaga. Little surprise I suppose since fanboy Hideyoshi had moved his own retirement residence here.  Then I began the return journey north along the Takeda Kaidō, which would lead me back to Kyoto Station.  A great deal of fighting had occurred along this route, as the light of the Tokugawa Shogunate began to dim.  I had an easier time of leaving town than these others had, barring one last detour that took me over to Yamarido to cool myself with a flight of their craft beer. 

The Takeda proved a long slog.  Not much was really happening until I crossed the Kamogawa, and came to a massive sake distillery.  Besides that all else was cheap tile and concrete.  I was beginning to hate this Route 24, and thought that there really was no reason for anyone to walk this.  And traditionally they hadn't, for this road was built for the passage of goods loaded onto ox carts, while walkers took the Fushimi.  As I often do, when the environs grow dull I turn to music.  But Hal Willner's spoken word collection, Closed on Account of Rabies, based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe, was a poor choice for the bright sunny summer weather.

The sight of a side entrance to Jonangu reminded me that beside being a mere kilometer west of the Fushimi Kaidō, I was about the same distance east from the Kyo Kaidō of the previous week.  Besides mulling that over, I tuned out completely.  These are the worst kind of roads.  

Finally I arrived at Kyoto Station, and crossed the rail tracks to the end of the Takeda.  Steps away was the Honke Daiichi Asahi ramen shop, which was free of the massive queues that inevitably extend away from the place. Taxi drivers always marvel why, saying the noodles are terrible, and I assume some popular FoodTuber is too blame.  Curious, I entered, and while it was a bit busy, I nabbed a seat.  And found the noodles to be perfectly fine.  But the cold beer was far better. 

 

On the turntable:  Lou Reed, "New York"

Sunday Papers: George Orwell

 

"Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism. It is actually the opposite of Conservatism, since it is a devotion to something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same. It is the bridge between the future and the past"

On the turntable: Rush, "2112"

 

Kyō Kaido II

 

 

It promised to be a hot day, so I set off at the just-dawn hour when the crows begin their murder ballads. It took a bit of squirreling around with non-cooperative maps until I was able to get myself back to the Kyō Kaidō, picking up where I'd left off a week or so ago.  I was happy to be led down the back-streets rather than the busy main drag up on the river berm,  but just as I was admiring a nice old Edō period house, I was nearly flattened by a car blasting by.  The hours between seven and nine are never good times to do road walks, a time when the oversleepers are inevitably racing by on their way to work.  I realized a moment later that the rising sun was behind me, beaming straight into their eyes.  

It was the work of destiny that I was here in the first place.  I had assumed that my intended rail station was an express stop.  It was literally at the station before that I realized that it wouldn't.  With a quick shuffle of trains I was able to auto-correct.  I was surprised because I had always thought that Iwashimizu-Hachimangu Station recieved all trains, due to the popular shrine on the hill above. The snarky side of my mind was wondering if they'd lost that status, as the surrounding neighborhoods were inhabited by the Japanese outcaste.  And I wonder if the little kids that I saw walking to school in their colorful caps realized that fact yet.  

I hadn't walked down here in quite awhile.  I'm sure that when I last did, it wasn't filled with these pre-fab homes plastic looking homes abutting the river's berm. What I recall from memory was older homes, poorer homes, which is what gave me a clue in the first place to the social status of the area's residents.  When I'd left the train earlier, a politician from the communist party was giving a campaign speech.  They certainly knew their audience.  

The next section around Hashimoto Station had the classical post road look, filled with old homes and even the old Yukaku inn, where one could stay for 3000 yen.  The glory of this former red light district inn began to fade after the ferry service was discontinued in 1962 (bridges previously unreliable due to frequent flooding), but a recent renovation had brought it a vibrant, retro look.  The traditional aesthetic of the area appeared to be further threatened, if indicated by a sign hanging before literally every house which stated opposition to a proposed five-story apartment block threatening to come in.    

I was fed onto a long stretch of busy highway that paralleled the rail line.  As there was no sidewalk, I hugged the grassy edge, trying to make myself visible to oncoming vehicles.   The land below I remember as rice fields, yet in a mere decade it had become a cramped suburb, complete with a small shopping mall.  Riding the train to Osaka each week to teach my yoga class, I always looked forward to seeing the old Kushuon-in temple that sat alone, surrounded by those rice fields.  Its symmetrical hall and front gate were lessons in aesthetic simplicity.  Now I could barely see it at all, but for a slice of pitched tile, its ancient form now choked by all that prefab housing.  Somewhere amidst the development was the site of the old Kuzuha river batteries, as well as some burial mounds.  But I could see nothing but progress.  

I left the highway and followed a quiet lane into Kuzuha, a town well marked by that enormous high-rise complete with heliport.  It must have really rock and rolled in the 2018 quake.  The map maker had me going straight across the railway tracks, which was physically, nay, legally impossible.  So I just followed what constituted the high street in this bed town, lined with small bars, down which commuters would stumble home after the red lamps went out.  It took some work to get back to the old road.  Kuzuha station multi-tasked as a large shopping mall, and I kept looking for ways back across the tracks.  But one after another proved to be dead ends.  Finally after a lot of backtracking, I was able to return to the road proper, which was sadly the busy Route 13. It was proof yet again that Japan is no longer built to human scale.

