What's in a Name

 

 

In the twelve years since I began walking the Hōkkoku Kaidō, I was never really sure of the name.  I similarly saw it referred to as the Hokuriku-dō, but was unable to definitively distinguish between the two.  To complicate matters, there is another Hōkkoku Kaidō far to the east in Shinshū, and most books and websites deal with that one, no doubt due to its proximity to the capital.  But the internet finally caught up with me, and I recently learned that the name Hōkkoku refers only to the section that leaves the Nakasendō at Toriimoto, to cross the Tochinoki Pass before terminating at Imajō.  From there it takes the sole moniker, Hokuriku-dō.

And there was a second clue.  Somewhere in north Shiga I picked up an map of old battlefields and ruined castles.  It was my guide through the summer of '21, as I did a dozen day trips exploring a variety of sites before a cooling dip in Lake Biwa.  The map clearly reiterated the Hōkkoku as passing through Kinomoto and continuing north.  All along I had thought it led south from Tsuruga, a route I walked back in 2013.  But apparently I was wrong.  

So it was that I boarded a train in the winter-dawn darkness of Kyoto station.  A waiting taxi drove the dull concrete highway from Imajō to the cobblestone entrance to Itadori-juku, whose thatch roofed houses impressed me as much on this frigid morning as they had when I'd passed through in 2009.   Most of the previous week's snowfall had melted off, but everything still hung cold and wet.  Unlike my previous visit, I turned left to return to Route 365, before following a smaller road that paralleled the highway.

Route 365 continued on above me, though apparently not much traveled here, to judge from all the broken rubbish that had been launched from it.  There was a preponderance of pre-2011 television sets, and weirdly, a bag of unopened bread.  A road-closed sign had me slightly worried, a worry which was quickly amplified when I saw the barricade that had been built midway along.  I scrambled up and over, through thick weeds that sometimes sprang back to slap me in the face.  I suppose that's one way to wake up on a crisp winter morn.  

Where I rejoined the main road I found another barricade, the twisting route beyond now closed.  There was massive construction going on, the concreting of what had been a beautiful, fast-moving river further down.  Much equipment lay about, heavy and light, and the sign here told me that it was to help deal with the snows of future years.  Luckily it was just before working hours, no flag-wavers around to tell me I couldn't carry on.  So I pushed toward the pass, the black ice of the previous night now aglow with the coming rays of the sun.  

This old route continued on awhile, until reaching a set of switchbacks that folded the road near completely back on itself.  I knew that the old Hōkkoku would not have done this, and would have continued along the riverbank.  At the first bend, I sought what could have been part of the ancient highway, then pushed myself up a slick ridge along what was little more than animal trail now.  After a few days of rain, the earth was beginning to give way beneath my feet, forcing me to clutch clumps of grass near ground level where it was stronger.  

With a bit of labor, I made it back up to the road.  The absence of cars made for easy walking, down the center strip.  The iconic Heart Rock I mistook for concrete.  From this height, I could see a lovely open patch beside the creek down in the valley.  This creek fed the dam which I had determined impassible.  That was probably the old road.  I carried on up the tarmac with my eyes aimed down into that valley, trying to maintain sight of that old path, or what I took for old path.  I hate moments like these, when I find my quest for authenticity has been diluted by the modern world. I knew that trail would continue to haunt me over the coming months and years, until in a wild spur of the moment I'd return to walk it. 

Patches of snow colonized the shady northwest corners of the road where it curled to hug the mountain face. This culminated in a small ski resort at the pass, still devoid of snow but with the lifts rotating beneath blue skies.  A few workmen were around, tinkering with this and that, one of them painting his truck with a paintbrush.  As I knew this place was meant to open in about a week, they'd soon begin to turn the green hillsides white with artificial snow.      

I walked over to where the old road would have met the pass, and the faint trail was camouflaged by wave upon wave of high, dense grass.  I'd thought about descending a bit to see how it all connected, but it was damn near impenetrable.  So I instead turned and continued down the other side of the pass, along a road now open.  Here and there the road broadened into overflow parking, but I couldn't imagine the resort got much traffic anymore.  As if to validate this, an old snowboard shop stood shuttered and collapsing into itself.  In fact there was little else here but hills on one side and a strip of open grassland on the other.  A BMW streaked past up to the resort and then back again.  As I knew I'd come to no other structures or hamlets for at least an hour, I thought I'd try to hitch.  But nothing else came.  So I pushed on, popping my earbuds in to distract myself from the monotony with a recording of an old Lenny Bruce performance.     

I finally arrived at a small settlement, at the heart of which was the towering trees of Hiromine Shrine.  The water gods too were active here, in the form of a spring that left the hillside to fill my bottle.  I found myself climbing again, and just before the road entered tunnel I diverted down the old highway, it too closed and traffic-free.  It was lovely, gentle climb beside a small stream before reaching a pair of small Jizo statues and a trio of A-frame cabins that marked the pass.  Down the other side the views opened up for the first time, and I sat awhile against a now useless guardrail, enjoying lunch and Lake Biwa far off in the distance.   

 

A scattering of deer bones in one of those old snow tunnels was a hint of what was to come.  Rounding a bend, I saw a buck thrashing beside the roadside.  He'd caught his foreleg in a tangle of cable that had peeled off the concreted hillside behind him.  The violence in his movements indicated it had just happened, and when he eventually saw me he went into a frenzy, somersaulting numerous times as he tried to escape. 

