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Ten Days in Japan -- Part 4

10/29/2014

The Experiences of Some American Tanuki in Japan

Leaving the warm rain, dew, mists, and occasional sheets of watery transparent sunshine in Kii-Katsuura, we took the tourist bus to Kumano Nachi Taisha. Nachi is one of the three Kumano Sanzan shrines.

http://www.tb-kumano.jp/en/world-heritage/kumano_sanzan/

All three shrines are World Heritage Sites but that isn’t what makes them special. These sites are obviously sacred, and have been so longer than anyone is prepared to admit. What they enshrine are mysteries no one can explain, except to say the walls have worn rather thin between our various worlds and a number of other worlds, parallel realities and divine things. We could repeat beliefs and stories about the powers of creation, the descent of the spirit into the flesh, purity, impurity, redemption, or even the first arrival of the ancient gods on this earth. We could even speculate about the secret power of toads to return to us some of the important treasures we have lost in our lives. But I don’t actually know the secrets.

Photograph by Alexander Mawyer

The Nachi temple complex has been climbing a mountain for many centuries and people have faithfully climbed up the mountain after it.

If the sacredness of a temple is proportionate to the number of staircases that must be climbed to reach it, then the Nachi Shrines are high holiness. It is a very long way up.

Photograph by Gary Mawyer

Along the lower flights of stairs there are lots of convenient landings and shops to break the climb but about halfway up the stairs break free of the lower structures and become monumental. We lost count of the number of discrete flights.

Photograph by Alexander Mawyer

Photograph by Gary Mawyer

They say the original god worshipped here was the waterfall itself, and the first temple was at the base of the falls. The current shrines have surmounted the shoulder of a mountain and include a spectacular pagoda.

Photograph by Gary Mawyer

Photograph by Alexander Mawyer

We have had a modest painting on silk of this scene around the house for years; it has hung variously in bedrooms, living rooms and stairwells and we always wondered if it represented a real place or was an imagined scene. It turns out to be real and a lot less minimalistic.

Photograph by Gary Mawyer

There is a more intimate degree of astonishment at the finer details.

Photograph by Gary Mawyer

It’s in the nature of the grand shrines to sell things. Exchanging goods is a basic human activity and all the needs and choices served by the temple shops bring religion vividly into this life. Amulets, fortunes, charms and divinations, memorial candles and incense and a variety of other prayer items, as well as souvenirs, are displayed for sale by acolytes and shrine maidens. Buddhist and Shinto sects built their temples side by side here, and the charms and prayer items come in two flavors. The more pragmatic believer might opt to patronize both, like the old Shoguns did, to cover both this world and the next. The agnostic has that many more bets to hedge and a vaster than usual range of skepticism to exercise, while the true atheist finally comes into his own with a practically limitless array of things to disbelieve in. It is hard to imagine anyone going away unhappy, or empty handed either.

Photograph by Gary Mawyer

Most stirring to me, though, was an ancient opening in the woods, reached by what might have been the oldest flight of stone steps on the property: the Kumano Kodo, or Kumano Incense Path. We would see this again farther north and get to walk some of it.

Photograph by Alexander Mawyer

Photograph by Gary Mawyer

Then we took the bus back to Katsuura, changed to the Shingu bus line, got off the bus in Shingu and waited in the shade on a wooden bench outside the bus station, drinking odd cold beverages from vending machines until the bus to Yunomine Onsen rolled up.

Photograph by Gary Mawyer

Cattycorners from the bus station we saw a very nice temple with roof tiles a tantalizing shade of rusty orange. On the way out of Shingu we saw the grounds of the newest of the three Kumano Sanzan shrines, Kumano Hayatama Taisha, only a millennium old.

In retrospect we were moving too fast. We could have stayed in Shingu and relished this shrine too. We also knew full well how badly we needed a laundromat and two spare hours to use it. Considering the quiet of the bus station, the restful chirrup of the cicadas, the idle pop of carbonated mystery sodas (because you never knew what you would get), and the occasional small child gawking at the huge foreigners from a safe distance, time did not seem to be moving at all. Time seemed to have stopped on an August afternoon in Shingu, but we should have known we were floating bubbles racing past, glimpsing an hour or so of eternity, remembering it as the silken pages of a book of dreams, and we never did get to the laundromat.

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Ten Days in Japan -- Part 3

10/15/2014

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Kii-Katsuura

After praying to Schrödinger’s cat in Nikko, a thing that could happen to any reasonably religious person, and then being stunned by a downpour at Lake Chuzenji among other adventures, we left Nikko very early in the morning to return to Tokyo. At Tokyo we changed to the shinkansen to Osaka. Our carriage was shamelessly luxurious. Who treats mere passengers like this? We relaxed and enjoyed a swift, smooth ground-rocket ride to Osaka.

