Waiting on the Sun (Ise Hon-kaido VI)

It was a day too warm for February, and the birdsong was in the key of March.  I'd wanted an early start, so had come down to Matsusaka the night before, in order to catch the first bus of the day.  My feet hit pavement not long after 7:30.  

The road on which we'd ridden out here to Kakinō was a busy one, but luckily I was walking a smaller road just above both it and a river that was quiet today.  In former times, the latter must have raced through this gorge with great power, scarring and twisting the rocks in the riverbed into phantasmagoric shapes.  These, and the mist hanging between the hills overhead, lent itself to the cliche of a Chinese landscape painting. 

This smaller road was leading me through the remains of a post town, the location of the old inns designated by paper lanterns hanging in the eaves of what were now modern houses.  The oldest house in the village dated from the Meiji period, but rather than lanterns, Christmas lights hung from  its cracked and faded beams.  This lingering holiday sentiment was refuted somewhat by the sight of plum blossoms that exploded into view a few steps on.

Before leaving the river, I climbed up above a Shingon temple whose twin waterfalls hinted at esoteric practices, to an overlook that was becoming hemmed in by the untrimmed pine branches that blotted out the view.  I imagined an older priest here, no longer interested in undertaking tough manual labor for the sake of a dwindling number of parishioners.  As the day went on, I noticed that the few temples I did pass seemed to be all Shingon.  I was closing in on the Ise shrines, and imagined the pro-Shinto fever that must have purged this area of all signs of Buddhism as State Shinto raised its snake-like head in the Meiji Period.  These Shingon temples had Shugendo roots, so were therefore deemed Shinto enough.

The river now behind me, I found myself walking a straight line throughout the day, village begetting village, with only rice fields between. Kadomatsu New Year's decorations hung from many of the doors, making it feel as if my previous walk in January was still going on.  

Villages, farmland, villages.  The one forest I did enter was flat, along a track that bisected a thick bamboo thicket that must be rife with snakes of its own in warmer days.  At the forest's far end, I heard what I at first thought was gunfire, but was merely a pile of bamboo trees ablaze, their air-filled chambers bursting as the heat escaped. 

Lunchtime came, and it brought with it hunger.  In many ways this was a dream walk as the path kept me far out in the countryside.  However, the walker tends to grow reliant upon the small cafes and convenience stores found just about everywhere across Japan.  I eventually came to a small yakuniku place, but the owner told me he was finished for the day, despite it only being just past one o'clock.  A bit annoying.  

Earlier while walking the river, I had tossed a fist-sized rock into a pool of very still water.  I was amazed at just how wide and for how long the ripples traveled.  I thought this a good metaphor for those who complain that a single individual has no effect upon a large and complicated world.  And in the same spirit, this fellow's refusal to serve me had ramifications throughout the day.  The ripples of my initial annoyance growing eventually into full blown anger, as my energy waned and waned.  I just couldn't find food anywhere.  More than that, I wanted an excuse to sit awhile as I was now about 25km into my day.  

Around 3 pm, I finally decided to detour off my track to a convenience store a few km away, not far from where the Ise Kaido meets a lesser traveled section of the Kumano Kodo that leads south toward those grand shrines.  I finally got my lunch, and as I sat I noted that I was just on the outskirts of Ise City proper.  Not long now.

When I rejoined the path, my laughter cleared out any anger I was still carrying when I came upon a food shop a 100 meters on.  Then another.  Spirits high, I walked on, trying to ignore my eyes made runny by the pollen that is always an unwanted companion to the welcome warmth of spring.  The farm villages continued for an hour or so, then crossing a broad river, I was in Ise proper.  

The kaido took me past the Inner Shrine.  I debated going in, but it was past 4 pm now, with the light fading.  Plus I'd recently paid my respects a few months before.  So I carried on the last four km toward the inner shrine, which I found more important anyway.  

This section was quite fascinating, as it had once been lined with brothels and inns.  Had this been 150 years before, I expect it would have quite the lively scene.  Today, all was quiet, just a few school kids cycling home.  One of these inns was the scene of a multiple murder that soon inspired popular entertainment. But it, and most of the other inns, were now replaced by bland new suburban homes.  Only Asakichi Ryokan remained, stacked up in a jumble of wood upon the side of a hill.  

I hadn't expected that I'd finish this walk with a climb.  Thanks to my lunch detour, I was clocking about 45 km for the day, far more than I'd walked in the last decade or so.  But incredibly, I felt fine, with none of the aches I usually get after about the 27th km.  But I could have done without this last hill. And along the descent down the far side I felt the pull of momentum, leading me through the mock Edo frontages that are a large tourist draw these days.  All were shuttered and closed by now, the punters having moved on.  