I put down my pack and pulled out the wire-cutters of my multi-tool, talking softly and gently to him as I approached.  He continued to pitch and buck as I got up behind him.  As I attempted to cut the wire a meter or so from his leg, he kept trying to gut me with his antlers, lowering his head again and again. The candelabra of sharp points on his head would have gone right through me had he made contact.  I could only imagine both of us dying there that night, side by side on the road.  

I moved a few steps uphill, just out of range and began to cut.  I don't imagine he could understand what I was doing, but seemed to calm some.  Once I'd finished the cutting, he dropped to lay in the mud of the roadside.  I returned to my pack and shouted a few times to get him to run off. But he simply lay there, breathing heavily, and watching me. Probably exhausted from adrenaline, and the struggle.  I'm sure I am anthropomorphizing when I say that I saw almost understanding in his eyes.  

A hamlet stood where I rejoined the main road.  I knew it was some distance to the next one so tried to hitch.  It wasn't long before a car came by, which slowed, then seeing my masked but foreign face, sped off again.  I swore and gestured as he did, thrashing about just as much as the deer had a little earlier. 

The road crossed the Hokuriku expressway, and just below, an older tunnel of stone cut beneath both.  It was here that I finally thumbed my ride. They were an ancient couple, the husband more so than the wife.  He was hard of hearing, forcing me to repeat myself numerous times, and finally leaning forward a bit, which I'd wanted to avoid so as not to create any Covid-related anxiety.  In doing so, I completely missed where I wanted to be dropped off. I laughed as I backtracked about half the distance of my five minute ride. I suppose I was destined to walk the whole thing today.  

Energy flagging, I pushed on through a chain of little hamlets, each increasing in size the closer we got to Kinomoto.  There was the odd explanatory sign, the occasional old Meiji-era building, as we all marched into the future.  And with my arrival at Kinomoto station, the Hōkkoku Kaidō was finally, and definitively, walked.   

 

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On the turntable:  Badfinger, "No Dice" 

On the nighttable: Mitch Cullin, Tideland"

In the End is My Beginning

It was the type of journey that I like, out to the edge, to the furthest reaches of a geographical something.  There must be a word for this, a word like 'liminal,' to expresses psychological geography.  It took some time to get up here, to this narrow shoulder of land at the dead center of Toyama Bay, where the Hokuriku-dō makes an abrupt right turn to continues the journey north, paralleling the Sea of Japan.

I stayed the night in Kanazawa, visiting with an American friend from my Yonago days, who is back in country for the summer in order to do a language program.  I hadn't slept well,  due to the beers and the excitement of catching up.  But I still roused myself to catch the first train of the morning, unfortunately a pricey Shinkansen but nothing else would get me on the trail before 8 am.  Nearly everyone else on board was cool-biz uniformed salarymen, who were expected in Tokyo by nine.  Poor fellows.  I debarked in Toyama, then took its light -rail out to its furthest end, as a few high-schoolers bobbed and dozed.  

It was dark and breezy, which was better than expected, if the rain continued to hold off.  It was a good start, through a post town proud of its history.  The road was wide and free of overhead clutter, and I shared it only with a dog-walker.  It eventually fed a series of busier roads that were bumper to bumper, again a far preferable situation than the speed racers who often rushed late to work at this hour.  These too fell away, and before long I was out in the villages. 

Tall electrical pylons marched toward the far hills, paying little heed to the  broad expanses of rice paddy through which they trespassed.  Rusting clanking hulks of small industry seemed to watch them as they passed.  I'd been spending a fair bit of time overseas these days, which was having a detrimental affect on my point-of-view and upon my tolerance for this kind of thing.  To be based abroad is the preferred option, where upon repeated visits to Japan you see little of, or easily accept, the visual blight, and the annoyances of day-to-day life.  Can't see the blemishes for the beauty.  But to live here, and to spend lots of time away, brings about the mind of comparison, a situation in which this country generally doesn't fare well.      

Perhaps this is a reflection on how I feel about things politically.  How disappointed and saddened I am at the extent to which people go not to see the unpleasant.  Better to ignore and carry on as if everything is fine.  But sadly, things begin to erode slowly away and the decay sets in. 

Its similar I suppose to the epiphany I had a dozen years ago when I decided to teach yoga.  That had happened on a train, looking out at farmer spraying chemicals into his fields, against a backdrop of hills manipulated and torqued by concrete.  I thought about how when a person is depressed or afraid, they often neglect themselves physically, be it with alcohol, drugs, or just poor diet in general.  So it is with societies and nations.  The most abused landscapes can be found in places where the citizenry is struggling.  Happy people tend to live in beautiful places.  It's a chicken-and-egg thing naturally, but it seems to be symbiotic somehow.  

There is an internet meme going around, about only spending time with people who enrich your life, and avoiding those who have the opposite effect.  This is probably all a reaction to the current horror show of contemporary politics, be it on the British, American, or Japanese model.  So perhaps in that lies the answer, to only visit places that fill you with life, and to concentrate on those with great beauty, doing your best to avoid those ugly and mundane.

Not long after these thoughts, I came across the hollowed out carcass of a turtle.  Its innards had been completely removed, probably pulled through its shattered shell by crows.  But its head and front legs were still extended from its shell, as if under the illusion that it were still protected.  For whatever reason, the sight of this, and the calm expression on its face, brought me near tears.  