A hot towel on the train. Photo by Alexander Mawyer

This was the route suggested by the JR Rail information desk in Tokyo. A JR local line runs from Osaka down the west side of the Kii Peninsula. A private rail line runs from Nagoya down the east side of the peninsula. Apparently, “How do you get to Kii-Katsuura?” was not the easiest question we could have asked. Ultimately three people, including a supervisor, consulted with us on this vexed question. “Very few tourists go there,” one said. “It’s a specialist trip.”

We would be told again, days later, that “Nobody goes to Wakayama.” This is only generally true. Obviously some people go, but mainly the people going to Wakayama are those who live there. It’s not crowded.

One reads in many travel books that the scenery from Tokyo to Osaka is too industrialized or suburban, or too developed or too bland, or strung with excess wires, or otherwise not interesting. I have to disagree. To someone from the east coast of the US, this landscape seemed quite an improvement. The train zoomed past the settings of countless slice-of-life anime series. Japan is a terrain of enclaves that look sometimes almost Tolkienish. Then suddenly we were at the station in Osaka.

Osaka’s huge terminal was loud and bright and full of food. Compared to Tokyo Station it was like a carnival. The temptation to stop and celebrate life was quite strong. It was strange to see so many smiling people in transit with so little anxiety. Maybe Osaka is why nobody goes to Wakayama. But we had our own chosen travel plans and so off we went to catch our rural dead-end line to the Kii Peninsula.

Photo by Gary Mawyer

Kii would have been a great train ride too if the train hadn’t broken down. We noticed with great interest how few people were on this train, how its circa-1970 carriages were the oldest railroad equipment we had yet seen, and by the time the train limped into Kii-Tanabe we noticed that the afternoon was wearing on and the train needed a different engine. Around the time we should have reached our destination, the broken locomotive finally pulled up short in Shirahama and the remaining passengers were shooed off and crammed into a bus.

There was a certain irony to standing in a parking lot next to the train station in Shirahama. In months of preparatory trip research before our trip to Japan, I had learned that people trying to get into the interior of the Kii Peninsula seem to start from Kii-Tanabe, a town on the west coast, next to the intriguing resort town of Shirahama.

Photo by Gary Mawyer

I originally assumed we would start in Tanabe or Shirahama too. But I had made reservations on the other side of the peninsula entirely. I picked the east side for easier access to the Nachi Shrine, at Kii-Katsuura.

At the limits of planning, here we were in Shirahama despite ourselves. At this point we might have decided that Kii-Katsuura had become impractical. Or we could have rented a car. It would have been the sensible thing to do. But we were caught in the momentum of the situation. The crowded bus lurched away with us on it, stopping at every crossroads between Shirahama and Kii-Katsuura to let someone on or off.

The scenery on the southern end of the Kii Peninsula was rugged and breathtaking. The narrow hairpin road hugs the coast because it has no alternative. I had never imagined a coastline as fractal as this, so closely corresponding to the dragon curve, each nest of rocky embayments harboring its fishing village.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_curve

Kii Coastline, http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e4957.html

As they say, in fractals the area is finite but the perimeters keep getting infinitely longer. So did the day and the bus ride. Twilight set in and seemed prepared to last for hours. In this liminal light I got one of the shocks of my life. The bus drove past something impossible. On the beach was a rock formation out of scale with mortal reality, disturbingly huge pegs of stone reaching into the purple sky beside the highway. How could this not be one of the most famous spots on the planet? Was it possible people were deliberately not mentioning its existence? The bus didn’t even slow down.

Later research turns up references to the Hashigui-iwa rocks at Kushimoto. I am not sure that feature is the exact thing I saw. Sets of dragon’s teeth rocks are picturesquely common along this coast and what I saw left me disoriented. My reaction was almost like a moment of sudden unexpected recognition. I need to go back to see what this was about.

Kushimoto has quite a wild history for such a small place, including being the epicenter of a magnitude 8.0 earthquake in 1946, the scene of a wildly unlikely Turkish shipwreck, and the first site of unofficial and indeed illegal contact between Americans and Japanese, when the trading brigantine Lady Washington put into harbor in a vain attempt to sell some surplus furs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kushimoto,_Wakayama

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Washington

On the bus we mainly only communicated by gestures. The bus driver came back to gesture that we had reached a great place to pee, if we needed to. We were as interesting to others as others were to us. We were on a mission no one could fathom, we didn’t know one vowel from another, and we might as well have been lunar.

