Japan Blog

Route Map of the Journey

2007-12-16T11:06:00.000+09:00

Click on the map for an enlarged image

Here is the map of our journey. We will replace the Flickr slides in the blog with a full set of Picassa slides for all parts of the trip as soon as they are uploaded.

Post 1: Tokyo
Post 2: Kawasaki, Kawagoe
Post 3: Nikko, Aizuwakamatsu
Post 4: Aizuwakamatsu, Yonezawa, Takahata, Yamadera, Hiraizumi, Rikuzen-takata
Post 5: Tono, Tazawa-ko, Kakunodate
Post 6: Kakunodate, Chokai, Haguro, Matsumoto, Takayama, Ogimachi, Kanazawa, Ine, Tottori
Post 7: Ushimado, Shikoku, Muroto, Awaji
Post 8: Overview on vehicle touring
Post 9: Uji, Hikone, Minami, Magome, Tsumago, Fujiyoshida, Hakone
Post 10: Kyoto
Post 11: Tokyo again
Post 12: Synopsis

Ninja Sesshoseki Transforms to Aotearoa

The shrine to the nine-tailed fox Sesshoseki-zan

We returned to New Zealand with two good-luck chimakis and a scarf with a nine-tailed animal on it scattered to the crowds at Otsu matsuri. The rice stalk chimakis were promptly seized by biosecurity to our chagrin, but not before we took a photograph of them. We then set the scarf and chimaki images up in a little shrine and quickly discovered that the scarf depicted the nine-tailed fox Sessoseki-zan who became a beautiful courtesan of the emperor until his wasting away signalled a plot, whereupon she disappeared, only to be hunted down and became a volcanic stone lethal to anyone who touched it. Sessoseki-zan was represented in one of the chariots in the Otsu matsuri parade with a puppet transforming between the courtesan and the fox. The same evening a friend of my son arrived with 133 episodes of Naruto, the manga/anime impersonation of the nine-tailed fox, conceived by Masashi Kishimoto thus profoundly extending the good luck we had received at Otsu by entertaining us for endless hours of Ninja intrigue in the Shinto tradition of personal supernatural fulfillment.

Naruto

Synopsis: Shinto, Sex, Shunga and Ecocrisis

2007-10-22T09:22:00.001+09:00

Passion: A shunga of a woman in sexual ecstasy

一家に
遊女もねたり
萩と月

hitotsuya ni
yûjo mo netari
hagi to tsuki

Under the same roof
Prostitutes were sleeping—
The moon and clover

Having finally left Japan, we have a few insights on Japanese culture, from development and eco-consciousness, to sex, spirituality and life energies.

To complete the relationship between Shinto, life energies, fertility and sexuality, here come three examples of sexually explicit Shinto shrines. These illustrate the fact that Shinto as a fertility religion was naturally sexual until Puritan influences in the Meiji restoration led to the suppression of the overtly sexual elements, despite the yin-yang male and female guardian animals that protect every shrine, the manifest sexual fertility of Shinto goddesses and the implicit sexuality of the Shinto demon Tengu (see later pic). Shinto which comes from Shin-tao or the Tao or way of the gods is implicitly Taoist in nature.

The iron penis carried in its portable shrine Hounen Matsuri,
Tagata jinja, Komaki worshipping the ancestral
woman-goddess Tamahime-no-mikoto.

The pictures are from internet images, Hounen Matsuri at Tagata jinja Komaki north of Nagoya in March and the Kanamara Matsuri rite at Kanayama jinja, Kawasaki in April. The iron penis rite originates from a town of the old Tokaido road, which had a profitable trade in prostitution, and the iron penis was said to destroy the bite of a demon in the vagina of women, that we would associate with an STD. Consequently the shrine is devoted to penis images.

What of the vagina? On display in the Tagata shrine's museum, is a small statue, where, in a wooden case with two swinging doors, is a life-size brass model of a vagina, centered between the stumps of two spreading legs, particularly polished around the orifice. For five hundred yen, you can buy a tiny golden penis charm and rub it on the vagina shrine for good fertility luck. Other Shinto shrines such as the Kangi shrine in Shirahama-cho, Wakayama, have both penises and vaginas as fertility shrines which you can rub.

Penis and vagina shrine totems Kangi shrine.

The matsuri participants carry these penises through the streets with other multifarous manifestations of the penis in trinkets and icons carried by women which the onlookers can rub for good luck, amid frenzied rejoicing and partaking of penis and vagina shaped delicacies.

Penis totem being carried from the Kanayama jinja
in the Kanamara Matsuri by men who are
cross-dressed in the manner of a Kabuki play

A third Shinto shrine renowned for its sexual imagery is the Taga shrine at Uwajima in Shikoku, which is one of the few remaining places where the explicit Shinto sexuality before the Meiji restoration remains. This again has a penis carrying festival and a world sexual museum capitalizing on its unusual reputation.

The Taga shrine at Uwajima has a penis log carried in festivals
as well as various other penis images in stone and wood
and has an adjacent world sexual museum.

In addition to his appearance in many Shinto rites and at Buddhist mountain temples, Tengu is also paired with the goddess of mirth, Otafuku, the breast dimpled female figure paired with Tengu on the love hotel in a previous posting in this blog, in a spring wakening rite at the Asuka Onda Festival, held the first Sunday in February every year at the Asukaniimasu Shrine in Asuka-mura, Nara in which there is an ecstatic simulated sex act between Tengu and Otafuku played by two males in costume, whose origins run back to the 7th century and are some of the oldest in Shinto's long history.

Another part of the exploration of Japanese sexuality involves shunga, the erotic art associated with 'pillow books' for sex education of newly weds, which forms a physical Karma sutra of Japanese sexual positions, as well as group and lesbian sex, and other forms of voyeurism such as bestiality and sado-masochism, illustrating that nothing is new under the Sun.

Shunga: Woman on top and back to front

Sexual elements are also portrayed in sculpture in small ivories depicting sexual engagement and other images, from food to phallic deities. There is a museum of the sex gods Seishin no Yakata in Utsunomiya, Tochigi. Dosojin or wayside protector gods are also sometimes portrayed as a couple, occasionally surmounted by a glans-like shape, or in suggestive, or explicit penile form. A museum containing some penile dosojin from the Dosojin matsuri at Utsugushi-ga-hara Onsen is beside Matsumoto castle.

Dosojin or road-side guardians

In mythological Shinto tradition, the universe begins with both yin and yang attributes forming a diffuse cosmic egg out of which heaven differentiated more easily but the eart was more troubled with chaotic confusion. A tale of Genesis depicts an original couple who walked along a heavenly Rainbow Bridge, thrusting a "jewel spear of heaven" into the chaos beneath. Foam from the spear formed an island, and the couple floated down upon this and built a house with the spear becoming the central pillar supporting the household. Their marriage gave birth to the Kami Islands of the gods, trees, plants, grasses, sun and moon goddesses, and others.

Commercial ivory carving of common rear entry coitus position

The final observation is about the relatively advanced way in which Japan is taking expensive measures to build a sustainable society that is eco-friendly and manages the land of Japan in a sustainable green paradigm. Japan contrasts wildly from colonial agricultural countries such as New Zealand in that 76% of the land area is in forest, despite the extensive urban development, and the remain areas are carefully intensively managed rice paddies and horticultural plots for vegetables. Extensive pasture farming is a novelty, so for confined to Hokkaido and the plateaus at the top of some high hill country.

Tengu's eagle beak has become a distinctly sexual penis nose

The ecosystems thus remain relatively intact, although Japanese demand for wood and other raw materials has devastated the tropical forests of Indonesia and the wider Asian tropics. Japan is also extensively into recycling to the extent there is no trash collection as such but everything is either plastic bottles, metal especially aluminum cans, paper, or 'combustible'. However until China recently overtook it Japan was the world's second largest consumer of oil.

Japan is also heading into demographic crisis with an inverting population pyramid.

Efficient careful land use in Japan.
Tea plantations, rice paddies and extensive forest cover

Protecting the environment has some negatives, like sealing off many of the parking bays on highways, partly to avid accidents but also to prevent desperate Japanese for dumping wholesale garbage in disused corners of the highway system, but it serves as a lesson to other agricultural and industrial countries that it is possible to remain economically robust and have a clean urban technological society as well.

Last Tango in Tokyo

2007-10-19T08:59:00.001+09:00

The flash from Fuji summit

蛤の
ふたみにわかれ
行秋ぞ

hamaguri no
futami ni wakare
yuku aki zo

Translations:

Dividing like clam
and shell, I leave for Futami—
Autumn is passing by

I'm like a clam pulled apart
Its body ripped from the shell
Looking back, leaving you
With the passing of the autumn
Onward to Futami!

Matsuo Bashô (松尾芭蕉)
Final poem in Oku no Hosomichi; it can be read a number of different ways.
Futami is the rope-linked wedding-rocks at Ise-Shima, and the site of one of Shinto's foremost shrines...

We returned to Tokyo from Kyoto by local train a couple of days ago. As we passed Fuji city on the coast, Fuji-san mountain, the lady renowned for her shyness, finally revealed herself to us. Her summit was just poking out of the clouds as the train came round the coastal hills into the bay, but in the few moments we crossed by, the clouds opened up and separated and her form was revealed, and at the last moment the setting Sun was reflected in a glint of the shrine and shelter on the summit ridge.

Sakano at Yoshida

Returning to our two bunk room at Yoshida at about 8.30 pm was the next thing to a home coming. Sakano, the proprietor was still there to greet us, protesting mildly that he had wanted to go because he had a friend staying at his home, waving a note he had written saying "Dear Chris KIng - I welcome the Second Coming" - finessing the fact it was actually our third visit.

Yoshida is absolutely covered in greenery and creepers !

Yoshida House has been a real home to us. We have stayed three times and come back again and again because we know and like the people here and the house and Oizumi Gakuen are a really nice place to be when in Tokyo. Sakano has been both patient and helpful and our contact with Shon catalysed the most creative phase of our travel round rural Japan. Above all we love to be in a house covered in creepers and green plants in the biggest concrete jungle on the planet.

Shinjuko

In contrast to our waking life phased the Sun on the road in the Mitsubishi, our time in Tokyo has been wholly under the banner of the night. The first evening here we set off to see the love hotels of Dogenzaka hill in Shibuya and the red light district of Kabukicho in Shinjuku.

In Kyomachi
a cat prowling for love
heads for Ageyamachi

Takarai Kikaku (1661-1707, also known as Enomoto Kikaku) was one of Basho's leading disciples. Kikaku preferred the city and the opportunities it provided for extravagant play. Kyomachi and Ageyamachi were districts inside the Yoshiwara pleasure quarters of Edo.

Crowded in Shibuya

The trains were absolutely packed to overflowing and as we arrived in Shibuya, the streets were so crowded that there was barely room on the sidewalk, giving a feeling of utter claustrophobia. The evening is a time when Japanese who have been working hard all day can go to town shopping so it can be even more crowded than rush hours.