At least this stretch had a sidewalk.  The river was far away here, as the bank had been broadened to make room for a golf course.  It looked like the golfers will soon be playing in the shadow of a massive flyover, now under construction.  Oh, the hits just keep on coming. 

An old low-income housing estate looked abandoned, its residents most likely relocated to the row of high rises right next door.  The question remained:  had society begun to better care for its less-privileged members, or had their number increased to the point that more housing was needed.  I was tempted to ask one of the golfers, or perhaps the guy with the heliport.  

The map had me walking straight across a culvert, leading me to believe that the mapmaker himself was Jesus.  On the far bank I saw my first Jizo of the day, and a stone stele marking the old route back to the grand Iwashimizu Shrine.  Not far to Hirakata now, the real jewel along the Kyō Kaidō.  I appreciated that they made an effort to maintain a lot of the architecture, and I liked too how in those parts they hadn't, they'd built a arcade filled with charming shops that were still grounded in the needs of the local community.  The road was well marked and free of power lines.  After three hours near-nonstop walking, Hirakata returned the spring to my step.  Alas it was over all too soon. 

There was a feudal period house of a Edō vintage at the edge of town, but the glassed in upstairs hinted at Taishō renovations.  I popped into the Kagiya Museum not far off for a quick look at the exhibits, then continued along.  Just beyond, a spur line peeled off the true Kaidō.  As I'd already walked the latter, I moved along this spur, but aside from the occasional old home here and there, it led me deeper into suburb.   It eventually rejoined the main trunk route, which then stayed upon the bank of the Yodo river.  This section too I'd walked back in 2009, so decided to jump ahead, following a narrow path to the nearest train station, which cut between a small canal and a solid wall of ticky-tacky houses.

 

 

I left the Osaka monorail an hour later near the banks of broad Yodogawa, the only time I'd see it all day.  After a quick lunch under the a row of shade trees, I moved on through suburbs not much more inspiring than those before the train ride.  But somewhere along the way the scenery began to take on a new look, as it passed through an array of older communities.  Each train station was surrounded by what amounted to its own village, each worth exploring for half a day or more.  Moriguchi was the nicest of these, with old stone staircases running up and down the town's low hills.  It too cared for its history, the older structures renovated and given new life as shops or cafes.  

And the road continued on like this for the duration.  The vibrance of the surroundings distracted me from pain or fatigue, as the footfalls neared 30km.  Being past noon the heat was up, but each town had its own covered arcade, which brought respite and more than a little Showa retro charm.  I looked for a cafe for a stop and a rest, but my phone's battery was perilously low, and without the online map I might as well go home.  So I powered on.   

The signage was good here, far better cared for by Osaka than by Kyoto.  Stone markers stood reliably where the road turned. One arcade had a powerful smell that brought greater Asia immediately to mind: that olfactory cocktail of fish, fruit, incense, and diesel.   I lingered a moment in the doorway of a sword school that specialized in test cutting with live blades.  Its sensei sat proudly at the back of the dojō, while a student washed the floor by pushing a wet rag along its length.  I similarly paused before supermarkets, stealing a bit of second-hand AC leaking out from within the automated doors.      

The older look eventually stopped around Kyōbashi, and all that was left was a final push along busier thoroughfares overshadowed by Osaka Castle. Not long after bisecting the grounds of the old feudal Kyobashi fish market which had stood here until 1915, I was pleased to come upon the stone stele that marked the true start of the Kumano Kōdō.  Almost fifteen years ago I'd come up with the idea of following the waters from Kyoto to this point, trailing the boat journeys of Heian nobles a thousand years dead. Today I'd followed in the footsteps of the copycat Edō pilgrims five centuries later.  It's hard not to appreciate closure, particularly when one isn't seeking any.   

And then I was standing before the Riteigenpyō, reminiscent of  Nihonbashi in being shadowed by a overhead expressway.  And like its equivalent in Tokyo, this was the place from which distances were marked, if walking old kaidō like the Kumano Kiishū, the Chūgoku, and of course, the Kyō.  

The best walks tend to finish near a watering hole, and Yellow Ape Craft served that purpose more than adequately.  The day's heat made the first beer disappear near instantly, but while nursing the second I reflected on the walk, and how I could recommend nothing beyond a quick visit to Hirakata, and leapfrogging ahead by train to do that lovely stretch from Moriguchi to Kyōbashi.  Done of course, in a much cooler season... 

A map of the walk can be found here.

 

On the turntable: Her Name is Alive,  "Someday my Blues will Cover the Earth"

 

A Passion for Japan

 

I am very pleased that my piece, "The Man Who Stepped into Yesterday" has been included in this anthology, A Passion for Japan.   Thank you again editor John Rucynski.