It was after dark when the bus pulled into Kii-Katsuura. The bus station, the taxi company and the train station formed two sides of the town square, or rhomboid. We got off the bus exhausted. “I don’t know what I saw. I don’t think I’m the same person anymore,” I said. The night was young but this was a town that had gone to bed long since, probably at the first inkling of impending dusk. The hotel in Kii-Katsuura had emailed us a map along with the hotel confirmation, so although we saw a cab driver smoking a cigarette on the curb, instead of hailing him we pulled out our hotel map and set off on foot, hauling our luggage. Within minutes we knew this map was so indifferent to the actual topography of the town that only a bird could have used it to find the hotel. We found several vague dark intersections with no obvious hotels attached. We found the red light district, a single dim and windowless karaoke bar next to a staircase with a neon arrow pointing upstairs. We found the well-lit and utterly closed and deserted shopping arcade, a street roofed over and strung with lanterns leading back to the main rhomboid at the heart of town. The same cab driver was still parked at the bus station, now smoking a different cigarette.

We helplessly proffered our printed-out reservation, and the cab driver wisely drove us to the perfectly obvious hotel. It was about three minutes away, but on a different promontory. We would never have found it in the dark. The hotel looked so normal, indeed was so normal, that I felt palpably relieved.

We had long since missed our special hot springs kaiseki feast—it was nearly 9:00 in the evening—but the buffet was open and crowded with families enjoying their seaside hot springs holiday. There was a vast amount of food on display and no reticence was being shown about tucking into it. We joined in, and did what we could to demonstrate that Americans can put away their grub as well as anyone. All sorts of amazing dishes were on offer, including small translucent ice fish, grilled top shells, a superb grilled eel, fresh gleaming raw mackerel and tuna, and a really first rate prime rib of beef, which somehow we did not expect, along with scores of other edible curiosities of every imaginable description. We served ourselves a la Russe and the devil took the hindmost.

We were learning to like sleeping in puffy blankets on tatami mats with hard pillows, and quickly fell asleep.

Photo by Gary Mawyer

At breakfast the next morning, we found a breakfast buffet that drew all the families, old and young, with and without children and grandchildren, dining in earnest on a fresh and delicious spread that included hand-prepared Japanese omelets to order, along with yet more dishes and preparations beyond rational enumeration, some entirely familiar and some beyond our previous breakfast experience. Perhaps the best were small salty smoked whole fish with a texture somewhat like bacon and a great subtlety of flavor.

Daylight gratified our curiosity about the layout of the town. Kii-Katsuura is shaped by the fractal dragon curve of its coast. One gets from place to place by going back the way one came. Also, we realized that we had found the subtropics. Kii is the southernmost point of Honshu and even the palm trees have ferns growing out of them. It is a wet and sultry coast.

Photo by Gary Mawyer

The streets of Kii-Katsuura seemed tranquil and undemanding. One could entertain the fantasy of calling everything else off and moving in, to live like a sea gull on the coast of Kii from then on.

Photo by Gary Mawyer

Photo by Alexander Mawyer

Kii-Katsuura, however, is not nowhere. It is a tuna capital. We had no idea until we stumbled over the fishing docks and found a huge tuna auction in full swing. These were not minor tuna in size or number and we later learned that the Katsuura auction is of considerable importance and the best fish are flown out and resold in Tokyo.

Photo by Alexander Mawyer

Fishing is not really for the squeamish and the harvest of the sea involves hard lives and killing. We were not in a place Westerners generally go, and Westerners have attempted anti-dolphin-fishing protests slightly farther down the coast where people eat sea mammals. However, cameras are a universal language. We started taking pictures. This was one of the times I most wished I fully understood the language. I love auctions. This auction was a gathering of experts whose tuna appraisals would have educated me no end. No question we were looking at the wealth of Katsuura—and no question this was a lot of wealth.

Getting from Nikko to Kii-Katsuura had seemed like an epic although it really only took all day. The Katsuura trek was a railway epic that ended on a bus. Getting from Kii-Katsuura to Yunomine Onsen by way of Nachi Hongu and Shingu was going to be another epic that would also somehow only take all day. This time it would be an epic of bus travel that ended with us happily bobbing up and down in steaming sulfuric water, which turns out to be absolutely fabulous for whatever ails you. More on that in my next blog post.

Photo by Gary Mawyer

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Author

Gary Dale Mawyer has been writing for over four decades, and to date has published four novels, Rockfish, The Southern Skylark, Exemptions, and The Adventures of Reese Macaque, P.I., as well as a biographical history, Sergeant Wolinski and the Great War, and a short story collection, Dark and Other Stories. Gary's writings draw on a wealth of history, lore and lived experience. He has a B.A. and an M.F.A. from the University of Virginia. Gary is a Central Virginia native with over 40 years of publishing and editing experience. His interests include American and Virginia history, military history, geology, hiking, travel, landscaping and gardening. He is the father of four grown children and has four grandchildren. He lives with his wife Karen and two cats in Albemarle County.

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