Love Hotel Two-way

The love hotels were colourful additions to our collection, garish and blatantly offering different prices for a tryst or a night's sleep, all automated so you can register and use the available rooms without any human eyes falling on you.

Automated booking window
with separate charges for 'rest' and 'stay'.

But they are also discrete enough that they don't look like they are bawdy brothels, after a 1980s court ruling that curtailed the more blatant extremes forcing many to masquerade as 'business hotels'.

Foyer Two-way

The 'Two-Way" sported a luxurious foyer, like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, with the front window adorned with Amazonian love birds, and the hall sporting New Guinea masks.

Pink Cabaret trounces the Blue Movie

The red light district is similarly shielded from immediate view, so you only get a bare taste of it from the street with curtain-clad screens covered in Kanji and Katakana hiding most of the pleasures inside, ranging from the usual 'massage parlours' referred to as 'soap lands', through bottomless cafes, to cabarets with erotic acts inviting audience participation.

Kabukicho angels for hire

Intriguing was the prevalence of establishments offering male 'models' with teased haircuts, as frequent as the galleries of barbie doll girls, something which makes an intriguing commentary on Japanese sexual relations.

Those delectable naughty samurai boys! CNN News Article

Video of Kishimojo Shrine, Ikebukuro, Tokyo

Last night taking a different turn we went to an evening festival at KIshimojo Shinto shrine in Ikebukuro, or Zoshigaya Kishimojindo, dedicated to yet another Goddess of fertility and childbirth Kishimojin, a gold clad jinja surrounded in ancient ginko trees tucked away in a labrynth of side streets. As we arrive outside the Seibu Department store, we realized the procession was already under way with large lanterns powered by portable generators being wheeled to the main thoroughfare Meiji-dori, coalescing into a long train of giant lanterns interspersed with drumming groups, led by a pipe and glockenspiel band and dancers.

Festival lanterns whirled

At 7 pm the procession took off to loud fireworks crashing above the high rise neon-clad buildings, and a deafening combination of loud drumming, police whistles and traffic noise, overlaid with the lanterns, now being actively hurled around in combination with whirlygigs consisting of streamers on poles which the guys took it in turns to energize in a kind of virility dance.

Whirling the whirlygigs to flat skin drumming

After donning industrial ear plugs we followed the procession through the crowds down Meiji-dori and into the narrow side streets which eventually led right up to the shrine, giving another taste of claustrophobia as everyone, the procession, onlookers and the neighbourhood faithful converged on the shrine entrance lined with brightly coloured sausage stalls and red and white lanterns.

The throng passing through the shrine

Each team performed on the steps and gained a blessing from the priests and the entourage then mover in a loop back down the shrine steps and off to one side where a lantern lined avenue led on to the local Buddhist temple, Homyoji, where the teams were all blessed again after yet another tattoo of drumming and whirling, in a short reading of sutras before disbanding into the night.

Today is packing day and making the multi-stage transit from Oizumi gakuen, our quiet residential neighbourhood on the North Western fringes of Tokyo to Narita, a city 45 kms East, making at least two changes of train after dragging our overload baggage on a trolley the mile or so to the station, grateful even to spend the night sleepless in the plane at the thought of having a whole house to wander through and a comfortable bed to sleep in on our return.

Basho: From Kyoto with Love

2007-10-15T21:37:00.000+09:00

Mrs Tani at Tani House

京にても
京なつかしや
時鳥

Kyou nitemo
kyou natsukashi ya
hototogisu

Translations:

Even in Kyôto—
hearing the cuckoo's cry—
I long for Kyôto

I am in Kyôto,
Yet at the voice of the hototogisu,
Longing for Kyôto.

Back to Kyoto
My longing now refreshed
When Hototogisu cry

This is our last day in Kyoto. We wound up by going to a craft market at a local temple, catching a glimpse of the maples beginning to turn red in the parks, where a Japanese man stopped me to pronounce that my visage was very much in the likeness of Basho, then to Morita Washi the finest paper supplier in Kyoto to buy some rather beautiful Japanese wood block prints of Samurai courtship, again passing through the downtown markets, and pontocho area having already seen a variety of expensive crafts, from the scintillating woven art of Shosui Kaku, through several Japanese craft emporiums to the paper shops.

Tonight I went to visit Funaoka Onsen, the traditional Japanese bath house nearby which contains old wood carved panels of the Russo-Japanese war, as well as a ceiling display of Tengu, the red-faced penis-nosed mythological guardian figure that appears in both Buddhist and Shinto temples and festivals here, as well as the love hotel in the previous blog, whose long nose originally came from the beak of a bird of prey, as which is regarded largely as an evil spirit in Buddhism but is a guardian protector in Shinto.

The big room Tani House

Afterwards I heard the elusive clicking of sound sticks in the night that happens here mid-evening and mysteriously heralds the fire guards who wander through the alleys calling "Hi no jo-in" - beware of smoldering fires - harking back to the time when Japan used open fires for cooking and the wood and paper houses caught fire so often that, in Tokyo, the nightly blazes were a regular entertainment called the 'blossoms of Edo'. After running hundreds of metres down several streets clean into the precincts of Daitoku-ji temple, I finally came upon them singing their ancient protection song, something that is common sense in a compound full of pine trees in the centre of the city.

Giving the V sign downtown Kyoto.

The 12 days here have stretched out endlessly and at the time time we have been so fully occupied that I have had little chance to write. This is partly a function of the unique way of life at Tani House, a very special Japanese style guest house for Westerners, which we first stayed at in 1984 and whose land lady Mrs. Tani has been doing the same good thing ever since the 1970s. Tani House is famous and she does a really neat job of making it personally pleasant, keeping the whole process going smoothly including providing simple but varied breakfast fare every morning and a kitchen where you can cook, a small bath house and a series of quaint traditional Japanese sleeping rooms of various sizes with futons and floor mattresses.

Girl in Kasuga procession

Japanese style dwelling involves living on the floor with paper thin walls, so that every rustle in the room next door echoes like thunder, and any chance of a romantic liaison depends on finding odd times when everyone is out. Because its up a small alley, getting a free wireless internet connection to produce the blog requires walking out of the little cul-de-sac and down the lane to huddle on a street corner typing with one hand, although a laptop is provided in the foyer for a small fee for ordinary internet use.

Medieval Belgian hanging Otsu matsuri

In Kyoto I have discovered a golden rule. Never follow one religion. Either have none at all, or make sure to have two and give only some of your allegiance to each. In the case of Japan there is no one religion but an ebb and flow between Shinto's polarity of life, fertility and energy and Buddhism's pole of quiescence, chastity and death. By separating the two, each person remains free from the oppression either might deliver on its own and able to give spiritually in a way which one dominant religion rapidly obliterates - thus as I have mentioned Shinto serves birth, marriage, luck, worldly fertility and cultural continuity while Buddhism serves death, enlightenment and meditative repose.

Peach girl puppet play Otsu matsuri

We have tried to spend our time doing the unexpected and concentrating on the spontaneous and accidental rather than slogging our way through the endless round of 500-800 yen temples, with varying varieties of slightly gross touristic exploitation of Buddhist excesses, like Chion-in which boasts the largest bell and temple gate in Japan and Sanjusangen-do which houses 1001 images of the 1000 armed Goddess of mercy, Kannon each of which has a different face and none of which you are allowed to photograph, although do have a postcard displaying them for all to see and I did manage to accidentally sneak into Shokoku-ji which sports a huge hall, like a bare protestant cathedral, with a famous painting of a dragon on the roof.

Kinkakuji burned to the ground
by an obsessed monk in the 1960s.

The first couple of days we visited Kinkaku-ji and Ginkaku-ji the two delightful lakeside temples famous for their reflections in the water, and the latter for its painted panels and sand garden, spurning Ryano-ji the austere temple with a bare rock garden which exemplifies how the affinity of Zen to nature can end in a complete contradiction where the dead contrivance of raked sand has replaced living nature, despite the more sensitive mossy gardens of the huge temple complex of Daitoku-ji right over the wall from Tani House.

Kasuga procession

Instead we have come upon a so far endless variety of the spontaneous and unexpected. After exploring some of the craft centres, we walked by the Yasaka pagoda, coming upon a succession of women dressed up as Geisha's for a day and to the Sennenzaki and Nissenzaki districts full of old houses and boutique shops finding as we wound up the hill crowds of people converging on another temple Kyomisudera, which is a very endearing Buddhist temple, with a freely photographable set of altars and a water fall with reputed sacred therapeutic properties.

Missing the target love rock Jishu jinja

But the most intriguing thing about it is that it is uniquely associated with the Shinto Jishu shrine in its grounds, which is the shrine of love. The shrine has all manner of good luck charms and oracles including a pair of rocks hopeful lovers try to walk between with their eyes shut to seek their fortunes in love and a shrine to Ogaki-myojn, the guardian deity who answers all prayers especially for ladies, even those who nailed straw dolls to the trees below during 2 am visits to curse their betrayers.

Women in kimonos on an outing to Kyomizudera

Being in the name of love, the temple has a unique air of affection and draws both streams of school children and young women in kimonos out to celebrate the mystery of love's fortune, who are pleased to be photographed and found beautiful in the eye of the beholder.

Wedding Shimogamo Jinja

We have also made a tour of many of the Shinto shrines in Kyoto, which in contrast to the fees charged by touristic Buddhist temples, have stayed true to their sacred calling and remain free. We are next to Kenkun jinja a quiet hill top shrine, but have also visited Yoshida and Yanaka shrines and the very picturesque Shimogamo shrine set in a park between the two forks of the river which was literally pulsating with a series of wedding ceremonies, and 'christenings' of infants demonstrating the relationship between Shinto and the rights of passage of life in birth and marriage, and a ceremony between a Shinto priest and his partner wildly dressed up like a woman in a traditinal Japanese medieval play almost unable to move for the flowing bulky garments, requiring two attendants to get her into her clogs to move to the next shrine.

Man in Shinto priestly attire with woman
in traditional dress in ceremony at Shimogamo

Video of Otsu Matsuri

Earlier on in the piece we had travelled to Otsu on the shores of Lake Biwa, half an hour out of Kyoto to watch the Otsu matsuri, a festival like to one at Kakunadote where medieval three wheeled two-storey high chariots containing teams of flute players and drummers, covered in ornate old brocades, each with its own puppet theatre telling a different tale are blessed at the shrine, before being pulled around the town with frenzied energy by teams of men in Kimonos and loin cloths, again with a procession of the elders, priests, little girls and boys in costume, while at the same time throwing out good luck charms to the crowds who vie with one another to pick up the prizes.

Otsu Matsuri Chariots

We have stopped in small temple markets where we found fresh vegetables, sexy cups with naked geishas, a monk doing wild staccato rap sutras.

Video of Chion-ji rap sutra

Naughty Geisha Teacups Temple Market

We also spent a day traveling by train to Nara, where there is a park with several quaint old temples and shrines. Nara was before Kyoto the capital and its priests became very powerful before being eclipsed by Kyoto, which in turn gave way to the economic power of Tokyo as capital in 1868 marking the start of the Meiji period. Nijo castle in Kyoto records the council in which the Shogun was compelled finally to utter a decree transferring power back to the emperor in the state room in a set of mannequins.