And at the far end, the bridge led over to the water to where the Sun Goddess awaited, just as her spherical form was beginning to leave the heavens.    

  MAP: http://latlonglab.yahoo.co.jp/route/watch?id=4cc9415e09dd2d174d0d38987812e0fb


On the turntable:  "Skankin' 'Round the World"

Sunday Papers: Antoine de Saint Exupery

"Life creates order, but order does not create life."


On the turntable:  "Cafe del Mar Volume 9"

(untitled)

The sun goddess
Welcomes me with a day
Far too warm for winter.

On the turntable:  "Repo Man (Sdtk)"

 

(untitled)

Changing her make-up
As the clock ticks toward night.
Winter splendor.

On the turntable;  "IndiaRama"

Looking for the 'There' There Pt. VI

I quit my walk at the perfect time.  The rain grows heavier and heavier and it is with great relief that I find a bus stop.  An hour later I drive past this same spot, in a rented car I picked up back in Sendai.  As I pull onto the highway on the edge of the city, a sign tells me that I can expect to get 1.2 microsieverts of radiation if I were to race through the exclusion zone at 80 kph.

But for now, that is far away, yet growing closer as the car points south.

And to the east, the sea walls stretches on and on and on.  Although it is being built at a more human scale than up in Iwate, I have yet to see the water, despite being only 100 meters from the sea.  There doesn't appear anything for miles around to protect.  This shoreline is a series of lakes and canals, most of the land beneath being swamp land.  It didn't look farmable, not a place of habitation.  But anytime I wonder if there had ever been anyone living out here, I'll come across a gutted house, an abandoned school. Beside one of the latter is a 'thousand year' memorial stone.  I'm 350 kilometers south of where I started this walk.  The scale of the waves, of the destruction, is enormous.  

I keep driving south on Route 6, into areas whose names I recognize from the news.  I'm not sure how far I'll drive.  I'll turn around the moment I begin to see people in masks, or god forbid, a Hazmat suit.  And while the number of obviously abandoned homes and businesses was increasing, a good number still had lights on, beneath which people went about their day.  

Not much later, I'm getting into areas that I know are within the exclusion zone,  open to residents to spend the day, but not the night.  Workmen wave their traffic wands, without masks.   Few drivers coming from the other direction are wearing masks either. The smiles of a trio of policemen are visible as they investigate a minor accident.  A handful of people eat their lunch in a small restaurant. Yet amidst this is the view of tsunami damaged businesses, including one with a sign saying 'open year-round.'  A Family Mart has been abandoned, its fully stocked shelves visible through the windows.  At a Lawson's a block away, it is business as usual.  

One entire shopping plaza has been barricaded, and policemen stand at the turn-offs to residential areas, both to deter looters I suppose.  Police cars slowly cruise other roads off in the distance.  Here and there are signs warning us of cows or other livestock suddenly entering the road.  The town hall has a large sign offering free radiation screenings.

I plan to turn around well before this.  I will drive right up to the barricade, manned or unmanned, telling me that all beyond was unsafe and off-limits.   That is how I have already scripted the true end to this journey. 

And I'm wondering just where this checkpoint is going to pop up, when I notice the name Fukushima Daiichi Reactor slide into the corner of the car's GPS.   Then the towers themselves well up out of the grey mist.  My heart, already wary and nervous, nearly stops.  I calm myself somewhat in remembering the article about the bus services that recommenced just three weeks before. (What I hadn't known was that this Route 6 had reopened to all thru-traffic last September.)  Riders were expected to receive 1.2 microsieverts per trip, which is what I assumed I now got.  To put it into perspective, I received a hundred times that dose when I flew from Tokyo to New York last autumn.  At any rate, a quick check of the Geiger counter back at my hotel later proved to read far less. 

But I didn't know that at the time.  I wheel the car around as quickly as possible, using the main driveway that leads down to the stricken plant.  The snow begins to fall thickly and softly upon my windshield, blurring somewhat the view of the guardman waving his baton, the diners happily munching away in the restaurant, and other scenes in what is now the new normal.  



On the turntable:   "Martin Scorsese Presents Jazz"

Looking for the 'There' There Pt. V

There had been no initial clue as to why the train had been delayed.  After a half-hearted attempt at hitching, I found a taxi driver willing to take me to Morioka.  It was along the way that I learned about the earthquake.  And as my Shinkansen sped its way south, I learned of the tsunami, which at a mere ten centimeters lapped at a pair of harbor towns that had been scoured from existence nearly four years before.