The signs of decay continued.  At an intersection not far on, it was so complete that it looked set dressed:  scratched and rusting signs, peeling paint, faded posters, and ivy-covered walls. Even the traffic signal looked frail.  At the center of this was a snack bar called, of all things, 'Haven.'  It too, of course, was shuttered.

The day remained cool.  Thunderclouds kept a lid on it all, the breeze blowing in from the sea.  At some point the sun began to poke through, very gently, as if slowly opening the eye of morning.  How beautiful its rays looked upon the fresh green of rice paddies, a refreshing contrast to the flat grey above.  

Rice fields. Rice fields. Rice fields.  A village came up eventually, with a surprising amount of Jizo statues along its length.  There was also a house doubling as an izakaya, a poster for Orion Beer on each of its side panels.  In the nearby schoolyard was a white marble statue of what I at first took to be Balzac, as if I were still in The Rodin Museum of Paris.  His hair was perfect.  I went along like this, spacing out, in a liminal state of my own, when suddenly a pheasant raced across the road ahead of me, to get to the other side.     

Here in the rice belt, it was only natural that there would be a large amount of channels to irrigate them.  I made a series of crossings, and along one ditch, all the grass had been recently shorn like a crew-cut.  I walked across it awhile, relishing this all too brief respite for sore hips.  With all the walking I do I rarely blister anymore, the soles of my feet are smooth and firm like the soles of my shoes.  But I do feel it in my hip flexors, usually after 20km or so.  I would finish with 26 today, and was moving fast in order to beat the full heat of midday.      

The clock struck high noon as I reached the outskirts of Takaoka.  I was rushing, as ever, to catch one of the few trains back to bigger places.  This seemed a theme, as if a buildup of momentum were necessary to vault me from these rural scenes of mid-20th Century Japan, back to my place in the 21st.  But  even if a day like today had been less than invigorating, scenery wise, I could relish a bit of time spent in the past. 

http://latlonglab.yahoo.co.jp/route/watch?id=29b6e839c0223c1795f287f9421165cc


On the turntable:  Ben Harper, "Live at the Hollywood Bowl"
On the nighttable:   "Rome and A Villa" 
      

Spent on Rainy Days

A tall Daibutsu stood at the center of the town of Takaoka.  I found myself skirting it, zigzagging in a way that kept me away from all the covered arcades. Instead I was treated to a surprising number of old brick buildings.  Pasted to the wall of one were old beer posters from the 1970s.  That decade remained in mind as I spied a shop with taxidermied fish, and another selling Nehru suits.  It’s as if the bubble years of the 1980s never hit here.  Despite that fact, our perhaps due entirely to it, the town had an attractive uniform look, anchored in a decade 100 years before the bubble. Unlike a place like Kyoto where the old shops have been converted into cafes and galleries, here were actual old cafes and galleries.  Between them were the true survivors of those earlier days: the beauty salons and the obligatory wristwatch-and-eyeglass shops, the latter always paired.  These can be found all over the country and tend to look like they are hanging on from another era.  As if to prove my point I spied a Seiko ad with an actor from a Kinoshita film from the early '60s that I had recently seen.  This time capsule Takaoka is one of Japan’s hidden secrets.

The sky turned dark and went to rain.  Central Takaoka petered out to become a posttown, on whose broad street I saw a stone stele marking where the Meiji emperor had stopped for a brief rest.  I’ve passed hundreds of similar stones on my travels, but today I felt a closer affinity with the man, having just finished Donald Keene’s encyclopedic biography, written in such detail that it could have been His Majesty’s Twitter feed.

I passed a long row of temples, many of them of the Jōdō sect. Rennyō hadn’t really gone much further than Kanazawa on his journeys, but certainly his followers had.  Above the temples,  blue streaks were coming into the sky, and I blessed my good fortune with the weather, until I noted the black wall coming in from the west, nearly hidden by grey tiled roofs.  My pace quickened.

The weather held until the next village.  One field at its front edge had been only 2/3rds planted.  I wondered if they had misjudged the amount of rice they needed.  The town itself, as scented with a curious mix of mosquito coil and rain.

Further on was a large cluster of new homes built on what must have been rice paddies a few years ago.  Nothing here had any age to speak of, all bright and shiny.  My steps carried on, matched in time by the hammering together of yet another structure.

And the rains never came.  But the next village did.  And another.  And yet another.  A forest of windmills on the hills to my right cleared the clouds from the sky, or at least had held them at bay.  The rains of earlier had kept the fields flooded, and the streams that flowed between them smelled of the sea.  As with all of my walks along Hokuriku’s shoulder, I never saw their waters, not even from the train that led me home.    

http://latlonglab.yahoo.co.jp/route/watch?id=29b6e839c0223c1795f287f9421165cc


On the turntable:  Boards of Canada, "Music has the Right to Children"
On the nighttable:  Alberto Moravia, "The Woman of Rome"
     

Well I Needn't

The sound of the rain atop the metal gutter was like the nervous tapping of the caffeine addict.  Luckily I heard it from the other side of the glass, snug and safe as I was in my bed.  This morning the rain is of completely different character, almost a dust. To call this a drizzle would be exaggerating.  It is more like the particles of steam that hang in the shower before a sunlit window.  The moisture gently caresses my face as I make my way down the monotonous Route 145.