Sculpture Nissenzaki district

Nara's Kofuku-ji has one of the talles old wood pagodas in Japan. Like Kyomisudera, Todai-ji's Daibutsu-den hall housing the great Buddha is a photo-friendly rustic temple thronged by crowds of school children, along with the Nigatsu-do hall which has a sweeping view of Nara. Behind these is the secluded Shinto Kasuga shrine which was again celebrating life in an infant blessing, amid throngs of deer which wait to eat deer biscuits we mistakenly consumed ourselves last time in 1984 and which try to sneak up and nibble your sandwiches.

Women worshiping at a Tengu shrine Kurama.
Tengu is also a mountain protector.

A couple of days ago for another change of scene, we traveled by a neat little mountain railway a few kilometres North of Kyoto to Kurama and Kibune, where there is a Buddhist and Shinto complex straddling a forested mountain park, which we ascended in a long winding pathway with great views out over the hills. The temple belongs to the slightly bizarre Kurama-Kokyo sect which, believes that more than six million years ago, Mao-son the great king of conquerors of evil and the spirit of the earth, descended on Mt. Kurama from Venus with the great mission of the salvation of mankind. While this conflicts with evolution as madly as the Christian view of a four thousand year creation, it does make a refreshing twist to the religious fantasies of humankind. Consistent with the engagement of Buddhism with renunciation and death, rather than life and life energies, the main hall had a candle-lit mausoleum below full of the urns of the ashes of the dead in long rows like an ancient DNA library.

Geishas officiating at the Doll Burning Ceremony

Yesterday we found ourselves intimately involved in two different festivals. The first was a solemn 'doll burning' ceremony at the Hokyoji nunnery, which houses a very expensive 1000 yen exhibition of dolls the daughters of the emperor brought when they set up the temple. This consisted of a huge display of hundreds of Japanese dolls, and a solemn ceremony in which the nuns read sutras, while three extremely photogenic Geishas in ornately woven attire made offerings and the small crowd offered prayers.

Women's shrine team at the Kasuga festival

Video of Kasuga festival

Afterwards we headed to the Kasuga shrine just North West of Shi-in station where the Shinto deities are taken out into the town by two teams of two hundred men in hand-carried scintillating Arks of the Covenant, and a smaller team of women carrying a women's Ark, to ensure the deities go out to the people and remain alive and entwined in the life of the people. We arrived just in time to see the Arcs being blessed by the priests, the procession of elders, men on horseback, little girls in headdresses and boys piping flutes, followed by the women wildly joggling their shrine Arc and then the two teams of men with great gusto wielding their two shrines out into the street and away on a route round the neighbourhood.

400 men carry the two male shrines and
vie with one another for energetics.

Tomorrow we hit the railroad for Tokyo (probably another chain of locals but hopefully using rapids that jump at least some stops), where there is an evening lantern festival at Ikebukuro over the next couple of days and will explore the love hotels and red light districts of Shibuya and Shinjuku.

Lady Murasaki and the Goddess of Fire and Fertility

2007-10-09T08:35:00.000+09:00

Konohanasakuya-Hime:Goddesss of fire and fertility Fuji-yoshida.

Our journey now drives East through the mountainous areas of Honshu, slipping between Kyoto and Nara because we return to these places after returning the van in the urban wastelands half way between Tokyo and Yokohama, to consummate our time in Japan in the cultural capital.

Shingon temple north of Uji with fire offerings

As we left Awaiji we realized we were now taking the world's longest suspension bridge, a much huger more imposing structure than the one we entered the island from, totally dwarfing even the largest trucks and far larger than the Golden Gate in San Francisco. As we arrived in Honshu, we found ourselves in a bewildering spaghetti network of highways around Kobe. No matter which direction we took, we ended up traveling South West rather than the North East into the hills we sought to avoid the metropolitan paralysis of greater Osaka. After a lot of compass navigating and repeated mistakes, we managed to take a road into the hills as far as Ikeda, driving up into the Minoo Quasi National Park to stay the night on an isolated side road in the forest.

Rock garden and Pagoda Ishi-Yamadera

Next day we ploughed through the peripheral cities to the North of Osaka in fine weather in maniacal traffic speeding along two congested lanes interspersed with endless traffic lights, averaging about 20 kph, overtaken every two minutes by the Shinkansen bullet train careering past at some 300 kph. The highway then became entangled with a toll motor-way weaving in and out of its elevated pylons. We enarly ended up taking the toll road to try to cross the river to Uji at Shimamoto, but the men in the toll booth helpfully gave us a map to show us there was a parallel non-toll lane as well. We stooped in at Yawata to climb the forested hill to Iwashimisu jinja (a jinja is a Shinto shrine), with a beautifully decorated inner shrine under restoration, then on to Uji with a small world heritage Shinto shrine by the river and and the Byodin temple, whose Heian phoenix shrine is famously illustrated on the 10 yen coin, but found it closed for restoration, however we plan to return to it in a few days from Kyoto once restoration is over. We then took the river road passing by the temple, which ran around in a loop of hydro lakes from South East, eventually North, passing a colourful recluse Shingon temple on a hill with a lot of tributes to fire and flame, racing to Ishi-yamadera just before closing, when we found by accident it was lying in our path.

Lady Murasaki's alleged room at Ishi-Yamadera

Ishi-yamadera is a delightful Shingon temple set on a hill with beautiful shrines and altars, classic painted screens, a pagoda set above a rock and moss garden, and the room where it is alleged Lady Murasaki Shikibu wrote the Tale of the Genji, in the eleventh century Heian peak, for the women of the aristocracy. It is said to be the first novel, a title which shows how far ahead of European culture the Japan of the time actually was. The work recounts the life of a son of a Japanese emperor, known to readers as Hikaru Genji, or "Shining Genji". Genji is simply another way to read the Chinese characters for the real-life Minamoto clan, to which Genji was made to belong. For political reasons, Genji is relegated to commoner status and begins a career as an imperial officer.The tale concentrates on Genji's romantic life and describes the customs of the aristocratic society of the time. Much is made of Genji's good looks. His most important personality trait is the loyalty he shows to all the women in his life, as he never abandons any of his wives. When he finally becomes the most powerful man in the capital, he moves into a palace and provides for each of them, thus providing a unique insight into the sexual ethics of the imperial culture of the times. Yesterday while in Kyoto we went to another Matsura festival with chariots in Otsu adjacent to the shrine on the shores of Lake Biwa, very like the one in Kakunadote and one of the medieval floats had a marionette display with lady Murasaki and all the images of her novels parading before her.

Float of Lady Murasaki and her creations Otsu Matsura

Such tales are by no means fantasy. The original capital Nara had to be moved to Kyoto when a priest by the name of Dokyo managed to seduced an empress and nearly usurped the throne, and it was decided to move the court to a new location, out of the reach of Nara's increasingly powerful clergy.

Japanese dress style: Miniskirts and undressing atire, Magamo

Tale of the Genji provides a counterpoint to the tale of erotic entrapment spun in "Woman of the Dunes" whose inspiration we was in the great sand dunes North of Tattori mentioned in an earlier blog. An entomologist on an expedition to collect insects in an area of sand dunes is entrapped in a sand pit by local villagers to assist a widow who has been tasked by the villagers with digging sand to be sold to the cities and preventing the sands from encroaching on the house and her village. Junpei eventually becomes the widow's lover and resigns himself to his fate. The focus of the film shifts to the way in which the couple cope with the oppressiveness of their condition, and the power of their physical attraction in spite of - or possibly because of - their situation. At the end of the film Junpei gets his chance to escape, but he chooses to prolong his stay in the dune, in part because the woman is already pregnant with his child.

Female as 'Cherry Blossom'

Japan's fixation on doll-like images of woman shows clearly that the cliche of the fecund female as the nubile fertile child-like adolescent figure is not just a product of Western anorexia nervosa. Images of the doll-like geisha transfixed in her kimono extend through the soft-core girlie comics and magazines that litter every Lawson Station and Seven-eleven snack bar outlet, through kamakaze mini-skirted school girls, to young women carefully made up to look fragile to perfection as a cherry blossom petal, yet seductively adorned with clothes simulating a partially undressed state.

Boy's girlie magazines in snack shop.

This is possible partly because Japan's rule obeying and Buddhist non-violent mentality results in a low incidence of sex and other crimes and girls feel safe to walk in the street, even at night, without fear of attack. The seductive younger generation contrasts antipodally with the gentle forbearing conservative image of the older generation, leaving the statistics of Japanese people claiming to make love on average only 31 times a year, compared with the 144 times for New Zealanders, a mystery spanning the generations.

Goddess of Mercy 'suckled' by two dragons Chomeiji

At evening we drove up the Eastern shore of Lake Biwa where there were a long string of recreational beach-side parks, stopping in a car par with a toilet constructed by an ingenious recycling research project, which we found, having washed all our clothes, was providing the sweet-smelling water by filtering the sewerage outflow through six tanks of soil.

Buddhist priestess, Setouchi Jakucho at Chomeiji

Driving North in the morning we stopped at a lakeside temple, Chomeiji, which had a very select altar with a forbidden image of the thousand armed Goddess of Mercy Kannon,, outside which a very famous woman Buddhist priestess, Setouchi Jakucho was being interviewed for a program on Japanese television. Only one of the Buddhist sects in Japan permits women to be consecrated piests, so I guess this was it. Later we would come to see her lecture posters in towns we drove through.

Kimono art exhibition Hikone castle

Driving north to Hikone, we stopped and climbed the hill and the Y 1000 fee to visit the castle and its lakeside formal garden with mirror reflections and an electrifying kimono exhibition with the models dressed as lady killer geishas. We then drove East past Gifu to Yaotsu, where we finally managed to get some silicone and paint to repair a few scratches on the van caused by backing into parking signs at Cainz Do-it-yourself chain that had everything from art supplies to building materials. Trying to find a place to crash we wound up at a strange very opulent sect-like peace settlement called The Hill of Humanity, and managed to descend into a derelict side road with a panoramic view of the valley below the hill overlooking a tunnel.

Love hotel north of Nikko with penis nose and breast cheeks.

Next day we set off on the road from Yaotsu to Ena through the hills, but it rapidly degraded into a local farm alley that broke off into several directions with only signs in Japanese to the nearest villages, forcing us to navigate by compass, and to back track for 5 or 6 kilometres when on of the choices descended a deep valley and turned through 180 degrees to go South-West rather than the North-East we intended. Finally on one of them we recognized the Kanji for Ena and then drove on a tortuous little hill road through the forest with a large number of cars commuting to work, finally emerging into Ena after two or three hours lost in the hills.

Venus love hotel with drive-in anonymous portal automatic registaration
and cheaper rates for resting than sleeping

We stopped in at the Hotel Venus on the outskirts, a discrete love hotel with a drive-in core and an automated room service, offering different prices for overnight or 'rest', that prevented anyone seeing who arrived and who left. It was a cut above the seedy one we first saw driving up to Nikko, which had a man with a penis nose and a woman with breast cheeks on it.