How ironic than that I have chosen this day to continue the walk of the Tohoku coast that I had begun in June.   Due to some incorrect bus information, I wind up in another taxi, headed out to the small village of Onnagawa, nestled between a long low valley and an extremely craggy coast.  Berms are being built up along the former, which I presume had held most of the homes of the inhabitants.  Those who survived are being housed in a long row of shelters that must hold a hundred households, the sounds of which carry out over the rice fields that had for centuries heard little more than the hushed whisper of rice stalks. 

My driver tells me that this cab is one of eight donated to Ishinomaki by Okayama Prefecture.  When I had entered the taxi, he asked why I wished to go out to Onnagawa.  Last summer I had been too sheepish and ashamed to tell people why I was doing this walk, but today I apologetically confess that I am thinking about writing a book about the region's reconstruction.  So he drives slowly and thoughtfully, narrating along the way.  Where all I see is empty expanse stretching toward the east, he sees six decades of memory.   The pair of schools, the shops, the neighborhoods, all peopled by those now gone elsewhere.  I don't have the nerve to ask his story.  I don't dare.    

As we drive, I keep changing my destination. Part of the reason is that it has begun to rain, which had been a constant during those few days I'd spent walking in Iwate.  It seems fitting somehow.   And I'm again beginning to question my motives for coming.  Somewhere between last summer and today, I no longer remember the point.  

So I ride on, both road sides empty and green; the right side all neat rows of stubbled rice paddies, the left a twist of weeds and the odd squared foundation.  Will anyone ever return to claim this land?  

I arrive finally at a train station, serviced only by a few buses daily.  We parallel the rail line, past the air base that is the home to Japan's Blue Impulse air demonstration team, their bright and shiny machines parked atop high berms of their own.  On the outskirts of town, I see a handful of men squatting atop a new bridge, putting the finishing touches on the Senseki Line which is due to reopen this spring.  All the new concrete hints at the ferocity of the water that had moved through here, shifting these enormous heavy slabs.  This long low valley must have served as a funnel, for as at Onnagawa, I saw most of the damage in such a terrain.  And as the introduction of the locomotive helped assert over man the importance of clock time, so do these railway workers endure in their metaphoric turning back of the clock's hands.
  
I get off the bus in Matsushima.  I've guided here numerous times so give the town a miss, but do want to visit Oshima, whose old bridge had washed away, severing the historic link to the poet Basho and the generations of monks who'd confronted life's mysteries in the caves that pockmark the island.  A newly built bridge leads the way. Below me, tour boats trudge up and back, up and back, sluggishly feigning enthusiasm on such a cold wet day.  

I too drag myself toward Shiogama.  This was a particularly nasty piece of road, devoid of any sidewalk or shoulder to protect me from the barrage of trucks racing past.  I could completely understand why Basho had chosen to skip this stage and instead take the boat.  The hissing wake of passing vehicles sweeps me monotonously to a small train platform, and here I will quit for the day.   I've walked most of this next section between here and Tagajo, and less a reprieve for the feet as for the enthusiasm, which never showed up today. 




In yet another taxi the following morning in Tagajo.  Out amongst the hills to the west lies the ruins of what had once served as a sort of northern capital during the Nara period.  Not far away is another row of shelters.  One spring afternoon last year, the sight of a young girl my daughter's age playing amongst them brought tears, as I thought of the lost promise of what could of been. 

Aside from that I see no apparent damage nor reminder of the tsunami, though I know that this town had a significant loss of life.  And again I ride on, ride on, repeated my mantra of "Further, further," like one of Ken Kesey's somnambulic Pranksters.  The continuously poor weather conspires.  My heart is no longer in this walk.

I get out beside Sendai Airport.  Beside it, they are building a park called a Thousand Years of Hope.  They've actually created two hilly berms that resemble the ancient burial mounds of that aforementioned Nara period, upon which people are encouraged to come and watch the project.  These same mounds also serves as evacuation zones built as they are, ten meters high. 

And here beyond them are the new graves shiny and black, tucked into the corner of a large empty space.  This is the third time in two days that I've encountered this.  On what had once been a tidy suburban community, there was now only similarly aligned black stones.  I normally leave them alone, but today I feel I want to pay my respects. Each stone was not for a single person, but for an entire family, all born over a span of decades. And upon a few, rather than surnames, I find sentiment etched in marble: "Hope,"  or  "Souls united for eternity." Most painful are the graves of the children, so many, so many.  And the tears fall again, washed immediately away by the rain.  