 

On the turntable:  Phish,  "Junta"

Writers in Kyoto talk

 

John Dougill writes:

"Yesterday saw the resumption of physical meetings for WiK with an At Home with Ted Taylor. There was a good turn out, with fourteen people in all, and the event started off with a tour of the house (which was built in 1986 as a Culture Centre) and an introduction to Ted's voluminous book collection. After refreshment the group listened to Ted talk of his lifelong love of travel and his devotion to travel writing. Not surprisingly given the nature of the group, there was a lively question period.

At least three new members attended, and it was heartening to see introductions and networking going on. This is one aspect of the writers group of which I am proudest. When I used to belong to Writers in Oxford, which was the inspiration for this group, the main activity was in fact social gatherings in each other's houses to discuss writerly matters such as publishing and state of the market etc. It was a delight to see this happening here in Kyoto, and I'm told discussions continued till late in the evening - or at least until the bottles were empty.

 

Many thanks to Ted for hosting the occasion and providing a stimulating focus for the meeting. The house was a perfect setting for such an event, and it may be that we can make use of it again at some stage."

On the turntable: Foo Fighters, "Wasting Light"

Seek Sustainable Japan

 

 
Quite pleased to be this week's guest on JJ Walsh's Seek Sustainable Japan. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOVSr6ICeWE

 

On the turntable:   Jool Holland, "Best of Friends"

 

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"

 

Experience Japan

 

I feel honored to have been one of the writing team for this new release by the iconic Lonely Planet. 

https://shop.lonelyplanet.com/products/experience-japan 

 

On the turntable:   The Durutti Column,  "Idiot Savants"

On the nighttable:  Henri Charrière, "Papillon"

  

Sunday Papers: Iain Maloney

 

"Old punks don't die, they just stand at the back, nodding." 

On the turntable:  Rush, "Different Stages"

Gion, 2:02 pm

 

  

Watching the world go by from a stoop in Gion, on an April day that hits 29° C. Architecture bound in wires; delivery trucks unloading fish iced in Styrofoam boxes; a pair of Geiko chat beneath parasols; the rigid gait of a well-coiffed okamisan; and an older woman tumbles painfully into the street.

 

On the turntable:   Robyn Hitchcock, "Fegmania!"

Sunday Papers: Hans Brinckmann

 

"Trying to run Heisei with a Showa mindset is like retrofitting a Boeing 780 with propeller engines.  It won't fly."

 

On the turntable: Ravi Shankar, "West Meets East "

 

Hiking Down the Kamogawa

 

 

Just received the latest issue of Kyoto Journal, in which I’m pleased to have a short piece about walking the Kamogawa. This Number 101 is visually stunning, and I’m quite looking forward to diving in.

 

https://www.kyotojournal.org/.../kyoto-journal-101-water.../

 

On the turntable: Rick Wakeman, "Journey to the Centre of the Earth" 

Knowing Tranquility XXIII (Tamashima)

 

 

As we have the car, we detour over to Tamashima.  Donald Richie never made it this far, though it was historically an important part of the region.  The suffix shima hardly applies anymore, as nearby mountaintops gave their crowns to attach the former island to the outer suburbs of Kurashiki city. A narrow canal bisects the old town, though the proper sea is far off, out by those block-shaped man-made islands that extend to the south like a robotic prosthetic.     

All of this is visible from the heights of Entsu-ji temple, whose picturesque grounds are filled with ponds, thatch buildings, and stone statuary that climb the hillside, all beneath spreading cherry trees.  A torii-like gate formed by tree-trunks leads to an array of trails made for light hiking.  As we make our way through the shade, I imagine myself in the footsteps of one of my Zen heroes, Ryokan, who trained here two centuries before.  Stone figures silently watch as we spiral toward the top of the mountain, upon whose summit is a towering statue of Ryokan himself, at play with a group of children, as was his wont.  The scale of the thing seems out of place with the simplicity of his life, and of his haiku:  

 

The thief left it behind:
the moon
at my window.

 

Down at sea level, we walk through what had once been the center of Tamashima.  The Saisō-tei was once the home of the Yunoki family, who ran the town on behalf of the Lord of Bitchu-Matsuyama, whose atmospheric and original castle still sits majestically in the mountains an hour from here.  Among the displays within the house, I discovered that the reclamation went back as far as 1671, creating a important port which at its height hosted over 200 warehouses.  None of these were visible today, but a handful of trade houses still existed across the canal in Nakaigai-cho, all repurposed into shops or trendy eateries.  We did a quick spin through the area, before excitedly crossing the canal again to buy a gelato at a colorful little shop near the water.    

On the turntable:  Grateful Dead, "1983-04-12, Broome County Arena"

 

Sunday Papers: Wes Anderson

 

"Self-reflection is a vice best conducted in private or not at all." 

On the turntable:  Joep Beving, "Henosis"

On the nighttable:  Soejima Teruto, "Free Jazz in Japan"

Crawling Curmudgeonly along Hiei’s Eastern Hills

 

 

Thank you to Writers in Kyoto for hosting my latest piece, detailing an errant walk beneath Mt. Hiei:

Crawling Curmudgeonly along Hiei’s Eastern Hills 

 

On the turntable:  George Fenton, "Gandhi (Sdtk)"