Thankfully the precipitation is a lot different than when I was here in February.  I laugh when I remember that I had wanted to walk this stretch in winter, to experience the harsh weather that this region is known for.  Boy, did it deliver that day.  More troubling than the rain is my spirit.  I am only about half an hour into the first of two consecutive walking days, days in which I am hoping to cover the remaining 56 kilometers of the Hokuriku-do to Sabae, but even this early in the walk I am listless, a combination of accumulated fatigue and general lack of interest.  Once these two days are complete, I'll probably walk one last section during the summer, and after that I intend to walk the other roads that I have on my list in their entirety, rather than segmented into day-trips as I have been doing.  Day hikes will return me to the mountains, and their softer, more atmospheric trails.

Kaga Onsen town peters out. I come to Tsugo Isobe shrine, whose concrete torii stands before a massive gate that can only be called Buddhist.  This old gate is marked with the crest of the powerful local Maeda clan, but just beyond it rears an iron stallion, as if in pain from having the imperial crest stamped into its flank.  The building beside it also implies Buddhism, so I imagine that this former temple once held a great deal of influence in this area, until the fall of the shogunate and all their affiliate regional allies.

I come to another town before long, where I refill on rice balls and tea.  My map-maker gets it wrong, zigging far off the trail for no apparent reason.  I stay on the main road as I assume that that is correct.  But a phone call comes in, and thus distracted, I go wrong myself, and my subsequent backtracking nullifies any time that I had hoped to save.

Thus fueled, there is a new spring in my step as I march out the other end of town and into the hills.  The trail is overgrown, the wet grass quickly soaking through the mesh running shoes that I wear on my road walks.  I am cautious of vipers, but more concerned with what lurks beyond.  I whistle awhile (I usually whistle the Winnie the Pooh theme in these cases), but this creates a cacophony amongst the bird population above my head. So instead I use voice, and by default, Blake's "Nurse's Song" becomes my new go-to bear repellent.  I repeat and yodel its refrain a hundred times, since "And all the hills echo'ed," feels much more appropriate.        

The trail is well-marked through here, and also has a number of signs that tell me about the local history.  Again and again I enter hills, and I realize that I could never have down this walk in the snows that I encountered last time.  They had been an omen somehow.  On one particular hill I am told that a series of tea houses once stood here, but today all I find is a graveyard, one that presumably 'serves' the village I have just climbed out of.  Amongst the newer graves are six standing Jizo, perhaps marking where a cluster of older graves had been, for travelers who'd died here on their own journeys.  Just below is small Buddha with its head knocked off, most likely dating to the forced Buddhist separation from Shinto in the 1870s.  When I see this type of religious vandalism I can't help think that this is never the work of a lone individual who comes along one day and decides to impulsively take a swing.  No, this kind of thing can only be mob-rule, fueled by stubborn ideology, and perhaps too much sake.

Ironically this particular section of the Hokuriku-do can be characterized by similar religious persecution.  The medieval priest Rennyo too had walked this path, as indicated by the new stone markers that sprout up at every turn.  This was his escape route, as he fled the violent uncontrollable monks of Mt. Hiei, who were alarmed by the success he'd had in restoring the Jōdō Shinshu sect after the decade of violence that had completely leveled Kyoto in the 15th century. (The massive Hongan-ji temple complex is a monument to his success.)  Rennyo later went on to play a large role in the Ikko-Ikki peasant revolts, which, along with those monks of Hiei, were completely eradicated by the great leveler, Oda Nobunaga.     

Up and down, up and down through the hills and forest, past a golf course and a orchard that completely fills a long narrow valley.  I would count this stretch as one of the nicer walks in Kansai, though you'd have to tolerate a 30-minute stretch of busy road until the train station at Maruoka.  It was here that I board, my legs not willing to do the 34 km I had ambitiously intended.  I grab a hotel just off Fukui station, where from my bed I can hear the dull roar of the dinosaurs below, as they lower and raise their mechnical heads.  One eye-balls me as I wait at the crossing, and despite my rational mind knowing that it is a machine,  I have a brief, unsettling Westworld moment.  The feeling continues as I find Fukui itself to be mechanical and redundant in its movements.  I am usually pretty good at digging up interesting eateries as I travel, but an hour of creative Googling refuses to excavate anything worthwhile.  I settle for some fried chicken and beer at the train station, and am asleep by 8:30.  



Early to bed, early to writhe. My body is heavy, but my head is antsy, so I rise at dawn and am back on the trail before seven the next morning.  For the first hour I follow a long canal, which has been horribly smothered by a layer of concrete across its face.  I live in a land of criminal concrete abuses, but this is pretty extreme.  Eventually I leave it, and begin a zigzag through rice fields newly flooded. I realize quickly that my map-maker has gone wrong again, but I don't mind as it is a pleasant walk.  There is a new development here, and in one corner, about two dozen primary school children have packed themselves inside a glass-walled bus shelter, looking like a bunch of uniformed guppies.  The number of children seems to equal that of the houses here, and I wonder if in these days of population decline, mandatory child-rearing is a requirement for home-ownership.    

The sun is still rising over my shoulder.  It is supposed to get up to 29 degrees today, and I hope to finish long before that.  Coming to the Nine-Headed Dragon River reminds me of Peter Matthiessen's Zen classic of the same name, and how another great Buddhist leader had also escaped prosecution in this area, the great monastery of Eihei-ji still as relevant to Japanese Soto Zen as when Dōgen lay its first stone.  Latter-day monks would have crossed the old funabashi here, walking delicately over the series of boats moored side by side.  A wooden bridge had been built for the Meiji emperor when he came through in the 1870s, to be replaced with the current iron model after a devastating 1945 quake.  This latter point goes a long way to explaining why I find the city unattractive, the majority of the city being less than 70 years old.     