And suddenly I'm angry.  What is being done in the memory of these people?  Each stone has been dedicated by a surviving family member, but what is being done for them?  Where are the rebuilt communities, the promise of a new start?  Where can it be found beneath all the talk of the Olympics, of Abenomics, of taking tougher stances against China,  terrorists, or even against a world demanding accountability for wartime 'improprieties,'  for the erosion of a free press, and for nuclear reactors still out of control.  I usually consider myself somewhat pragmatic on the latter topic, but now all I feel is that any talk of reactor restarts is an insult to the memory to these people lying here, and an even greater insult to those displaced nuclear refugees who face the far bigger challenge of living on.  I want to ask these men in government, "Mr. Abe, I know you've visited these stricken communities as a politician, but have you ever once come as a human being?"

My heart is no longer in this walk because my heart is breaking.

And my anger stays with me, as the diggers continue to scrape away at the land.  The question is "What have they been doing all this time," as even this particular project didn't get started until last September.  I'm sure there must be a good reason for the delay.  I know that it has nothing to do with these workmen who have been suffering the elements of various seasons.  But I want someone to explain to me, why has nothing been done out here for the last four years?

And with that, I'm done.  There are no answers here, nothing left to seek. 

But there is still one place left to see...


(Postscript:  A sort of answer can be found here.)



On the turntable:  "The Complete Stax"
On the nighttable:  Kyūya Fukada, "One Hundred Mountains (Martin Hood, trans.)"

Sunday Papers: John Berger

"True translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal."

On the turntable:  "The Rough Guide to Hungarian Gypsies" 

 

(untitled)

Steadfast as islands,
The monks maintain their silence
Beneath tall stone slabs.

On the turntable:  "Grosse Pointe Blank (Sdtk)"

(untitled)

The wind blows.
The snow falls.
The trees merely wait.

On the turntable:  "God Save the Queen"

(unitiled)

How can words capture
What even photographs
Cannot touch?

  

On the turntable:  "Texas Worried Blues"

 

(untitled)

From atop the ladder of stone,
The souls of Bandai return
As gently falling snow.

On the turntable:  "Putumayo Presents Italia"

(untitled)

Ruddy cheeks chilled
By winds from the north,
Yet Jizo keeps its smile.

 

On the turntable:  "Jazz Divas Gold"

Sunday Papers: Jonathan Clements

“Japan is still living five years into the future, but whereas that was once a breathless boast of oncoming technologies and trends, today it’s a warning of the crises that could also face the developed world as a whole.”


On the turntable:  "The Blue Note Years, Vol. 3"

(untitled)

Back stooped to avoid
Hitting my head on clouds.
Winter sky.

On the turntable:"Virginia Traditions"

(untitled)

Transformations without,
Transformations within.
Upon all the snow alights.

On the turntable: Lovely Sparrows, "Daytrotter Session"

Sunday Papers: Antoine de Saint Exupery

"What saves a man is to take a step.  Then another step.  It is always the same step, but you have to take it."


On the turntable:  "Nirvana Lounge 3"

(untitled)

A fine cold morning.
The snow outside my window
Mocks the white of this page.

On the turntable:  "Radio Thailand"

Walking in the Land of the Gods

Many thanks to Paul Crouse for inviting me to appear on his radio program.  Our hour-long interview went live this morning, but a downloadable podcast can be found here:

http://paulcrouse.com/radio-show/

(Scroll down...)



And as an introduction:

“Walking in the Land of the Gods”

Ted is an American writer, traveler and a long time Japan resident. Ted shares his experiences  studying Zen Buddhism and yoga, as well as his extensive walking journeys in the Japanese countryside.
In this wide ranging conversation, Ted and Paul discuss the old indigenous Japanese spirituality and how it can be applied in daily life.



On the turntable:  "Weekend Sessions"

Sunday Papers: Bill Emmott

"[T]he vital thing to understand about Japanese people is their very normality and their humility.  At the heart of Japan’s traditional religion, Shinto, is exactly that humility: it is not like the monotheistic religions that postulate an all-powerful deity or an ordering principle for life and the universe. It is an animist religion that emphasizes ignorance in the face of the world’s mysteries and natural forces. It is an admission of what we don’t know, not a call to faith."


On the nighttable:  Haruki Murakami, "A Wild Sheep's Chase"
On the turntable:  Funkadelic, "Standing on the Verge of Getting It On"

Hang your Head no More...

On January 23, 1905,  three men entered an inn in what is now Higashi Yoshino-cho and sold the carcass of a male wolf to an American traveler.  It would prove to be the last animal of its kind.

I'd come across this tale in Brett L. Walker's The Lost Wolves of Japan.  I first read it two summers ago, as I led a group of Singaporeans through the snow covered high peaks of Hokkaido.  It was a fitting location for my reading, for it was there that a Ohio rancher offered his expertise on raising livestock, and one of his teachings was the importance of exterminating the local wolf population with extreme prejudice.   As I penetrated deeper into the Hokkaido hills I similarly penetrated into the heart of the book,  an exploration of how the Japanese went from a culture that saw the natural world as a sacred land of the gods (including most definitively the wolf), to a society who quickly and widely accepted the western view that this same natural world was a bountiful font ripe for exploitation.  Within a single generation the howls of the wolves were silenced forever.