Magome

After failing to find Enakyo gorge and instead arriving at a hideous fun park on a flooded hydro-lake we then drove on to Magome and Tsumago, two old towns built on the Nakasendo (the old stone-paved medieval post road). Magome was delightful but rather touristic, but Tsumago over the saddle, on the other side of the range, was still in an unspoiled state, with a long meandering pedestrian only street following the old Nakasendo. Going through Iida, we pulled off for the evening near Oshika in a disused old loop of road by a bridge in the rain.

Tsumago

The next day we drove into the Minami alps, ascending a winding back road named on the map as a major highway, stocking up with gas at the last gas station ascending the 1424 m summit road, coming down to Hase, where there was supposed to be a back road going by Mt. Kita the second highest mountain in Japan. This however proved, like those around and to Kamikochi previously could be traversed only by paying a hefty price for a bus ticket and was thus useless for a transit in the van. After nearly departing we returned to the alpine information center and was told by the woman on the desk that the tiny wiggle hexagon 20 was passable in the current conditions, even though the map showed it with a barrier road closed sign. We thus took of in the rain and mist up an exceedingly narrow windy precipitous little bush track that had no seal and in many places was fit only for a four wheel drive, but never quite petered out, despite coming at many places to locked gates with only one opening through, finally ascending Mt. Nyukasa 1955 m, all foggy and lichen hanging from the trees, eventually bursting out through a pair of farm gates from the wilderness onto a high plateau farm pasture, then descending in a wild bunch of hairpins to Fujimi and the valley down to Mt. Fuji. Views of this road are in the previous blog.

'Private' love hotel Fuji Five Lakes

From there it was a long drive south down a wide populated valley, before getting mired in the highways around Kofu where there was no turn off for the 358 to Fuji lakes, going East, but only going West, after we had overshot by 5 kms in rush hour traffic, because it took off from under a fly-over. We ended up sleeping on the slopes below Fuji five lakes right under the turn off to a viewing mountain called Ashigawa under the highway bridge by a precipitous valley with a stream in the entrance to a little deserted shrine. Another idyllic place brimming with nature that appeared out of nowhere.

The next day we drove around four of the five lakes in the pouring rain and mist-clad foothills with Fuji completely obliterated in the cloud cover. The first two smaller lakes were lined with devoted fishermen under umbrellas or in little tents erected over rowing boats, but the latter ones were tourist traps with hideous duck-shaped pedal boats littering the shore lines. The second lake had a cute little discrete love hotel called the Pr()ivate with a love heart in he place of the parentheses. Because of the rain we made it pretty much a rest day just trawling along the lake edges and hanging out in the towns. I got on the wireless internet and set up a fan-fold of google maps to navigate through Tokyo and Yokohama suburbs to return the van and managed to park it up on a side street out of the rain to do a quick paint job on the few scratches we had made in the body work. In Kawaguchi despite being on the fore-front of a tourist town full of plush hotels, we managed to find an easy park we could spend the night right on the foreshore of the lake overlooking the opulence.

Raisiing the shrine screen with scarlet-skirted female priestess
of the fire goddess entering Fuji-yoshida.

Next day took us on to Fujiyoshida, the main hub of the Fuji lakes area, and stumbled upon Sengen jinja, the Shinto shrine at the foot of the main trail up Fuji, just as they were carrying out the morning ceremonies of setting up the shrine and its fertility offerings. The shrine is dedicated to Konohanasakuya-Hime the Goddess of Fire and child bearing, who is propitiated annually in a big fire ceremony on August 26 at the end of the climbing season to ward off Mt. Fuji from erupting. The shrine comes equipped with golden arcs surmounted by phoenixes, carried through the town by the priests, along with a huge red replica of Mt. Fuji amid fire and dancing.

Carrying the fertility offerings

Having driven up Fuji until we became hopelessly submerged in the thick fog, we then drove down to the hub town of Gotemba and to the Hakone area to position ourselves closer to Yokohama for the journey back next day. Hakone is famous for views of Fuji and for the red Tori gate rising up in the lake edge at Hakone jinja. The old post road from Hakone then descended in a string of hairpins to the tourist gateway town to the Fuji area, Yamoto, past some hideous ticky tacky private Buddhist and Shinto temples with gold painted ersatz images, guard dogs and surveillance cameras, and spent the night tucked into the entrance to one of the old post road walking tracks. However Fuji is renowned in Japan as a very shy lady, so although I have seen it in the past, I have resorted to a journalistic foray to snap all the images of Fuji I can find, on tourist town billboards, the internet, on manholes, on pottery and even on kimonos. The result is a virtual tour to the summit and its various shrines and views from almost every vantage point we passed.

Fertility altar at rear of the main shrine

The next day we returned through boisterous traffic on the 255, 246, 409 and local hexagon 2 to Hyoshi, the suburb of Tokyo-Yokohama where we had leased the van. By this time I really felt the I had learned to become a fearless Japanese driver riding the lights in convoy volleys as they all change phase in programmed sequence to let a cohort of traffic move at speed through about a kilometre of intersections at a time the same way they do in New York. Having cleaned out the van at a Lawson Station snack bar outlet because it is one of the few places you can dispose of rubbish, we finally arrived at 1 pm sharp to return the van five weeks after we had leased it for two, having faxed Kashiwa a note in Japanese and English translated by a helpful bank clerk in Tono so he would know we hadn't stolen it. Kashiwa was delighted to see us return with the van and shouted us both a lunch of Japanese noodles at the bar over the road. By evening we had finally made it back to Yoshida House in Tokyo again anonymous and apparently unscathed from the diabolical threats of instant fine or highway infringements which could bust the meagre budget of an impecunious traveller from New Zealand.

Milestones looking lke prehistoric monuments,
old post road Yamoto

We had a well-needed day's rest in Tokyo getting money from the post office ATM and venturing no further than the supermarket. However next day we took the local from Tokyo to Kyoto starting at 9.45 am, because the Shinkansen bullet train which only takes thre odd hours coasts 13,500 yen rather than the meagre Y 7900 on the local. The Lonely Planet suggests it may involve up to four stops and take 8 hours, but things proved a little more complicated than that. The local involves multiple transfers where you come to a halt and wait for another local to take off in the same direction starting from the station you have been dumped off at, possibly shifted platforms with all your luggage. The trouble is that the station you end up at may not have a rapid transport train, which jumps minor stops, departing because it is only a local station, so you can get locked in a series of locals, slowing and complicating the journey. We had to wait for a new train to link onward, at Odawara, Atami, Shibawa, Numazu, Shimada, Hammamatsu, Toyahashi (15 min delay), and then took a local to Gifu (via Nagoya), but waited 12 mins at Okasaki to take a rapid instead to save time, passing Gifu to Ogaki. At Ogaki we then tried to take a limited express to Osaka via Kyoto, but got thrown off the train at Maibara because we hadn't paid a surcharge, where we waited another 20 mins to board a rapid bound for Himeji via Kyoto finally arriving at 7.35 pm, just over 10 hours later, finding we still had about 35 minutes on the local bus to get to Tani House by close to 8.30 pm, where we are now hanging out for 12 days of cultural respite!

Driving for a Song on a Wing and a Prayer in Japan

2007-10-05T12:50:00.000+09:00

World's longest suspension bridge on the toll motor-way

linking Awaiji Island and Shikoku with Honshu

Although Japan is developed few international travelers make it outside the standard tourist destinations. Travelling by vehicle takes you from the cliche of tourism in Jpan's great cultural cities such as Kyoto where there are many tourists to genuine frontier intrepid travel where you will go places where there are few or no foreign tourists, and people are intrigued and curious to meet a gaijin or foreigner.

We traveled very cheaply through rural Japan by managing to make an arrangement with a small Japanese auto firm to informally lease a Kei van - a Mitsubishi "Town Box" for Y2,500 a day on a 35 day lease, only about 40% of the usual rental cost. This was a special gentleman's agreement negotiated by a friend we met in Tokyo, but gives an indication of possibilities if you can speak Japanese.

Bridged highway in the Gorges diving Shikoku.

Fuel added about 1500 on average for about 120 kms of travel a day. Many types of kei van, although very small and having only a 660cc motor, have enough room for two people to lie out comfortably. This proved a god-send because we could travel anywhere, without having to worry about how to find lodging at the soaring Japanese accommodation costs and could spend the night in often idyllic natural settings by the sea or a lake or river, or in the forest. We could also explore remote places inaccessible by public transport and choose where we wanted to go freely as we went.

Highway road sign showing national and local roads in Japanese and English.

Japanese roads are well sign-posted, with all, but the very minor ones, written also in English, but the convoluted numbering system, with national highway shields and local road hexagons as well as numbered toll roads, often multiple numbers for the same road, multiple adjacent roads flagging the same number, arbitrary changes, and the totally inconsistent way a road which starts out sign-posted for one destination will subsequently only give a more minor local one that doesn't appear on the map, and the sheer number of toll ways, expressways, major and minor roads, tortuous local lanes and alleyways connecting in tortuous and unexpected ways makes navigating through the countryside and exercise in extreme navigation.

Steep narrow secondary roads with endless hairpins
and mirrors cover mountainous Japan.

Only a few cities like Kyoto are designed on an open grid pattern. Other places many side turnings may be cul-de-sacs, and a road which looks like its leading one place may snake off and go down a valley with no side roads to compensate even in large cities.

Complex spaghetti toll motor-way interchanges.

Each of these kinds roads has unique and extreme forms of potential jeopardy, which you need to become accustomed to, to get through Japan unscathed.

Highway meets toll motorway in Spaghetti.

Firstly the toll roads cost a small fortune, and you can inadvertently find you have entered one unless you watch the signs very carefully and avoid anything green that doesn't have a shield or hexagon number.

Back roads are narrow winding and often very beautiful.

Frequently major highways interlace under over and around the toll motor-ways, so you have to be careful not to accidentally find you are on a toll road.

Small cameras tracking a red light.

Major highways are bristling with speed, surveillance and red-light cameras of many different shapes and sizes and located in all manner of different deceptive positions. All roads have an excessive number of traffic lights, sometimes with very complex lane signaling. I feared the whole trip that we had incurred hefty instant camera fines, although this proved unfounded at the time we returned the van. All roads have very few easy places to pull in and there are always other cars and big trucks on your tail so you can't easily stop when you are uncertain. Furthermore many roads are very narrow and smaller ones often don't have room for two vehicles to pass.

Mitsubishi Kei Town Box van with large box drain.
Most box drains are narrower but deep, partially obscured and uncovered.

This is made worse by the diabolical deep uncovered box drains running partly obscured along the edge of most roads, posing a death trap for any inattentive driver pulling over, in paradoxical contrast to the safety obsessed Japanese drive to cover all escarpments with concrete spray and wire netting to avoid any risk of falling rocks, so that the idyllic forested landscape begins to look more like a giant toy train set. This is partly why kei vehicles exist, as well as to cater for the fact that most roads, except the toll motor-ways, have a speed limit of 40 or 50 kph.

