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"

 

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"

 

Confluences

Back in the days when Miki and I were walking the Kansai sections of the Tōkai Shizen Hōdō, we'd often find ourselves heading south on the Keihan line.  Inevitably it would be a Sunday, and we'd be sharing the car with dozens of old men who would be laboriously studying their racing forms.   When the train reached Yodo Station, they'd all shuffle off toward the adjacent racetrack, taking the sour smell of sake and cigarettes with them.  

Today for the first time I too disembarked at Yodo, though I headed in the opposite direction from the track.  A few minutes up the road brought me to the Toba Kaidō.  Known today as Senbon-dori, I would follow its narrow form which gradually broadened as it moved toward town.  In these remote reaches, it had the look of an old highway, though most of its flanking houses were of a more modern vintage.  A few sections were  referred to in my guidebook with an excited "古い町並みが残る," which I'll loosely translate as having that ole-timey feel.  Yet most often what was being touted was perhaps two or three houses of more than a century in age, ignoring the fact that they were flanked by some of the 20th Century's worst architectural abuses. 

A couple times I chose the riverside berm and strolled along its cycling course, looking down upon the road as it ran parallel below.  Kyoto was ahead of me in the distance, watched over by the frosted mounts of Atago and Hiei, with the snow capped peaks of Kitayama further on.  I'd started the walk just above the confluence of the Katsura and Uji rivers, and after an hour I found myself at the foot of the Kamo.  Dozens of trees on either side of the river were still combed down after the lashing of Typhoon 18 last September.   I found a sign on which two photos had been affixed, taken from where I now stood and showing how incredibly high the waters got.  The berm itself was still lined with blue sand bags, beneath a row of sakura that were coming bizarrely into bloom.  

The road began to move away from the river, and I followed.  A rack of buns was stacked in front of a sweet shop, drying in the sun as they collected a hint of exhaust fumes.  Near the site of the final battle between the Shogun's forces and the new Imperial army, was a house built like a castle, which I assumed could belong to no one but a mobster.  The Imperial forces had been encamped at the nearby Jonangu Shrine, which today was being tarted up for New Years. Inside, a priest was blessing an infant, as a shrine maiden stood outside, smiling at me beneath an unusual headdress that looked more Central Asian than Japanese.  I was intrigued by the gardens in back, until it dawned on me that I'd already been here, at the poetry event that they hold every May, when people in period dress float sake cups down river and attempt to pen a poem prior to the cup reaching them.  But I was more intrigued by the exchange of bullets rather than verse.  Where the road crosses the Kamogawa is the sight of where those first bullets began to fly in 1868, starting off the war that ended the Shogunate forever.  

However, what came next wasn't always pleasant, the road now serving as metaphor for that fact, as it stretched through the southern reaches of the city, which is certainly Kyoto's least attractive face.  I was surrounded now by factories, train lines, and elevated highways, so pushed on in order to get the walk finished.  The ruins of the Rashomon gate brought the road to an end, but I wasn't quite done.  I moved down Kujo-dori toward the subway, passing a shop that sold motorcycle clothing, including an armor-like "back-protector."  I wondered if it also protects the wearer from the current government and their back-stabbing ways.  

Past Toji, and the Kyoto Minami Cinema.  Plenty of memories for me at both.  But sadly, posters outside the latter indicated that they don't show as many art films as they once did.  Time certainly hath wrought changes, a point I was reminded of with every footfall. 


On the turntable:  Helmet, "Born Annoying"
    

Kyo Kaido (Original Recipe)

Back in the late winter, I walked a small section of the Kyo Kaido, which used to be an extension of the Tokaido, as it passes through Kyoto toward Osaka. It is essentially the Keihan line now, but sections still remain. I start near the amusement park in Hirakata. The road goes up through a section of town that probably hasn't changed in 50 years. It takes me to a small canal, then the color of the pavement changes making it easy to follow. I stop in a funky cafe for a cuppa, then continue down the narrow road, where the shopping arcade is trying to keep the dreams of the Showa era alive. I veer a couple times to the opposite side of the train tracks, to investigate hilltop temples and shrines. One of them had a nice view of the Yodogawa stretching away toward Osaka. How much nicer it would be to see slow moving boats out there.