I eventually passed the book on to my friend Wes, who readily agreed that we visit the site where the last wolf has been memorialized in a bronze statue alongside a narrow stretch of river.  But our mission wouldn't begin there.  In the vicinity were a pair of peaks that find themselves on the bucket list of many Japanese mountaineers, the Kinki 100 famous mountains.  There were a handful of other, more attractive mountains closer by, but as they were all over 1400 meters and covered in snow, we opted to approach two that were half that height.

So it was that we found ourselves walking up a steep pitch in a light rain.  The day was reasonably warm, the warmth increasing as we pressed back against the stubborn might of gravity.  The Dainichi Nyorai statue we passed midway betrayed no emotion as we went by; nor for that matter did the lone hiker we saw that day.  And that's about all we saw, as this Horizaka-san was socked in, and a metallic map on the top taunted us with its display of what we couldn't see, including Mt. Fuji far far to the east.  There were however a couple of corrugated tin lean-to's for those staying overnight.  Soft mats and bottles of water were provided either for those stuck on the mountain unintentionally, or for the yamabushi who saw this mount as a playground.   We descended along one of their trails, wild and slick as it shot us downward, now allied to that same gravity that had bullied us earlier. 

After a quick refuel at a roadside Chinese joint, we drove part way up the flank of Shirai-zan, bisecting rice paddies bordered in stone, until a gate prevented my car from going any further.   The mountain's name translates as 'White Boar,' which I'd love to believe refers to some mythological beast.  More likely it is simply the covering of snow during the winter months.  Not this day however, though it could have been a welcome method of covering up the evidence of man's abuse of the natural world which has spiraled out of control since that Ohioan stepped off a ship in Hokkaido over a century ago.   Whereas the peak earlier today had been for the holymen, this one was for the villagers.  And the condition in which they'd left it could only be described as blasphemous.  There had once been major forestry here, and though no recent cuts were to be seen, hundreds of trees spilled down the hillsides dead where they lay.  A concrete road had once brought the loggers in, passing a farm now similarly abandoned.  Ours wasn't the toughest of hikes, as the trail meandered in and out and above a few ravines.  Except for a trio of giants said to be a millennium old, all was new growth cedar, sodden pollen pouring from their trunks in the form of white foam, perhaps in biochemical confusion on a day far too warm for January.  We found the peak just beyond a junked scooter that had somehow made its way up to 800 meters.  The rain and the devastated landscape did little to inspire a long visit here.  It wasn't too long before we were back at my car.

Our drive to the wolf took longer than our two climbs had.  Along the way I kicked myself for not having prepared an appropriate soundtrack, which would have included the Dead's 'Dire Wolf,' Los Lobo's classic, "How will the Wolf Survive?,'  X's 'Hungry Wolf,' and of course the obligatory 'Hungry Like the Wolf.'   Plus copious amounts of that old bluesman.  But I was forced to settle for the criminally underrated Wolfgang Press, and a track or two by Herr Mozart. Along the way, Wes pointed out peaks he'd scaled, many climbing out of the smallest of hamlets.  These grew further and further apart until we found ourselves moving beside a valley quickly growing dark.

Then the wolf appeared.  It stood still and proud in the shadow of the hillside, its mouth eternally open in an expression of either defiance or surprise.  Wes looked around at the hills that these proud creatures had once proudly roamed.  Both he and I share in that spirit I suppose, having logged countless hours of our own moving along the same trails, though through what is now no longer the same landscape.  

If the nature of the wolf is perhaps within us, then so too is its curse.  And as if bewitched, we yet again took a series of wrong turns, though this time we were protected from the chill by the steel body of my car.   And now as the fog pressed in and the darkness thickened, the forest reminded us that, touched by the hand of man or no, it was still most definitely wild, and had teeth. 


On the turntable:  "Buddha Chillout Lounge"

Nakasendo Waypoints #89

Before my eyes
The day ages
From blue to grey.

On the turntable:  Alamedas Riddle, "Granny Riddle's Songs and Ballads"

Nakasendo Waypoints #88

Somewhere beneath
All that fresh fallen snow
Lies today's haiku.

On the turntable: "Asian Groove"

Sunday Papers: Joel Weishaus

"The stuff of paleoarchaeology has been dug up mainly in places that had an era in which stone monuments were raised, or stones in place were painted upon. But the earth itself is creative: rolling, tossing, weathering, building up and eroding down, decorating itself with natural colors and curves. Wherever it hasn't been paved over, a lithic mythology may be seen. All that's needed is a mind that can see what's hidden from ordinary sight."