Road Spiral of tunnels and bridges Northern Honshu.

In fact virtually all vehicles travel at 10 to 20 kph over the limit. Now take into account that, except in remote country areas, most highways are continuous no-passing zones and you can see it can be hard not to run a speed, or red light camera, unless you brake so heavily the vehicles behind are liable to pile into you in a nose to tail. Sometimes the orange phase is so short its almost impossible not to break the law and you have to scan the structures ahead to see if its a camera crossing. Locals know these quirks, but traveling across country requires uncanny foresight.

Multiple convex mirrors, a hairpin
and a sheer drop of hundred of metres.

Smaller roads can be both very narrow vary suddenly in size from two lane highway to a lane which can barely pass a small vehicle. Because Japan is exceedingly hilly and mountainous, major roads are liable to either tunnel and viaduct literally through the landscape and minor roads can become wound in amazing numbers of very tight hairpin bends with precipitous drops, ornamented with convex mirrors at every turn, so you have a reasonable chance of seeing the large truck coming towards you from round the corner if you don't go cross-eyed looking in two places at once on a blind corner.

Mountian roads have sheer edges
often dropping away for hundreds of metres.

More expensive rentals and many Japanese cars have digital navigation systems. We had no navigation and it may not work in isolated areas anyway. We found carrying a compass for direction and using as many map sources as possible essential to keep reasonably on course on minor roads. If you are traveling with a wireless capable laptop you can download series of Google Map or Google Earth blow ups of regions from the environs of many large and small towns by picking up a free wireless connection. This makes it possible to navigate to exact spots in large city regions like Tokyo-Yokohama, although these Japan Google maps are all in Japanese, so we needed an English map as well to make full sense of where we were.

Road with hairpins cut into the hillside in the Alps.

There is no guarantee that a national highway will not be closed, either for the season or for major repairs, so in a couple of cases we were forced to make major diversions having to retrace miles twice over.

Tunnels cutting through the hilly landscape
are universal in all but minor roads.

Sometimes, when we were following a highway, it would suddenly turn into a tiny local road between farming communities and the local hexagon numbers would change nearly every intersection and then cease altogether, so that we had to navigate by compass and back out when the initial direction proved to be entirely deceptive and we found we were winding down an endless valley South West when the initial direction was North East.

The roughest road we traversed was the hexagon 20 in the Minami Alps.

On these smaller roads it is imperative to write down the Kanji for some local destinations before you leave the main highways, because you won't find signs in both Japanese and English on these roads and there are heaps of intersections fanning out all over.

The Enlightenment Circuit and the Spirits of the Dead

2007-09-25T13:33:00.000+09:00

Peerless Coastline and transparent ocean East of Tottori

朝顔に
我は飯食ふ
男かな

asagao ni
ware wa meshi kû
otoko kana

Translations:

I am one
Who eats his breakfast,
Gazing at morning glories.

I am one
Eating my meal
While gazing at the glories of the morning.

Matsuo Bashô
Bashôs rebuke of Kikakus poem about tade and fireflies.

A firefly;
I partake of the smartweed
In my hermitage.

Kikaku (1660-1707)

Tonight we're perched on a little spit by a rocky outcrop with a little shrine on it beside a small fishing village on the island of Awaji just north of Goshiki, having circumnavigated the pilgrim's enlightenment trail of Shikoku even to the wild cape where the spirits of the dead depart in a manner similar to Cape Reinga in Aotearoa. Goshiki has a famous beach lined with pine trees but when we stopped in there were only a few lugubrious places we could park. Here its one of those sanctuaries that pop into the view of the lonely traveler scanning the horizon for a place to lay their heads as they pass, never to return. We pulled in almost by accident, although we always stop at the little shrines with tori gates that adorn little outcrops and islands. There are a few other Japanese camping here, fishing off the breakwater that encloses the village port. There are also clean tiolets and showers and places to wash our clothes almost the first time we have gypsy camped amid a full suite of domestic luxuries and the first night it hasn't beeing sweltering hot and stcky virtually since we arrived. This in itself is a worrying sign amid reports that the North West Passage has opened, that the Arctic ice is disintegrating leading to a runaway affect as white polar shows are replaced by deep blue ocean which absorbs the radiant heat of the sun further exacerbating global warming and the rising oceans.

Anyway back to the subject of this blog and the next section of our travels. Our next day on the North Coast of Honshu proved to be problematic. After leaving the beach hideaway, we followed the coast to the next town, Kasumi and turned inland planning to transit to the south coast. This was unexpectedly complex because the roads out of Kasumi were confusing and criss-crossed. After stopping at a wayside temple adorned with Japanese classical painting we wound our way south, stopping off an a huge and gross Buddhist temple atop a high hill which charged 800 yen, about 10 dollars NZ to view three giant Buddhas.

Ushimado Port

By contrast with Zen temples which are tasteful and integrally natural in their appreciation for trees and the use of gardens as a central expression of spirituality, this had huge buildings and temple guardians three times larger than usual, echoing some of the grosser aspects of Buddhist idolatrous worship we have seen in South East Asia and Tibet. When we tried to continue south however, we found everyone giving us the crossed hands in an X indicating the road was blocked. We thus were forced to drive back north to sample more of the wild coast and along to Tottori where there are famous kilometre wide high sand dunes which became the title and context of the movie "Woman of the Dunes". These were searing hot in the freak September heatwave sunshine and crossing to the highest one was like crossing the Sahara. In fact if you wanted to pay the money you could cross on camel back for a hefty fee.

From Tottori we staged a lightning transit from the North to the South coast of Honshu, running down a major highway until we hit the industrial belt on the plain around Okayama, working by compass and misdirection around its edge to finally arrive in the dark at the extremity lands-end of Ushimado, turning aside from the road in the pitch dark to camp in a vacant lot beside the yachting harbour.

Ushimado shrine with multiple guard coyotes

In the light of morning Ushimado proved to be a pleasing respite from the doldrum wastelands of Industrial Japan, a mix of old time fishing village and rich development, with a harbour on the inland sea, a beach and a bunch of temples and shrines amid some charming old houses. From there we planned our attack on Shikoku, using the internet to pinpoint the entry points to the toll bridge systems that link Shikoku with the 'mainland' of Honshu, then navigating round Okayama and past Tamano to the last IC or tollway junction before the bridge at Kojima.

Second bridge on the Seto-Chuo Expressway connecting Honshu and Shikoku

The bridge to Shikoku was a truly awesome experience, hopping 14 kilometres across the ocean in a string of enormous bridges connecting small rocky islands. The transit went without hitch with Christine videoing while I drove and snapped stills as best I could.

Shikoku is very different from Honshu in several respects. One respect noted in the Lonely Planet is the women, or particularly the women of the Southern city of Kochi, who are called 8-balls, because they are the nemesis doom of the men and strong-minded as a man with 8 balls, partly because they had to both protect the children and keep the family together in times of trouble when the men weren't around.

Henro or enlightenment pilgrim

Another unique feature of Shikoku, which become ever more remarkable as you make the transit, is that Shikoku is continuously circumnavigated by pilgrims, or Henro, of all sorts, following the 1400 km course of 88 temples on a journey of immediate enlightenment which has been ongoing for over 1000 years following the steps of the great Buddhist saint Kobo Daishi - kobo to spread the teachings widely and daishi saint,a also in his lifetime called Kukai 'sky and sea'. Daishi founded the Shingon sect of Buddhism, the only major sect that believes enlightenment can be achieved in the current lifetime and the pilgrimage is a sadhana to achieve it. I see this very favourably as a basic credit rating of any religion to deliver on the realization agenda here and now. Many forms of Buddhism fail to do this and Christianity and Islam pass the whole agenda off to worshipping Christ or seeing the face of al-Llah in heaven which is a literal cop out.

Christine with henro partners walking the road on the South Coast

Our experience of Henro began abruptly when we visited one of the 88 temples and immediately became caught up in a throng of elderly pilgrims who had erupted from a couple of busses to lead us to the temple tucked away up an alley where we had missed it. As we drive to a second temple, we passed several walking on foot wearing the characteristic while cloak, staff, bells, sash and conical hat, some pulling carts with their belongings. The next temple we tried to find, a pilgrim on foot jumped into the van and gave us emphatic instructions ordering us post haste to the major temple before closing time even paying for the car park to get us in in haste. Since then we have met pilgrims in cars, in taxis, on puch bikes and following the Zen art of motorcycling on Kawasakis and even Harley Davidsons, but the most impressive are the countless number who steadfastly walk the journey on foot straddling secluded forest paths and major highways including an 84 kilometre hike between the two most distant temples towards the wild southern Cape Muroto.

Kotohira shrine

From the first few temples, we traveled a few kilometres south to Kotohira a small town where there is a famous Shinto shrine to the Goddess of the Sun on a hill overlooking the town with a thousand steps up to it. There are very few foreign tourists in Shikoku and almost none traveling in Japan in small Kei vans gypsy camping, so its a real form of fringe intrepid travel. Arriving at nightfall we drove up a small side road parking in a vacant space near a house, whose occupants unlike most Japanese people who are very friendly and courteous and greet you courteously with mutual konichiwah's, instead stared at us like alien species and having made a brief attempt to get rid of us by telling us the entire huge space was needed for the one or two cars on this isolated cul-de-sac to do sweeping u-turns went inside and phoned the cops and before we had had a chance to feed ourselves there were a bunch of flashing lights and two car loads of plain clothes detectives and uniformed police politely and apologetically trying to check our passports and when they finally checked with Narita immigration that we were legitimate, asked us to move a metre or two closer to the verge and let our erstwhile neighbours know there was little else they could do, to strident voices of protest from the femme fatale of the piece, who was still peering out at us balefully and furtively at six in the morning as we cheerily honked our good byes as we left.

Parking in Kotohira proved very difficult but we have found in every Japanese town so far that you can always find a free park even under the most tightly regulated conditions by a fractal search for an ambiguous space in a residential street not too far from the place you want to visit. The thousand steps proved pretty grueling in the sweltering conditions and I had to coax Christine up the last few flights but the view for the top was truly awesome reaching all the way to the coast and the bridges we had crossed and sweeping across the cities of the North to the rice fields and hills of the interior. The Shinto priests were performing an intriguing set of rituals as we arrived adding an auspicious presence to the whole process.

Deep Gorge in Central Shikoku

From Kotohira, we travelled south through the centre of Shikoku, traversing a series of quite awesome gorges, with suspension foot bridges over them, replacing the traditional rope and vine bridges that one could cut to escape pursuing enemy. At one point I was photographing rafter shooting th rapids when the whole boat load of 10 or so got thrown into the river.s night fell after some crafty navigating on small roads to bypass the coastal cities, we turned in at a charming beach-side avenue running between the sea and a graveyard, ringing with a scintillating throng of crickets, some very like those in New Zealand, but others sounding almost exactly like small temple bells. This coast is te most exposed in Japan both to tsunamis and to typhoons and the sea has a reputation for veering from mirror calm to tempestuous swells which leave the coastline buffeted high above the water line. The beach was foreboding, a hugely wide stretch of shelving sand, pebbles, stones, sand and pebbles, following the imprint of previous storms, which finally arced up at the low tide mark to a precipitous ledge where you could stand as the shingle dived almost vertically into the deep ocean, with waves breaking right at your feet.