I am entering Fukui proper now.  The Hokuriku-do plays slalom around new development, then takes a wide berth around the site of the old castle.  Once over the Asuwa river, the road shoots due south, and there it will point for the rest of the day.  Once the development falls away, I find myself passing through a series of surprisingly large farmhouses, a hint at what must have once been a wealthy domain. Laundry dries in front of one house, and written on one of the shirts is the maxim, "A Day without Laughter is a Day Wasted."

I'm closing in on Sabae now, briefly shaded from the heat by the burial tumulus of Kabuto-yama.  Then I find the familiar high-street, and descend toward a train that whisks me home, from which I play peek-a-boo with the Hokuriku-do that I've walked on and off since 2009.  This section now complete, my spirit is nearly as pleased as my body.  I've covered 56 km over two half-days, on legs that had been at rest for too long.  My left instep is swollen and painful, and I am pretty weary overall .  I feel these walks more than I used to, partly due to the passage of time between them, and partly due to the passage of time itself.  I will turn 50 next year.  Age appears to be my kryptonite.    


http://latlonglab.yahoo.co.jp/route/watch?id=55055cb88bec2a62d3651a12bdd63bfe

http://latlonglab.yahoo.co.jp/route/watch?id=4bf6ebcb3a7128e00ef87fa73e8b6833

http://latlonglab.yahoo.co.jp/route/watch?id=8f458c9131ca952ed3abac3cef1c4721


On the turntable:  Bill Laswell, "Psychonavigation"
On the nighttable:  Donald Keene, "The Emperor of Japan"

Deeper and Deeper

February surprised by giving us a Valentine's day weekend guaranteed to warm the heart with 19 degree temps.   Monday it was back to work, as the cloudy skies brought things back closer to zero.  As I stood on the platform of Kyoto Station the wind rushed around me with the cold determination of the commuters similarly swirling toward the intense heat of crowded transport.

Finding the correct door in which to enter a limited express train is a game of guesswork, with a low margin for error if one didn't want to stand for the duration of the ride.  After I confirmed my pole position with a passing railway staff, a gentleman in his 80's approached and complimented me on my Japanese, a compliment that the foreigner in Japan is never truly confident in receiving. We took up conversation in order to ignore the cold.  He was a university professor of the journeyman school, which in this country is not necessarily a respectable career path.  Being a bit of a journeyman myself, I could appreciate the breadth of knowledge that variety can bring.  We talked of his trips abroad, and in the midst of this, he handed me an English book he'd co-written with a Vietnamese professor dealing with the aftereffects of dioxin that had been dropped on that country by my own. (A book that didn't hold much interest for me, one I'm ashamed to say I 'forgot' on the train, not wanting to add additional weight to a backpack already overloaded for a two-day winter walk.)  Today he was going up to Tsuruga to attend a conference on hikikomori shut-ins.

The lights of the train cut through the grey from the direction of Osaka.   I hope you don't think me unkind to find irony in the subject of hikikomori, but as much as I enjoyed the conversation, the last thing I wanted was to continue it for the next hour.  I tend to shun conversing with strangers while on transport, preferring instead to withdraw into the company of book and internal monologue.   As it was, he led himself to a place farther down the train, and I found myself in the typical foreigner's position of sitting alone.  Shut out, as it were. 

The train sped along the cold waters of Lake Biwa.  Beyond its northern shore, we exited a tunnel to see the first flurries of snow, falling near horizontally upon the icy surfaces of hibernating rice fields.  Further along, my eye fell upon sections of the Hokuriku-do that I'd walked before.  Unlike the real snow country of Nagano where they board up the northern windows of houses, here it was merely with mats of reed and bamboo.  There was no snow on the ground at the moment, but one restaurant had pushed a small mountain from their carpark into the rice fields below, early irrigation for the blackened and stubbly soil. 

The horizontal snow was an indicator that I had better put on the rest of my layers.  Thus girded, I returned to where I'd left off my previous walk on a balmy evening in late November.  From here 60 km to go, or two days to complete the Hokuriku-do.  As this next stretch was lined with well-known onsen resorts, I had thought it best to do in midwinter, when the region's infamous gray skies have been scoured clean by the cold winds of winter.   

Goethe warns us to be careful of what we wish for.  With an almost Teutonic determination I pushed forward into the storm, the winds mercifully aiding me as I moved south.  Visibility was compromised as the skies pressed in, and I could see very little beyond the road I trod.   The weather was perfect though for photographing detail; the light ideal for black and white.  It's funny but when you begin to shoot black and white, you begin to visualize things in black and white, and how well a photograph of a certain object would look in that medium.  And so I carried on, head down, eyes open, getting my Domon Ken on.     

Komatsu was a rather small city, if it could be called a city at all.  Somewhere along the way was a stone marking an old ichirizuka, and another marking the site of an old technological school whose mere 13 year life had overlapped the years of the Second World War.  This may or may not have had a relationship with the large factory that was my companion for at least 30 minutes.  About midway along, it dawned on me that the Komatsu corporation may have indeed been founded here (Wikipedia tells me it was). Once a small rural enterprise, those same war years were good to the company, when its tanks and howitzers saw good use.  It has since grown to become the world's second largest producer of construction equipment, contributing in part to these very walks I do, providing not only the medium, but the impetus to see things before they are all paved over.   