 
On the turntable:  "Drumfunk Hoologans 2" 

Nakasendo Waypoints #87

Feet barely touch ground,
As I awake to a world
Soft around the edges

On the turntable:   "Acoustic Brazil"

Nakasendo Waypoints #86

Under their frayed woven scarf,
A pair of dosojin
Huddle against the cold.

On the turntable:  "AfroCubism"

Mitsue Mountain Hop (Ise Hon-kaido V)

When I returned to my room, I noticed that the water had spread across three of the six tatami.  Shit.

The inn hadn't supplied me with any towels, so I quickly stripped the pillow from the pillowcase and used the latter to begin mopping up the spill.  I rubbed and rubbed the faded surface of the mats until they took on a uniform color again, the darkened wet spots now nearly indistinguishable. I then pulled the water reservoir from my pack, thinking I'd not screwed the top on properly,  but found that it was snug and secure.  I must have set the bag itself on top of the mouthpiece, which then leaked while I was out of the room.

I tend to travel an comparatively exorbitant amount, so I'm allowed a certain percentage of culturally stupid fax pas.  But they always seem to happen in the most remote inns, the ones where, due to the seemingly few foreigner guests, I'm thrust into an uncomfortable role of bumbling ambassador.  I am still mortified by the sukiyaki incident of '09.

And my hosts had been incredibly nice.  Not only had they accepted me as the sole guest during the New Year's holidays, but they spent a great deal of time talking with me about my walk and giving me pointers for what lay ahead.  They joined me for dinner, where the television served as an additional companion,  the conversation turning into questions about topics seen on screen.  Again, my foreign background seemed to make me an expert on such diverse topics as mountain rescues in both Nepal and Niigata; the growing economic cold war between Russia and the Balkans (China's relative quiet of late has forced Japan to join the growing international criticism of Putin.  Helps to build support for a pumped-up SDF, especially when you remember that the two countries are still technically at war); and drunken English revelers passing out or otherwise behaving badly on New Year's Eve.  (Quoth the Pot:  "Kettle, there none more black.")

When staying at inns I tend to decline breakfast, since that allows me to leave when I like, usually just after first light.  My hosts graciousness had extended to making me breakfast at six, then bowing me out the door when the day's first rays topped the hills lining this long broad valley. 

I made my way gingerly over the sheets of black ice. Nothing moved but myself, passing beneath a massive camphor tree and the humble shrine visible between its bare branches.  A little further on, a pair of fireman carried out the first rubbish of the year.  I entered the hills, moving over the crunch of snow beneath my feet, toward a large oval structure seen through the trees, which proved to be a rather unorthodox primary school.  A man was sweeping out front, making me wonder if school was in session on this first Monday of 2015.  After passing beyond the frozen swimming pool and pitch-white athletic grounds I had my answer in the sight of a young boy waiting beside the road with his father, the pair of them turning their heads in unison toward the small bus tottering up the hill.

It was yet another hour and two more villages before I got my coffee.  Surprised I made it that far.    As I sat on a low concrete wall I thought how I had seen no vending machines nor shops since leaving Haibara.  Whereas the day before I had only encountered hamlets of a dozen homes or so, this morning I found myself walking through what could be properly termed villages, expanding spatially rather than temporally, as many of the trappings of the second half of the last century had yet to enter their orbit.  And this is precisely why I love these old roads and the places they take me.  Here, it is still definitely 1958, and my surroundings are right out of that golden age of Japanese cinema of which I am so enamored.    

And further beyond were views from even further back in time.  To my left I was leaving behind the tell-tale peaks of Soni Kōgen, and up ahead was the saddleback shape of Ōborayama (which only later I realized I had climbed in 2009.)   The mountains out here were truly magnificent, and I really needed a return visit to give them the attention they deserve.

But luckily not this day.  My hostess of the night before had mentioned that this would be an easier day than the last, in terms of topography.  I would be therefore able to move at a greater clip, which would enable me to cover the 25 km to my intended accommodation by noon.  Far too early to stop, but it was unthinkable to push on another thirty km to a train station before the darkness fell at five pm.   Even without the heavy pack, my age bracket takes that out of the realm of possibility.  Fifty five kilometer days are a decade or more behind me.