Sunrise on the precipitous shore edge on South Western Coast of Shikoku

The next day we drove south towards the tip of Cape Muroto stopping off at each pilgrimage temple we came to. Some of these are perched in the forest on mountain tops with wildly inaccessible country lanes littered with mirrored hairpin bends, so tight you can barely get a vehicle around them.

View of the South Coast of Shikoku from Konomine-ji Temple near Aki

But everywhere there were more pilgrims, dressed in their distinctive garb, exchanging greetings with us and praying fervently at the altars reciting their enlightenment passages in a manner similar to Tibetan Buddhists, clicking their rosaries and ringing the various temple bells as they pass. The imagery in these temples is different - more immediate and immanent with Buddhas wreathed in the fires of realization, and the images of Kannon, the Goddess of Mercy, carrying baskets of fish, lobsters and clams symbolic of the tortured lifes of fishermen in this treacherous ocean.

Fudo: Guardian spirit of enlightenment reminiscent of Tibetan Buddhism

The Cape itself is the wildest spot in Japan, and said to be the place where the spirits depart for the land of the dead. It is a place of natural beauty with gnarled trees and rock pools intermingling with the thrashing waves and weird rock formations pummeled by the sea. In addition to the departed there is a fertility rock where people have piled up cairns of pebbles, and the cave were Daishi is said to have gained enlightenment as well as a temple perched high on the cliffs above beside the Cape lighthouse. So, all in all, this wild spit represents the whole gamut of life's experiences from death, through fertility to enlightenment, rolled into one natural experience, combining the wildernesses of Cape Reinga and Punakaike of Aotearoa.

Cape Muroto where the spirits depart for the Realm of the Dead

From here we drove North again sidling past some atrocious beaches packed with surfie day trippers in tinted window beach wagons, lined up like sardines in a can, and found our way tortuously from the inland highway towards the coast again onto a tourist road enchantingly entitled the Hiwasa sun line, which wound high above the roacky coast with panoramic views. Turning off this at sunset we wound down a precipitous little side road stopping the night in forest punctuated by the odd small rice terrace. Next morning there was a snake at the first lookout and land crabs scuttling up the steps at the temple at Hiwasa, a town also renowned for its turtle migrations. The temple is reputed to focus on bad luck and the bad luck ages of men and women reputedly 42 for men and 35 for women.

Finally navigating through the concrete jungle of Tokushima and the sphagetti junctions around the toll road we managed to take the shortest links to Awaiji, crossing what is said to be the world's longest suspension bridge, from Naurito-kita to Awaijishima-minami, where we drive up the west coast stopping at this fishing village where we are now inland by a Buddhist temple eating breakfast.

Amaterasu the Goddess of the Sun

2007-09-20T07:04:00.000+09:00

Shinto Priests blessing the citizens Kakunodate

荒海や
佐渡によこたふ
天河

ura umi ya
sado ni yokotau
ama no gawa

Turbulent the sea—
across to Sado stretches
the Milky Way

From Oku no Hosomichi. Exiles were once sent to Sado.
Matsuo Bashô (松尾芭蕉)

We stayed a couple of extra days in Kakunodate to watch the Hikayama Matsuri festival which is enacted in the Autumn to pray for peaceful times suggestive of a safety valve to moderate their conflict-prone samurai past. The only crisis was being awoken at 1 am by a policeman who demanded our passports, drivers licences and the papers for the van which is not officially a rental vehicle, but who in the end took off without hitch. The town is famous because it still retains a tree-lined section of samurai houses, large black traditional Japanese houses with mossy gardens set in a polarity to the merchant neighbourhood to the south.

Video of Hikayama Matsuri

Festival float Kakunodate

The floats are 7 ton wooden carts, which boast warlike fantasy play samurai figures on the front, pulled by two teams of strong men (and a few women) assisted by older men and children as young as 2 or 3, egged on by a whistle-blowing cheer leader.

Each cart also has two teams of young girls in kimonos, on the front, who perform dances with fans and shawls, and inside each is a troupe of musicians with drums, flutes and Japanese lutes. The carts are pulled through a complex route around town with shouts of gusto and a great deal of heaving every time the float has to make a change of direction. The first evening all the floats were dragged to the major Shinto shrine Shinmeysa, where each team performed their songs and dances and ascended the steps to be blessed by the Shinto priests.

The next morning the priests did a round of the town in a parade of mobile shrines shaking paper fronds over each property and receiving offerings of prayers written on paper or fruit and other foods, after which all the floats began a morning and evening parade stopping at certain places where there were judges and other respected members of the populace where they would again dance and sing and receive blessings.

The whole performance gave a fascinating insight into the way Japanese culture preserves a staunch image of itself and retains a sense of national and local identity through both cultural tradition and the role Shinto plays as a founding religion of culture. I'll come back to this again when we come to some later experiences.

Wedded rocks - South of Atsumi

On the second morning after the parade, we headed to the West Coast to find a tempestuous and desolate wind-swept series of beaches, although less tsunami ridden, filled with concrete tetrahedra to reduce the pounding of the surf and make the coastline more accessible to fishing boats. Towards nightfall, we wound up to a high coastal volcano Mt. Chokai, shrouded on cloud and rain and stopped the night in a forest clearing, plagued by mosquitoes. In the morning we drove up to the little alpine town overlooking the summit crater, with panoramic views of the coast, and a hideously deep crater valley.

Pilgrims at Haguro San

We then looped back to the sea and a couple of fishing villages with classic little rocky island shrines connected together by ropes. Just as with Futami at Ise-Shima, in the bay there are two rocks sitting side-by-side, one large, one smaller, known as Meoto-iwa (the Wedded Rocks). Two rocks are tied together by shimenawa, ceremonial rope that is made of entwined and twisted rice straw and is used to mark off sacred or purified areas.

The small fishing towns broke the sandy monotony, before heading south inland to Yuza and Matsuyama Tachikawa to Haguro San, a mountain Shinto shrine which the pilgrims climb, led by a Yamabushi of the Shugendo sect in checked pantaloons and blowing a conch-shell. It is a sacred mountain with thousands of steps leading steeply up from a waterfall shrouded valley stream to a misty tree clad summit, with a string of high-Shinto shrines and an extraordinary children's graveyard clad in all manner of clothing , eyeglasses and barbie dolls.

This sect, which combines Shinto and Buddhism, has been recognized as distinct ever since Shinto was officially separated from Buddhism in the 19th centruy, an action that was probably associated with the rise of imperial Japan and Shinto as the official religion of the emperor, whose family strangely traces its origins to Amaterasu the Goddess of the Sun. Shinto is a pantheistic native religion in which all things are deemed to possess spirit or consciousness, especially natural phenomena, such as trees, water falls, hills, islands and sacred spaces of any kind. Shinto combines creatively with Buddhism in the Japanese psyche to invoke a polarity in which Shinto is the religion of life celebrated at weddings and Buddhism is the religion of mortality lamented at funerals. Unlike Shinto, which is consistent with the warrior samurai stance, Buddhism exhorts moral behavior. Personally, apart from the association with imperial militarism, I like Shinto a lot and see it as part of a groundswell of indigenous spirituality far more genuine than an absolute form of religion from apocalyptic Islam and Christianity which are hollow shells of delusion even to Buddhism which is tainted also with absolutes. The test of religion to me is the mark it leaves on nature, and in this respect both Zen Buddhism and Shinto rank very highly and Islam as a scorched earth desert religion of submission very lowly.

Island Shrine with Sacred Bridge

We then drove on to Tsuroka and the quiet Zenpo temple on a hillside by the coast, staying the night on the coast at Atsumi, south of Tsuroka near some deserted beach houses on a sea wall beside a tsunami warning sign. All along the coast, at 6 am and 6pm loudspeakers relay warnings accompanied by a jaunty tune like Bolero. Next day we stopped at some small fishing villages with island shrines connected by bridges to the mainland.

From Murakami we went inland and again got lost in the rain, taking a small valley road into the mountains to Mikawa looping back to the coastal valley and doing some expert navigating with the compass on back country roads to pass Tochio to the little town of Sumon, sleeping on an old section of road overlooking rice paddies and forest through the mist.

Matsumoto Castle

In the morning, we drove on south to Nagano where we saw the imposing Zenkoji temple, then ascending a steep mountain road with another spiral viaduct and tunnel system to Togakushi where there are a series of Shinto hill shrines. We stayed the night in the wooded entrance to a pilgrimage track back to Zenpo and in the morning walked in the misty rain to the uppermost shrine, a mile-long walk uphill to the base of a sheer escarpment where the shrine stood beside a tumbling stream.

The next day we drove on to Matsumoto down a long winding valley, where there is a classic samurai castle in original condition, just having time to see it and a couple of heritage buildings looking like they had popped out of somewhere like Brazil before driving out of Matsumoto to sleep in a winding valley below one of an endless stream of hydro-dams that litter the steep forested landscape of Japan.

'Matterhorn' of Japan 3100m

The next day we drove over the Japanese Alps in peerless brilliant sunshine on tiny precipitous hairpin bend ridden secondary roads past Kamikochi and the skyline pike - a mad Japanese tourist route you can travel only on buses to avoid pollution, gaining clear but distant views of Japan's 'Matterhorn', a stark piece of 3100 metre high rock and down again to Takayama, which is a classic Japanese town with a beautiful old quarter full of temples shrines and old wooden houses.

Traditional buildings Takayama

After a lot of deliberation in various car parks on the edge of the old temple quarter,and dinner in the castle park, we decided to go and sleep at the cemetery by the crematorium. The night was full of rain and the morning misty and drizzly and as we took off back to the castle park to have breakfast, there was a strange pinging sound from the wind screen wipers. Whe I got to the park I realized the unusual sized lens hood for the camera, which I had trawled Auckland second hand shops to find, was missing and realized I had left it on the front windscreen. After driving back to the graveyard and then to each of the parking lots, Christine suddenly saw it on the road, severely dented but rescuable.

We spent the morning exploring the old commercial houses of Takayama, which is a tourist haven similar to Lijiang in China and then headed for Furukawa another old town with old white-walled saki-brewing and trading houses set on a canal, where there were little 'shrines' set up with fish food for the visitors to hideously overfeed the large Koi carp in the stream.

