The area around Yoshiwara station defines ugly, but for a single trendy-looking cafe. factory after factory after factory. I overtake a quartet of women kitted out for a long walk. I chat briefly with them, a stutter-stop conversation that continues at a number of this town's copious traffic lights. Then my stride lengthens and I don't see them again.
Just past Hidari-Fuji, I am tempted
to cut across the grounds of a factory that the road was forced to
divert around at some point in the 20th century. Fuji is ever out on
the horizon, streaked with white in its hair. I've hit the road again just up the midpoint of December. It's a good time
of year for long walks as the skies are the crisp blue of winter but the
snows and the winds haven't moved in just yet
Yoshiwara proper is far more charming than its outskirts. Pumped-in radio accompanies me as I move through its covered arcade. Midway along I pass the broad window of the station itself, and I almost feel I know the DJ. On one block, an apartment building has been built adjacent to the arcade, something I've never seen, and I think that the people on the ground floor must be hopeless optimists, as the sun will never reach the clothing they've hung on their verandas.
This decent looking town is very Showa, and is the most interesting thing I've seen since leaving the main drag in Numazu. There are any extraordinary number of bars of every sort, and business owners seems to have some sort of ethnic fetish, played out in the form of a Brazilian jiu-jitsu school, a place doing tacos, a place advertising itself as a Filipina bar.
Beyond town, Fuji gets clouded in, with the the inner views even more clouded in with
suburb. Smoke sacks rise between here and the sea, ever a-billow and I
believe the scent stayed in my
nostrils, for the rest of the day.
How to how depressing to finally arrive at the base of one of the big factories
and find it to be directly across from an elementary school.
I'll play peek a boot with Fuji all morning, down alleyways and popping up over the top of hospitals, until I cross Fujikawa bridge, named for the eponymous river running broadly below. From the Shinkansen bridge adjacent, this is usually the best photos of Fuji that you'll
take, and I know that this particular bridge upon which I am midway across has appeared in dozens of
photos of my own
I finally leave the major roads to head diagonally uphill. I imagine in times past this was all forest, but today it's nothing but
suburb. In one of the houses, I spy a dignified old guy sitting in the
sun on his front stoop. I can't imagine that he grew up in this house, and was probably installed here by a son or a daughter. I try to imagine
what his life was like,
and what he thinks about it now.
I've been climbing steadily through the new homes. At the top of the
rise, there's a bench and from the bench, there's a view of the mountain
dominating. I sit for a while watching the winds blow snow off the peak, a big curl across the dome like a comb over. The mountain keeps me company as I move along a quiet road that parallels the highway. Up and over a hill now, I lose the mountain for the rest of the day.
Kanbara lies down the opposite side, a lovely post town stretched between the hills and the sea. My walk is punctuated by historical signs, including a lovely Taisho period dental clinic, and a small park marking the view that Hiroshige replicated in one of his best-known Tokaidō series prints.
Yui post town is an hour further along. The infamous Satta Pass looms at the far end. I have just enough energy and daylight to make it over, but my walk would all be in shade, with the chill quickly coming on. I decide to hop a train one stop forward to my inn at Okitsu.
Okaya is the oldest extant inn along the Tokaidō . It further warms my heart in having bottle of local craft beer in its sitting area. At dinner, the only others I see are a group of Buddhist priests. I want to engage them in conversation, but they are having a meeting of sorts. I occupy myself with my meal and a local sake instead.
***
The early morning train is full of drowsy schoolkids on their commute. The climb up from Yui station is through a better-preserved section of the post town, a few building inviting me to pop in and have a look, an invitation revoked by doors shuttered due to the early hour. But the road continues to accompany me, as I leave town and head into forest.
The morning is sunny and bright, and I congratulate myself for timing chosen well. What I took to be forest turns out to be a massive fruit orchard, mikan hanging over the trail like bright orange Christmas ornaments. I turn every twenty steps or so to snap yet another photo of Fuji, dominating the land and seascape behind. I almost regret the westbound direction of my footfalls, as to walk the other way would keep the mountain in view for close to an hour. Yet perhaps walkers in olden days barely gave it any heed at they gingerly made their way what had been the most treacherous stretch of the entire Tokaidō. Today, rather than the fall, you'd find more risk in getting hit by a car, speeding along one of the three roads blasted along the coastline below.
I chat up a trio of grannies I find gossiping in the sun at the edge of Okitsu. The town takes awhile to pass through, as I keep getting pulled into its remaining historic buildings. The Zagyosō is masterpiece of Taisho architecture, with attractive Western flourishes, and windows glimmering in the generosity of today's sun. Seikan-ji tops the hill above, built to protect the barrier gate built 1300 years before as a means of keeping the wild Emishi tribes at bay. Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu was educated here nearly a millennium later, and Korean envoys would overnight here on their way to meet the Shoguns descendants over the subsequent two centuries.
The rest of the day must've been a slog, for as I write this, I notice I have no notes and only two photographs over the next six hours. The highlight would've been the beer and burger at Rainbow in Shimizu.
What does stand out was the encroaching pain. A few years ago, I was stricken with brachial neuralgia, and as I moved along I began to note pain beginning to radiate from beneath the straps of my backpack. I powered through to Shizuoka city, stopping for a long rest at a coffee shop on the outskirts. Dinner too was equally long, trying a number of the intriguing beers at West Coast Brewing. The pain greeted me upon awakening, and after an hour or so looking at alternate itineraries for the day, I finally convinced myself to simply walk the five minutes to the station and take a train home. The old road had been here for thirteen centuries. It'll keep...
On the turntable: Terry Reid, "Super Lungs"