So I decided to simply walk as far as I could until four pm, then find a bus, or hitch to a rail line.  The weather and my high spirits were in my favor.  Upon reaching a train station at Ise-Okitsu, I stripped down to a T-shirt and sat eating my lunch in the sunshine.  This town literally was the end of the line, perhaps due to the very steep mountain wall on the edge of town, where an hour before I had needed my poles to manage its steep descent.  I had at first thought the station to be closed, but found that it had been reduced to one third its previous size.  The rest of the structure was divided between a civic hall of some sort, whose bored-looking employees giggled when I came in and spoke Japanese at them.  (And that was just the men.) The other half was a small folk museum, emphasizing mainly that the town had the previous year been the principle location for a film that had received quite good reviews, yet one whose title always brought giggles to the part of my brain that is perpetually thirteen year old.  Wood Job.

As I moved away I noted that this town, like Mitsue where I had spent the night, finally had the marks of a post town.  Every community in between had been too small. The houses here were built broad and squat, with lower roofs to keep off the accumulated weight of snow.  There were also quite a number of Tenri-kyo signs, no real surprise considering that the sect's founder had been born not far away. The locals seemed to delight in their history, and each home along the way had a plaque bearing the name of the inn it had once been.  I imagined the bustle of porters, hustling up business to assist with the pass up ahead.  Despite the town's charm, I knew what was to come.

I arrived at the top soaked and winded.  My choice of lunch location had been less about the aesthetics of a pretty place, and more about the timing of refueling.  But the weight in my belly had been a hindrance, and I sat a long while on a bench that marked the location of a tea house long gone.

The descent made me feel worse, upon finding the beautiful valley where I had intended to stay the night.  I had visions of sitting in the chairs out on front of the inn Nakaya, alternating between my reading books and engaging in sake-laden conversation with the owner.  I felt quite guilty as I slinked past.  This inn and my previous one Matsuya are the only ones that remain along this section of the old road.  Once they are gone, it will be impossible to do a through-hike without a tent.  In fact, my host from the previous night had told me that that was the reason he kept in business, despite being close to the age of eighty.  His son wasn't interested in taking over (the old story), so it was up to him and his wife.  The walkers relied on them, he said.

What came next could almost be seen as a sign of karmic retribution.  The beauty of the valley was short lived, for I was pitched once and for all upon the wide modern highway I'd been paralleling since the day before.  It was mercifully free of traffic, but its asphalt form was devoid of any charm as it climbed and climbed and climbed.  And as I made my weary ascent, I kicked myself for believing the old woman and her words that this day would be easier than the last.  No matter the good intentions, I know better than to listen to the advice of those who haven't themselves walked.

Upon reaching the pass, I found that the previously ample signage was now gone.  What was there was conflicting, matching neither the terrain nor the maps.  I carried on in what I was the right direction, but another sign quickly tempted me in yet another.  Gullible as a schoolboy with a crush, I moved into the dark of the unknown.  Another sign further on directed me over a stream, but I was soon thwarted by a dead end. A side road here seemed to head the right way...

From the pass, the trail was supposed to drop an incredible 300 vertical meters in less than a kilometer.  And for now the road beneath me was straight, but at least wasn't climbing.   I had another look at my guidebook, which told me "by all means follow the stream."  And the sunny spots just around the bend could be the pass, right?  Oh, well, then maybe the next one.  It was late afternoon, the shadows beginning to fall over the road.  It just didn't seem right.  The altimeter on my watch told me I was now 150 meters above the height of the pass.  Another look at my other guidebook.  At the pass, make a right turn after the bridge.  Had I crossed a bridge?  Shit.

I whirled around and moved quickly back down the hill, beneath shorn hillsides, in a demonstration of what passes for forestry in this country.  Eventually, I found myself at the spot where I had been an hour before.  No bridge.  I moved along the main road again, found the trail proper, and raced along the decline, poles swinging from my wrists, my four limbs a flurry of motion.  (At the bottom I found that local school children had left cheerfully-painted wooden sticks in a box to be used to aid walkers on this section.)   The guidebook told me I had two walking hours until the nearest bus stop, and I had a mere 45 minutes of daylight left.  If I missed the bus, I'd never get a lift since the Japanese tend not to stop after dark.

So I raced on, feet aching, mind tense and clenched.  I barely noticed the shrines and old farm houses fading into shadow.  The final approach took me along a small stream, but mercifully kept me out of the forest.   From above, a pair of crows heckled and jeckled my rushing, shuffling form.  A mother and son were a bit kinder as they rode their bicycles past, a New Year's greeting coming from their receding silhouettes.  And I made the main road at exactly five.

I turned and walked toward the bus stop, thumb out just in case.  Across the road, a voice asked where I was going.  A workman on his way home had pulled in to buy a coffee at a vending machine beside a shuttered factory.  "Any train station will do."  "Okay, I'm going to Matsuzaka."  Perfect.  A station that had express trains back to Kyoto.