Second pass in the 'alps' overlooking a range of 2700m tree-clad Mountains

From Furikawa, we passed again up a back road over the Alps stopping the night in the forest by a glade near the road hoping to avoid being ransacked by bears despite the warning signs. Next day before we had gone a kilometre or two, we arrived on the fringes of Shirikawa-go at Ogimachi a delightful town full of period A-frame thatched traditional farm houses converted into expensive restaurants and hotels, where a single cup of coffee cost as much as a meal. From there, we drove on through several touristic versions of these farming villages, which were moved in the 1960s to make way for a large hydro-electric dam, stopping at the best, Ainokura. While photographing I fell over backwards slipping on the trench of a rice paddy and stabbed my hand into the ground, spraining my wrist and totally dislocating my middle finger at the tip, so that it pointed hideously back at right angles. After taking one careful look at it, I grabbed it and forcefully pulled it out and snapped it back into place. For about an hour it seemed miraculously unaffected but as the day wore on it filled with blood and became bruised all over, nevertheless back into a functional condition.

Ogumachi Town with thatched farm houses

We then drove on to Kanazawa where I have a neuroscientist friend Danko from Bulgaria, who very kindly put us up for two nights in his tiny but very comfortable airc-onditioned apartment. We arrived in the middle of a late summer heat wave with the road-side thermometers registering 36 centigrade, which even at night is suffocating in the van when you have to keep the windows almost closed with two people inside to avoid encephalitis mosquitoes and the ands of imaginary thieves in the night.

Dinner with Danko in a Japanese self-cook restaurant

The day we spent in Kanazawa we made a tour of the temple area, having already on the first day wandered the Samurai and Geisha districts. Danko and traveled down the coat stopping at the family clan temple Jisshon Temple Daisnoji clan at Kaga,looking at the rock formations at Mikuni, sleeping the night at the Echizen coastal carpark with tsunami warning systems using loud speakers to give the time as they have in may other places, even inland.

Fishing houses at Ine

We then drove on down the wild coast, bypassing Tsurugu and took the coastal rainbow line from Mikata negotiating a hideous clogged industrial stretch from Obaba to Maizuru, then turning north up the coast to stop briefly beyond Maizuru at Amanohashadate, a pine-lined sandspit overrated as one fo the three sites of Japan. At even we pressed on to Ine where we found an idyllic spot right on the wharves along with three other groups of gypsy van campers fisihing and sleeping off the wharves. Ine is unique as a Japanes cultural enclave consisting of unique houses in a sheltered bay in which the ground floor is a boat shed they can drive into at high tide and the top storey is for sleeping.

North Coast

Yesterday we traveled on along the coast in idyllic wild craggy scenery, becoming completely stranded when the coast road we took and even the main highway proved to be closed forcing us to make a convoluted detour on back roads over high hill country, including one of Honshu's few pasture cattle farms, before returning to the coast. A driver we stopped to ask how to get through drove for about 10 kms to help us get on to the appropriate back road detour, something Japan is renowned for. At Kumihama we routed the lake to the North and took a back road back to some of the wildest and most precipitous coast we have seen so far, with weeping views of the rocky cliffs scintillating azure and foam white in the sunshine, finally stopping just short of Kasumi on a beach beside a small seaside town.

Legends of Tono and Tales of Two Lakes

2007-09-07T11:08:00.000+09:00

Samurai Hikayama Matsuri festival Kakunodate

いろはにほへと ちりぬるを わかよたれそ つねならむ うゐのおくやま けふこえて あさきゆめみし ゑひもせす
i ro ha ni ho he to chi ri nu ru wo wa ka yo ta re so tsu ne na ra mu u wi no o ku ya ma ke fu ko e te a sa ki yu me mi shi we hi mo se su
Though fragrant are the colors, Yet shall the flowers scatter. Who in our world Could forever endure? Over the mountain of transcendence Let us today cross, And there will be no more shallow dreams, No more drunken illusions.
Kûkai (空海)

I have added to the photos in the Northern Honshu set so there are now over 50:
North Honshu

Before turning to Tono, let me complete the talk of Hiraizumi and its golden relics with Basho's story of Yoshitune, the warrior who precipitated the downfall of the Fujiwara clan of Haraizumi, whose golden relics we saw there unearthed at the temple. It is a story that sets the stage for all samurai movies. Yoshitune left Hiraizumi to fight with his half brother, Yoritomo the great warlord who founded the first shogunate. However Yoritomo became both worried by the power of the Fujiwaras and jealous of Yoshitune's skill and fame, and the stage was set for a classic betrayal when Yoshitune returned to Hiraizumi. Seeing no escape Yoshitune killed his family, set his castle on fire and disemboweled himself and his retainer was stuck with a porcupine of arrows defending his master. Yoritomo then ordered the Fujiwaras to be wiped out and the temple at Hiraizumi to be destroyed, where the buried relics remained until they were unearthed. Legend says the real warriors were not killed but fled to Mongolia leaving their doubles to suffer in their stead.

The legend of the girl who became Oshira-sama

Three nights ago we arrived in Tono, a small inland town the subject of the exotic animist "Legends of Tono" by the early 20th century writer Kunio Yanagita, including shape shifting foxes, dumb impish water spirits who like to Sumo wrestle passers by and pull their intestines out their anus and a famous story of a farm girl who married her horse and when her father hung it in a tree and decapitated it, it flew with it into heaven to become Oshira-sama the goddess of fertility, still used in the form of dolls by blind crones to contact the dead during Northern Osore-zan Taisai festivals.

After driving through town fruitlessly trying to find the library where there is supposed to be free internet, we ended up at a bizarre supermarket built like an opera house with a huge fountain-like structure crowning its roof. In the process I found there was a free wireless internet service in the carpark. I've heard these stories of people who trawl round neighbourhoods and parasitize unwary people using wireless modems but its impossible to tell what the real source of these 'free' services is.

Afterwards Christine noticed that there was a shrine on a hill on the south west edge of town and we drove up to find a place to secrete ourselves and found the whole forested hillside running with small isolated roadways, and parked the night in the forest beside the shrine's graveyard, just up the hill from a delightful public toilet, in a scintillating and fragrant condition of perfection, so clean that I found myself backing out wiping the floor with spare toilet paper as I left!

Gohyaku-rakan

In the morning we found the site of the 500 17th century buddhas carved on rocks at Gohyaku-rakan above the town in a mossy valley with a stream running through. They were almost unrecognisable when you arrive, but as you look further they are all around you.

We then went out to a 'model village' Denshoen, where they have some traditional thatched farm houses set up as a folk museum. All over Japan farm houses have adobe or brick grain storage houses, and this one had been set up as a shrine to Oshira-sama for women who wanted to get pregnant to write messages on doll's shawls and post them on little totems with the heads of all kinds of animals and people, so that there were literally thousands of these Oshira-sama dolls.

Nearby is the Joken-ji temple where the Kappa-buchi sprites were said to have put out a temple fire so that a lion statue was erected in their honour. Behind it was the Kappa-buchi pool where women who offer breast like offerings are reassured of a plentiful milk supply. When we were there a man was persuading people to fish in the poll with cucumbers which made the Japanese laugh with hilarious laughter.

Takko Hime

From Tono we moved further North West yesterday to Tazawa-ko, the deepest lake in Japan. It is also surrounded in a sexual legend, similar to the Maori story of Taranaki, Ruapehu who both loved the delightful Pihanga but fought until they now stand separated as volcanoes. In the tale of the beautiful Takko Hime and her husband Hachirotaro she drank too much water and became a water dragon. Her husband ate a fish which also made him suffer the same fate. The fury of their transformation from human to animal created twin lakes Tazawa and Towada and the passion of their love making still prevents the lakes from freezing over in winter. Surrounding the lake are several statues of Hime, from staunch Buddhist Kannon figure, through a mermaid with a serpent's tail to a golden Pania like goddess on the shore.

Yesterday we made it to Kakunodate where there is a whole street of samurai houses and the festival is about to begin. Last night we again slept in the forest above the town and managed finally for 100 yen to get a piece of fabric which functions as a mosquito net to put over the windows, which made the van stiflingly hot but did the trick to avoid Japanese encephalitis (actually a disease of all South Asia which we never worried about in India where there was an epidemic as we passed through Gorakhapur).

The weather is threatening a typhoon so we are parking up for a day at the beginning of a major festival here; Hikayama Matsuri full of colourful chariots of the samurai being dragged through the streets and folk song and dancing.

Drifiting with the wind in North Honshu

2007-09-04T16:34:00.001+09:00

Eight sided pagoda with double helix spiral stairs Aizuwakmatsu

静けさや
岩に滲み入る
蝉の声

Shizukesaya
Iwa ni shimiiru
Semi no koe

Translations:

This pervasive silence
Enhanced yet by cicadas simmering
Into the Temple Rocks dissipating

Ah, tranquility!
Penetrating the very rock,
a cicada's voice

How still it is here—
Stinging into the stones,
The locust's trill

Here is the 20 image slide set for North Honshu:
North Honshu

We have been weaving our way up and across Honshu avoiding the big cities and taking the small winding roads that go through forests, by lakes and ravines and visiting the small hill top shrines we find by the way side. We have set no agenda and have to take into account the fact that speeds of these roads even in the country except on the hideous expressways are either 40 km/hr or 50 km/hr and our little "Town Box" really only does 80 kph at a stretch, so we have repeatedly changed our plans as each day passes.

We always find a secluded spot generally chirping with insects or the lapping of waves. The recipe is to aim for the fringes, either a lake edge or the forest or a region on the edge of a farming region where we turn off a road to find a cul-de-sac with the turn off that leads to a kind of no man's land. This gives a private place to sleep do our washing and cook the evening meal. We have learned that Japan is full of 7-11's which provide excellent toilet facilities - complete with warmed seats and warm water spray nozzles which leave the Japanese residents backsides as clean as a whistle.

Each place we come to we try to extract the local culture as much as can be done without paying hugely, although when the venue is really good we pay the full price and witness the treasures on offer.

At Aizuwakamatsu we visited the reconstructed castle with only a remaining tea ceremony house that was destroyed when the city unsuccessfully backed the Tokugawas during the Meiji restoration when the 20 young samurai disemboweled themselves when they saw the rice fields burning around the town below the mountain on which they stood. Afterwards we went up the mountain with its eight-sided pagoda with twin spiral stairways up and down like a DNA double helix. Mussolini put up a statue of his eagle on the hill and he and the White Tigers share a memorial in an ironic bow to doomed ventures

In the evening we went on to Siobawa near Kitakata, where we stayed the night in a by-way park with a panoramic view in the morning of the local mountain, a volcano which had split in two last century. Kitakata had a number of old storage houses.

In the morning we went on to Yonezawa, where we saw the Uesgi clan shrine and had lunch at the clan mausolems.

Kameokamonju

We then drove on to Takahata where there was a neat temple temple on the hillside - Kameokamonju, one of the first of the many rustic hilltop Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines or jinja's we have visitied and in the town itself, a three story pagoda and thatched burial chambers. Then we took the back road to Kaminoyama and went up Zao San (mountain) and stayed the might at Zao Onsen where there are hot Japanese baths and, in the winter, ski fields.

Reggae concert

In the morning we went to a reggae concert ( tepees and dancing in the mud) after meeting two girls from NZ and Australia.

We then went on to Yamadera, a famous shrine site east of Yamagata, where we climbed to the top shrine through the forest. People were as usual wafting incense on themselves, clapping twice by the altar and rubbing the buddhas for good luck. There were a variety of shrines and temples as we wound up the forested stairways and caves and grottoes, with cliff carvings.