Town ended where the factory did (both literally and metaphorically), and the road began to undertake a series of right-angle turns through the rice paddies.  As my body shifted in space, the wind buffeted me from this direction and that.  By the time I reached the windbreak of the next town, the nature of the snow had changed.  Until now it been falling in large clumps, usually an indicator of accumulation, but the earth had been too warm to receive it.  Now, it was small cold pellets.  Frozen rain. The road surface was beginning to go white.  As the road began to build up just north of Kaga Onsen, small turrets raised themselves from the central stripe and began to spray water in four directions.  This moving water prevented the road surface from freezing, but as it ran off to the sides of the road, it mixed with the freshly fallen snow to form a slushy bog.  Walking atop it was like walking through porridge, neither too hot, nor too cold, but just right to slow my progress by a third.   Not good. 

Today's plan had been ambitious.  I had been forced to start the walk in late morning, hoping to move quickly to cover my intended 32 kilometers within the six hours before dark.   And now, only halfway through, my pace was impeded even further by the ice beginning to form beneath the sludge. 

I pushed on for thirty more minutes until reaching Kaga Onsen, a town I was quite fond of as we'd shot scenes for Children of Water there seven years ago.  I toyed with the idea of staying the night and doing a long 40 km day tomorrow, but the weather forecast was less than optimistic.  A train it would be.  

Somewhere around Tsuruga,  the wet snow had devolved into a sort of dust, blowing past a surprised plum tree opening toward partial bloom.  Tunnels and more tunnels and more tunnels again.  And to my disbelief, I arrived back in a Kyoto basked in the warmth of sunny skies. 

Map: http://latlonglab.yahoo.co.jp/route/watch?id=55055cb88bec2a62d3651a12bdd63bfe


On the turntable:  Keb Mo, "Slow Down"
On the nighttable:  George MacDonald Fraser, "Quartered Safe Out Here"

Beneath Another Sky

The most difficult part of the walk began the moment I turned on my computer.  I mean, what is one to write about if nothing much happened?  It was the kind of day where nothing really appealed to the eye; nothing inspired words; nothing brought the feet to a halt to take a photograph...


I debarked the train in Matto,  my attention pulled immediately by the yellowing ginkgo trees of the old castle grounds which were attempting to bring some beauty to an otherwise drab day.  This set the mood for the entire walk, the odd splash of color on a dark grey canvas.

Grey above, grey below.  Little on the immediate landscape but cookie-cutter suburban sprawl, their squared irregularity broken only by the larger masses of industrial blight.  I was thankful then for the odd shrine which seemed to pop up every twenty minutes or so.  Above each was a single tree at the height of its tinctured spectacularity, the ground below littered with the leaves of those with less longevity.  But even with these, the metaphor for a fading and near deceased beauty was a bit too close.   Many of these shrines were tributes to Hachiman, god of war.  No surprise really since  remote farm communities like this were prime recruiting grounds for tough and hearty young men who went overseas to die in droves.  Same as every country I suppose.

Where the suburbs broke the land opened up.  The kites and crows were having a significant aerial battle above the dull colored stubble of newly harvested rice fields.  There must have been hundreds of birds, swooping and dodging and swirling in impossible geometric shapes.  It brought to mind an old dog fight of the First World War, and in an instant I remembered that the previous day had been Remembrance Day.

In the far distance, Hakusan had a fresh coat of snow, gradually moving toward the countenance that gives her her name.  She orbited slowly around my left shoulder as I entered a busier road seemingly dedicated to delivering people to the usual chain stores in order to whisk their paychecks away toward Tokyo.  I knew I'd be on this road for a while, and a quick peek at Google Maps said that it would be fifty-one minutes, to be exact.  With a sigh I pulled up a one-hour long comedy set by Bill Hicks on my iPod, and commenced giggling as I went on my way.

I had a quick pee in the toilet of a seemingly empty police box, then surprised a lone officer when I stepped back out again.  Crossing a long bridge, I saw a small amusement park nested against the berm of the river.  On the berm's other side, and nearly lost amidst the high grasses near the water's edge was a single teeter-totter, the world's most forlorn consolation prize.      

My fifty-one minutes having passed, the route began to zigzag again, as it had earlier on.  I was very reliant on my GPS here, and I figured I was in a footrace with the life of its battery.  There was very little else on the landscape to occupy me, until another river crossing brought me to the outskirts of Komatsu, the first place I saw that actually had even a touch of historical flavor.  What had been the old post town's high road was surprisingly lined with temples, each with a small placard detailing its history.  It all had a pleasant look, but one that was being lost in the fading light.  This land may be known by the moniker of Rising Sun, but this time of year, the sun falls all too fast. 

Map:  http://latlonglab.yahoo.co.jp/route/watch?id=3d0bdfefa930d24670385ed2bcedb5ab



On the turntable:  "Doob Doob O Rama"
On the nighttable:  William Scott Wilson, "Afoot in Japan"

Points and Lines

I walk the streets of the city, amidst the wreckage of another weekend night.  A crow plucks noodles out of an abandoned box in front of a convenience store.  Across the street, I spy Michael Jackson, flanked by three admirers.  As I drew near, I see that it was simply a scrawny Japanese guy who has adopted Michael’s hat and locks and questionable skin tone.  Drunk out of his mind, he is being led down the street by three of his friends. He suddenly stops and points his finger back up the road, striking a classic MJ pose, then pulls out of his friends’ grasp, and moves in the direction of a 24-hour internet cafe. 