I pass through Hirakata, then Kuzuha. The trail gets even narrower, passing modest homes and small temples. Many of the homes have maintained a centuries old look. I finally come to the end of the homes and am surprised to see a sign warning me of vipers. Past this overgrown part, things open up onto rice fields. In the middle is a temple I've often admired from the train, but being a training temple it is closed to guests. I enter another shopping street, lined with many old inns that had once housed Edo period travelers. At the end of this street is a huge tree, dwarfing all. I see a sign posted alongside, which I at first take for a Shinto monument of some sort, but on closer look is a notice about how to separate the rubbish. How sad that this massive being that has shaded some many figures through history, has been relegated to the place where the trash is picked up. The houses from here get more shabby. I'm guessing that this must be a buraku area. You don't often see poverty like this. All becomes squeezed between river and hill until blending into Yawata, where another spur of the Kaido heads south toward Nara.

Having walked this center portion of the Kaido, equidistant to both Kyoto and Osaka, I'm tempted to choose an end and carry on to either of them. But I worry that the paths are unmarked, and I've wasted too much time in my life second guessing myself, and retracing my steps...

 

On the turntable: Woody Herman, "Men from Mars"

 

Kumano Prologue III

 

We picked up the Kumano Kodo (here called the Kyō Kaidō) at the base of Otokoyama.  Members of the imperial court would have left the Palace via the old Rajomon gate, and travel by oxcart along the Toba Kaidō, named for Emperor Gotoba who underwent the pilgrimage 30 times.  Rather than continue onward by road, the nobility traditionally traveled by boat down the Yodogawa before disembarking at Temmabashi, and the true starting point of the Kumano Kodo. 

 

Leaving the road, we followed a quiet trail through the forest toward Iwashimizu Taisha, above a series of inns which once housed the pilgrims who once stopped here to worship. Today, the inns look well past their expiration dates, rotting slowly back into the damp hillsides. The final ascent before the shrine was up a series of moss-covered stone steps, looking warped in the middle due to generations of footfalls of pilgrims. The main hall had a unique construction, stacked up like one of those Heian period hats that nobles once wore. The slatted box into which worshipper's toss money had chipped paint from a million striking coins. It was colorful place, some of the outer buildings with ornately painted eaves like Korean Buddhist temples. Nearby, a calendar hung, painted the red black and green of the Rasta, and marking this years inauspicious birthyears. This was a unusual place, with interesting statuary, the figures looking more Asian than Japanese. Bare earthen walls ringed the whole site, and in one corner squatted a beautiful storehouse built of stacked logs, protecting the treasures within. The trees overhead were treasures themselves, dwarfing this courtyard with their proud and incredible height. The whole top of this mountain was shaded by tree of sizes rarely seen in Japan anymore. The forests in this country can be breathtaking if left alone. In fact, such beauty goes a long way in restoring my faith in this place. Reading back over my posts of the past-half year, it's apparent that I've lost a lot of faith in my adopted home. Yet in my recent walks, I have been reminded how much beauty still remains, and those feelings of peace that overcome me at such moments are far more powerful, more resonant, than fleeting moments of crankiness which are essentially reactionary. I do indeed love it here, and will long for this beauty once I've gone. 

 

We found a trail and followed it down again through the forest, unsure of our direction but hardly caring. Our feet somehow brought us back to the Kyō Kaidō, running here as the main street of a small village, presumably a buraku area due to the predominance of butcher's shops. At the next signal, we reentered the current century. Pressing on now, through apartment block ghettos, a shopping mall, a train station, and a golf course, before finally meeting the Yodogawa again. Turning left, we were a full days walk from Osaka... 

 

On the turntable: Dexter Gordon, "Bouncing with Dex"

On the nighttable: Bert Cardullo, ed., "Akira Kurosawa Interviews"

On the reel table: "An Inn at Tokyo" (Ozu, 1935)