All the while on the way there was a massive meet of big motor bike riders with lots of very fancy tricycles and side cars with trailers. All very sedate by comparison with the fleets of little Kawasakis we would later see in Kyoto and other places, who rode through town madly farting their exhausts in unison to play a miliatary tune, like the trumpet voluntary.

Yamadera

We then tried to drive north and then east to the coast, but got completely lost at Obanizawa trying to cross east and ended up staying the night at Kirikoma in a by way near some isolated farms.

This morning, we drove through Ichioneseki to Hiraizumi where we went to the Chuzonji temple on the hill with a treasury containing fabulous 13th century gold sutras and buddhas and a gold pagoda full of golden buddhas, which had been buried when the clan chief of the Fujiwara was killed along with his family.

Chuzon-ji treasure shrine

Afterwards we went briefly to Geibeki gorge, which was a rip off where you have to pay a small fortune to enter it in a row boat while the boatmen sing traditional Japanese songs which echo from the cliffs, and then over the mountains down a somewhat fantastic engineering piece consisting of a spiral of viaducts and tunnels leading out to the East Coast at Rikuzen-takata.

Sleeping pozzy on the shore at Rikuzen-takata

Today we wound up the precipitous rocky forested east coast visiting the isolated fishing ports and small towns in brilliant sunshine before becoming discouraged from going further north by the main highway which stayed away from the coast and bored most of the way in deep tunnels.

We are currently at Tono, a small town which is the subject of a series of literary fables, working our way back towards the west via Samurai houses and more forests and temples.

To Nikko and beyond

2007-08-31T15:52:00.000+09:00

Kawagoe

桂男
すまずなりけり
雨の月

Katsura-otoko
sumazu nari keri
ame no tsuki

The man in the moon
Has become homeless;
Rain clouded night

Matsuo Bashô (松尾芭蕉) ripped the first two lines from the Tale of Ise.
Sumazu is a kakekotoba meaning either homeless or unclear.

We've managed to pick up another free wireless internet connection, so here's another slide set of some of our pics of Kawagoe, Nikko and the road north to Aizuwakamatsu:
Nikko slide set

Nikko Rinoji Shrine

We set off from our little canal bridge in Kawagoe and drove into town to photograph the old merchant houses. The journey took all day winding through soulless small towns on the fringes of Tokyo valley. Finally we entered the gorge that leads up to Nikko and about mid afternoon we arrived at Nikko in the pouring rain. This misty atmosphere added a sense of mystery to the shrines of Nikko. These are the most beautifully ornate in all of Japan. They include a Buddhist temple Rinoji and the shrine to Tokugawa, the warlord who until the Meiji restoration conquered and unified Japan. This happened at considerable cost to his family as to preserve his strategic supremacy he found it expedient to have his wife and eldest son executed.

Having explored about half the shrines we set of up a winding hairpin road to lake Chuzenji-ko in pea soup fog exacerbated by us not realizing the air con was off and the windscreen was almost totally opaque, which made navigating the tunnels a nightmare.

Driving around the lake edge we found a secluded tree-covered entrance to a disused walking track and camped the night by the lake in the pouring rain. Next day we visited the Tokugawa shrine and after a cooked lunch in our camper - a Mitsubishi "Town Box" kei van spacious for two with only 4400 kms on the clock, we took off north again for Aizu Wakamatsu. This took a lot of navigating twisting in and out of side roads to avoid the very pricy toll road that led to a local spa. The road wound up a precipitous valley with small towns perched on the cliffs falling into the ravine on either side, punctuated by strings of hydro dams which left the green wilderness somewhat devastated in places.

Aizu-wakamatsu Castle

Finally, as we neared Aizu Wakamatsu there were richer valleys with rice fields and stylish traditional farm houses. In the evening we drove up to another lake and stayed the night in a side entrance to avoid the $50 NZ (Y4500) fees for a simple no frills camp site.

Today we went to the reconsructed castle and 17th century tea house and walked up the mountain where 20 young white tiger samurai bar one disemboweled themselves when they saw the rice fields burning below when the town backed the Tokugawas in the face of the successful Meiji restoration.

We're now off further north in the spirit of Bashō, who is famous for making the Haiku into a Satori, although rumours are rife that he was actually a Ninja agent of the government, reporting on any disaffection in the provinces. Anyway, his most famous work was "The Narrow Road to the Far North" an account of his travels through Tohoku in 1689.

Translations of Bashō's Haikai-no-Renga
Comparison of translations by R. H. Blyth, Lucien Stryck, and Peter Beilenson of several Bashō haiku.
Classical Japanese Database

Lake Inawashiro

It's very hard to understand the free wireless internet with unlimited bandwidth as a cell phone costs the earth even for a local call. Japanese cell phone coverage is incompatibile with all gsm frequencies, and our loaned Japanese prepay costs Y1000 for about 10 minutes with a 20 day time limit.

Out of Tokyo into Kawagoe

2007-08-28T21:18:00.000+09:00

Christine feeding fish at our Kawagoe sleeping place

This is completely insane! I am sitting in the night by a canal outside Kawagoe North of Tokyo watching the lunar eclipse beside our little Mitsubishi Kei van. On the spur of the moment I decided to try to log onto the wireless internet. The computer very politely told me my trusted service I had linked onto by chance in Tokyo was inoperative, but asked me if I would like to join the free service called "milky" and at the press of a button I was back on the net in the wilderness and able to blog and receive all my e-mails.

One of the things you learn from traveling is that it isn't just the inexpensiveness of the funkiest guest house that is an advantage but also the irreplaceable advice and help you get from the people you meet there. I had struck up a conversation with a European guy who is a long term Japanese resident and he had managed to get a much better gentleman's deal from a auto mechanic firm about six years ago and spoke Japanese, so he phoned up and found the 70 year old proprietor was still there and after a spirited conversation at the pay phone down at the "Family Mart", we were engaged on a long term informal lease for only about half the daily costs from a brand name rental firm.

Christine with Kashiwa San at Hiyoshi

This swept away all thought of simply going down to Nippon Rentals in Oizumi Gakuen and hiring the Kei van we had arranged by e-mail from New Zealand for Y5400 a day, which itself was far below the Y9500 they would have charged for a town ace. However it involved a rather complicated train journey half way to Yokohama and one of those extraordinary meetings, standing beside a silver sphere at the Hiyoshi station waiting for a man to appear who spoke only Japanese. In the event we have a gentleman's agreement with no contract except for a down payment of Y37,500 for the first 15 days and headed off into the magnificently complex roadways of peripheral Tokyo. Our friend even pulled a Japanese prepaid mobile out of a box which he had a duplicate of and we also have a phone for emergencies if we can decipher the Japanese menus!

We spent the rest of the day crawling round Tokyo at abut 15 km per hour, stopping to pick up a Japanese mattress and food to cook for the night on our meths stove, managing to reach Kawagoe on the northern tip of greater Tokyo at about 8 at night, and suddenly discovered this street filled with old Japanese merchant's houses and ducked into a side alley where we found this road to nowhere and are now parked on a bridge over a canal for the night. Tomorrow we will be able to set off into the countryside and Nikko where there are famous shrines in the mountains.

Tokyo One

2007-08-27T12:54:00.000+09:00

Senso-ji Temple Asakusa Tokyo

So we can have lots of images, this time around the slide shows are on flickr while the blog is on blogspot. This means we have essentially unlimited free image space and a quick flexible blogging facility.

For the 30 image slide show of this blog go to Flickr: Tokyo 1 Slideshow

We arrived at Narita airport after a 12 hour flight starting at 5.30 am and arriving at 4.45 pm local time (7.45 pm to us NZ time) to find it very hot and humid. We whisked through customs and immigration and figured out the cheapest way to get to our funky guest house Yoshida House way out the other side of Tokyo at was to take three trains. Firstly we took a Keisei limited express (the slowest and cheapest at Y1000) to Nippori interchanged to the JR Yamanote inner circle running to Ikebukuro where there was another crazy interchange, this time with no English titles to tell what we should do.

The ticket machine in Japanese with the hole in the wall

After bashing our heads against a brick wall trying to figure out the money machines, we noticed a red button with a little sign in English saying "Help" and pressed it. Almost immediately a head peered out through a little trap door and waved at the machine to put money in for two and press 230 which we did. Then there was the uncertain question whether this train would stop at Oizumi Gakuen, the little surburban stop where Yoshida was located.

When we arrived we found the little neighborhood didn't resemble anything the internet map said. But a kind young woman led us a block towards our destination, which began to make sense except the 7-11 was in the wrong place. Then another kind friendly Japanese man told us there were several 7-11s and sent us further towards our destination in the dark residential streets. Finall I began to explore up alleyways and finally stumbled on Yoshida House in the dark almost unable to be seen because it is so heavily covered in vegetation!

Yoshida House

This is a truly far out watering hole, frequented by long-term expatriates, which we discovered on the internet when our Japan Lonely Planet had only uncharacteristic upper class accommodation. We have a double bunk room for only Y3500 a night for both of us which is well under Tokyo rates. We get free air con, free internet and a kitchen we can use to cook for free. A washing machine we can pay for and the wonder of wonders, I tried out wireless on my laptop and have free international coverage from somewhere - goodness knows where, so using my computer is virtually as if I was sitting in the house at home.

Cos-Play Girls at Senso-ji

Yesterday we struggled back out through the metro and went to the Sensoji Temple in Asakusa. This takes three metro rides adding to Y580 each each way. If you want a comparison $1US is about Y116. The temple was full of Japanese tourists and also a very colourful throng of cos-play zoku girls or costume play gangs who are largely teenage girls and their boy friends from the suburaban gulags acting out their disphoria and love of visual pop groups creatively by donning rebellious suggestive costumes and wigs.

We ate noodles and walked miles through Ueno park to the Yanaka cemetry which was desolate and refreshingly wild. We descended through the railroad tracks to Nippori and struggled back totally overheated to our funky island of quiet sanity at Yoshida House.

We have managed to arrange a rental Kei van - a 660cc box van designed for confined Japanese conditions - a Daihatsu Hijet to pick up tomorrow, which is only about half the cost of a town ace or other small van we could use as a spontaneous camper. We plan to drive this into the mountains and north to Hokkaido. But there is an acquaintance here at Yoshida House who knows how to contact a firm that hires out vehicles destined for export because their insurance and warranty is a month short of expiry who may be able to get us a deal for only a fraction of the rental cost. This is part of the advantage of finding the funkiest place to stay in Tokyo, but we have to wait until tomorrow morning to see if this is a realizable option because the 70 year old proprietor is away today!

All the services here are very pricey and things like fruit are very expensive and of ridiculously flawless quality. I saw an apple for $4 the size of a small pumpkin and grapes that look like they were stage set models. However technological stuff and imported Chinese textiles are competitively cheap. There is almost no such thing as bread and butter and cheese although we have found how to find a Supermarket which has some small stocks.