There are very few others moving out here, mainly a handful of delivery men peddling their bicycles away from the Nihonkai Shinbun tower, whose rounded sides of bright reflected glass reminds me of the Ewing offices in Dallas.  I carry on past the newspaper men up Kanazawa’s high street, over a bridge girded by steel, and move away from the rising sun, the hour not yet five a.m..

I’d never seen this part of the city before, but it is as attractive as the rest.  On the river’s far shore I find myself flanked by one of the old geisha quarters and the village of temples nearby.  The floating world and the Buddhists had always had a close relationship, and I ponder how often had these low earthen walls been rebuilt, worn down over time by the robes of monks who’d climbed over them at night.  It seems like a fair metaphor for enlightenment somehow.

I move off the main road at a place called Izumi.  But the only spring I see was that of my step,  which drives forward my shadow, now lengthening a fair distance down the narrow lane.  This would be repeated for the next couple of hours, as I trace the narrow roads which usher me from busy street to busy street.  And all along this zigzag the city gradually falls away, as does the charm of my surroundings, until I am  affixed firmly into suburb, moving against the flow of traffic that races along arteries to feed the pulse of what I have left behind.   



MAP:  http://latlonglab.yahoo.co.jp/route/watch?id=3d0bdfefa930d24670385ed2bcedb5ab

 On the turntable:  "The Rough Guide to Jamaica"
On the nighttable:  Trevor Corson,  "The Story of Sushi"

From the Mountains, Where They Carried Heavy Crosses

I found the name puzzling. "Sabae"  literally means Mackerel Bay, but the sea was nowhere to be found.  Viewed from my perch atop the temple grounds, all I could see through its Edo period gate were perfectly framed hills, rolling one into another, all covered in fresh green, dazzling the eyes. 

I'd found the old post road rather quickly.  I'd needed the GPS to guide me away from the station, but upon approach, it was quite obvious, the narrow stretch now a modern shopping arcade, if modern were the 1960s.  I'll revisit it when I finish a future walk here.  My intent today was to walk from this express train stop, down to Imajo, which is serviced only by local trains, but is where I left off in December 2013.   In completing this 20 km section, I'll later walk the remaining 90km as day-trips between express stops.  Easy in, easy out.      

Before leaving the temple, I sat awhile to read of this town's history on wikipedia, looking to see which renowned public figures were Sabae-ites.  But all I found were politicians, sports heroes, minor actresses, all strangers to me.  So I descended the stone temple steps worn and curved, signifying that others had enjoyed this same view over the centuries.  As I rounded the bottom and moved south, I passed before the general store, its hexagonal windows resembling those of Vietnam.

I moved beyond town, and crossed a broad river.  Beneath me, a flotilla of turtles flowed just off a sandbank.  The far bank was more village than town. The countryside began to re-exert itself, the houses growing more space between them, allowing the sky to cut a broad figure, challenged only by higher peaks to the east, slowly shedding their remaining snow drip by drip under the unseasonal heat.  Sharing this same sky was a large sign telling me the history of the sake distillery behind me.  Sadly the sign had outlived the distillery itself, the weathered and dusty crates visible behind dusty and broken glass.  And where the sky receded again, I found the city of Takefu. 

Bizarrely, I have a small role in the history of this place.   A few years ago, I came up here to take on a job I was offered.  It was a simple one-off, and I doubt that I was in the city for more than two hours.  Not long afterward, I'd received a mysterious phone call from a young woman who had gotten my number from the company who had contracted me.  She told me that she'd met me that day, and was hoping that we could get together for coffee and a chat.  I had absolutely no recollection of her, and at any rate, no interest in meeting her anyway.  I explained that I was married and had a young child, and that I wasn't looking to play around.  That ended the conversation at that particular occasion, but it hadn't ended the phone calls.  Within a few weeks she called me again, the second of what was probably four or five phone calls. They'd all end with my telling her that I wasn't interested in starting any sort of affair, which were her obvious intentions.  Ironically enough, it was she who provided the ultimate end to the conversation.  I noticed that she would repeatedly mention Poland, and express her fondness for Chopin, being a classical pianist herself.  When I asked why, she said, "Isn't that where you told me you were from?"  It was immediately clear that she'd confused me for someone else.  With a quick and gentle rebuke, I told her that she had the wrong guy, hung up, and I never heard from her again.

Takefu receded now as well, and I found myself walking in true farmland, between paddies flooded and reflecting cloudy sky.  I followed footprints of dried mud beside the small canal ever rushing to my right.  Flowers lit up the banks of the paddies with a brilliant blue.   This long and winding road led me to the hills above Imajo.  I was upon them before long, and it seemed as if the steep uphill that followed was a reward for the straight lines I'd been moving along since morning.  Yunoo Pass wasn't too high, but I was winded by the top.   I gazed down upon Imajo itself, this being the third and perhaps final time I'd visit.  I had wanted to get in earlier and look around, but I'd dawdled a bit, the overall walk today being one of the better ones, all prettily remote and unspoiled.  So yet again I found myself racing for a train I absolutely had to catch, literally running along the town's main street. But my eye did happen to catch a directional sign for a hiking path up a nearby mount, and as the mental footnote formed itself with almost an audible click, I reminded myself to never say never.   During the train journey home, I wondered about all the glory that I casually stroll past as my attention remains ever focused on the ancient trail beneath my feet. What else is out there, laying just beyond the edges of my knowledge and imagination?