My driver was my age, and had remained single in order to maintain his lifestyle as a surfer.  We talked of world famous surf breaks that we'd both visited, until the lights of the city welled up and I hobbled toward my train.  Along the way I noted that I had covered just over 40 km on the day, a distance I rarely do anymore, and never in heavy boots better used for snowshoeing.  And later still, as I peeled off my socks to climb into a hot bath, did I see the bruises around my ankles, the blackened toenail, and most of all, the holes in my feet, stigmata perhaps for my sin of refusing hospitality, a complicit act of betrayal against the spirit of pilgrimage, which in this particular case, may be beyond the hope of resurrection.



MAP: http://latlonglab.yahoo.co.jp/route/watch?id=4cc9415e09dd2d174d0d38987812e0fb  
On the turntable:  "Daytrotter Session:  SXSW"

Uda Garden of Eden (Ise Hon-kaido IV)

It wasn't too long before it became apparent that I was carrying too much gear.  It was was weighing me down, and I was still a bit fatigued from fighting off a minor cold that was trying to get me. 

My intentions had been good.  It had snowed over the past three days -- days corresponding to the first three of the new year -- and I wasn't sure what I'd be in for up at 600-plus meters. 

I wasn't alone.  I passed the better part of the day following the footsteps of someone who had walked this path the day before, an assumption based on the fact that the slushy bottoms of the prints had refrozen overnight.  Whoever this person was, his feet were bigger than mine.

But now it was just the snow and I.  The cold had greeted me with a sudden smack in the face the moment I had stepped off the train in Haibara.  It must have terrorized the townspeople, for no one was in sight as I walked the streets back to where I had hitched a lift just over a year ago.  The cold dogged my own footsteps, kept me from dawdling too long as I would greet any passing shrines or stone statuary with a mere glance, rather than my usual thorough look around.  Ponds were frozen into a thick opaque white, hiding the carp beneath that swam slowly, slowly, as if a physical manifestation of the passage of time. History itself can be lifeless and cold to the touch.

What had taken ten minutes by car took an hour on foot, the newly carved wooden signs eventually leading me into forest.  My sudden presence scared off a deer, the bounce of its receding white bottom blending quickly into the white of the hillside beyond.  The signage was remarkably good, thanks to the city of Haibara.  I worried a little that the trails would be tougher to follow once I got beyond the city limits.  But for now, all that troubled me was the weight in my pack, the majority taken up by my twelve-point crampons.  I had nearly brought my snowshoes as well, but at the last minute had decided against it, considering we had gotten a mere third of the seventy centimeters that had been projected to fall upon the region over the holidays.  Even still, it was the most snow to fall upon Kyoto in over fifty years.

I climbed out of the village, and past the thousand year old cedar above.  The trail continued to climb, topping out at a tall stele marking what had once been a barrier station.  Beside it were a pair of picnic tables, frosted like a cake with at least ten centimeters of snow.  It saddened me a little to have to disrupt such symmetrical perfection, but with a sweep of the arm I provided myself with a place to sit.  It had been a long slog, and my body's resources were depleted, so my intended snack break quickly expanded to become lunch.  Each bite of my metallic onigiri was a taunt: "Wouldn't you much rather have brought a thermos of soup?"

I left the villages in the valleys below, their grey right angles standing out against the roundness of the surrounding snow.  Every now and again I'd pop out of the forest and into a small hamlet, a chain of which was strung across this, the highest section of the old road to Ise.  These proved to be more dangerous than the snowy passes, as I would gingerly navigate patches of road slick with ice.  It was little surprise then that I saw very few people, except for an old farmer who stopped his car to ask me if I was walking the Kaidō, and an equally old woman who set me straight when she saw me pondering the trail with a GPS that was beyond a signal.  The old ways are still best.

I climbed over three passes, each one taking a greater toll than the last.  Then I descended, arriving at a small gazebo below a shrine, where I sat and overlooked a valley as the first rays of the day's sun broke through the cloud cover to caress the contours of my face.  It wasn't to long before arriving at my accommodation for the night, where a kind old woman led me into a warm room, and placed a steaming cup of tea before me...


MAP: http://latlonglab.yahoo.co.jp/route/watch?id=4cc9415e09dd2d174d0d38987812e0fb


On the turntable:  "Clicks and Cuts"
On the nighttable:  Murakami Haruki, "A Wild Sheep's Chase"

Sunday Papers: Murakami Haruki

"Civilization means transmission.  Whatever can't be expressed might as well not exist."

On the turntable:  "Glucklich V"

(Untitled)

Like gnawing cold steel:
Eating onigiri
In three day-old snow.

On the turntable:  Madness, "Absolutely"

Happy New Year!