MAP:  http://latlonglab.yahoo.co.jp/route/watch?id=c4ca6df40c407c38a8bda476d1d97e46

On the turntable:  "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Sdtk)"
On the nighttable:  "To Myanmar with Love"
 

Nothing Gold can Stay

It was Kanazawa, and finding myself with a free afternoon, I decided to connect some dots.  While it appears from these pages that my feet are ever in motion (which is essentially true),  they move at a speed nowhere near that of the mind.  So it is that I have a ridiculous number of ideas for walks, and for the writing to inevitably follow.  This relationship of foot to hand could at one time have been compared to that of a simple dessert after a modest meal, but it has now shifted to that of an appetizer before a feast.      

One walk I envision is the complete Hōkkoku Kaidō, from its eastern end in Jōetsu, Niigata, 150 km along the coast to Kanazawa, then rounding south to connect with the Ōmi Kaidō which I'd begun in Imajō.  Numerous times I've walked a particular section while leading Walk Japan's Basho tour, so it seemed a good idea to knock off the 20 km that continued from there to my hotel.

I detrained in Tsubata and immediately jumped into the sole taxi waiting out in front of the quiet station. Hanging from the seat in front of me was an pamphlet for free cancer screenings.  I'd seen this type of thing before:  the ads for retirement homes; the ads for retirement services; the ads for grave stones.  It was a testament to just who was riding these cabs this far in the countryside.  

I had lunch in the shade of the michi-no-eki, overlooking a large patch of grass.  There was good ice cream here I remembered, but I forewent it to get moving.  I moved past a large soccer stadium built for god knows what, and carried on down a long straight stretch lined with shade trees, like the namiki of old.  I could imagine the cars of young lovers parked beneath them at night.  But from beyond them now in the full light of afternoon came the sound of things being pulled apart: the grinding of metal on metal; the gunning of an engine.  Something large was being torn out of existence.  

Thankfully the uguisu warbled in a stronger voice, one that seemed to punctuate my footfalls along this particular section.  It dawned on me that I don't often write about things I hear while walking.  For too much of the time, I've got music turned on, so as to blot out the roar of the traffic, and to temper the unpleasantness of walking the busier roads.  (Though on numerous occasions music has taken on the part of the muse.) And due to a recently deceased iPod, I could hear it all today, most especially the racket coming from the loudspeaker-mounted vehicles 'campaigning' for the election two days off.   These vehicles were most active in the rather new suburban community I eventually found myself in.  There was no real sense of history here at all, nor in the campaign messages echoing off its cheap frontages.

My road fed eventually into an older looking shopping street, which had a couple of ancient stone markers, designating lesser arteries diverging from this great thoroughfare.  Despite the Hōkkoku Kaidō's 1200 year history, very little remains but these stones, in a country spurred forward by the principle of the old being forcibly evicted by the new, a fact emphasized most magnificently by the cherry blossoms bursting above my head.         

I felt I needed a rest so took the opportunity to sit in a bus shelter, built like a little concrete hut as protection in these snowy northern climes.  I badly needed to pee, but was still in the midst of the 'burbs.  So having finished my bottle of tea, I began to refill it, thankfully with a volume slightly less than its allotted 500 ml.   That done, I dumped the warm contents into a drain, then, like a mafioso tossing away his weapon after a hit, disposed of the evidence in a bin beside a vending machine.  A few blocks up, my greeting to a dapper elderly gent went unreturned, which didn't set such a good example for the schoolkids playing within earshot.  Did his blanking me mean that word was already out about my piss-bottle antics?

I walked this road for the next hour or so. It wasn't particularly busy or noisy, but was rather bland on the eye.  The Kaidō eventually parted from it, leading diagonally away to the left, its surface now cobbled and somewhat preserved, leading me into a city that does a remarkable job of caring for its history.  I walked along it, passing old shops with wooden frontages, against the stream of high school students spilling out of a school at the top of the hill.  

I brought my day to a conclusion in an old machiya converted into a coffee shop.  There was an gallery attached to the front, where a fellow with a mullet was hanging photographs, the bowler hat atop his head straight out of A Clockwork Orange.  He was obviously one of this city's many bohemians, but I felt he looked a little unfinished without facial hair of some sort.  The cafe was run by two attractive middle-aged women, who I took to be sisters, not so much for any resemblance of face, but for their admiringly buxom figures.   

It was only a couple of kilometers from here to the end of my walk, a delightful zigzag amongst interesting little museums and funky galleries.  Kanazawa is certainly one of the most charming of Japan's regional cities, its name befitting a place filled with treasures far greater than I had ever imagined.  In a way, it is a shame that these treasures will be shared with the residents of Tokyo, who can now reach the city by Shinkansen in two and a half hours.  I fear for the character that will thus be lost in this town.  Luckily this year I will be able to get back up here a few more times while on tour, and will try to find some time to get out and explore.  But isn't this exactly the point of these walks in the first place, to get out amongst this country's history?  In this particular case, it is history in motion rather than history simply memorialized, and I am lucky to see it while it still exists. 

MAP:  http://latlonglab.yahoo.co.jp/route/watch?id=4872fd06a816f3eadf96e851b258d57a

On the turntable:  "1234: Punk & New Wave 1976-1979"
On the nighttable:  Will Self, "Psychogeography"