Yuasa to Gobo

I returned to Yuasa on a cool grey day with a thin mist clinging to the mountainsides. The weather reflected my mood. I had left Yuasa in sunshine and sociablity — the volunteer ladies in the information centre, persistent guide Naoya, but now the streets were quiet and the information centre was shuttered. I wanted to see the castle, but I lost so much time trying to find the way to it, through streets thronged with high school children on their way to school, that I gave up on the idea. I could see it in the distance, and it looked suspiciously modern, a reconstruction perhaps, used for wedding parties and the like. Later, when I returned home, I discovered after some searching on the internet that the castle was in fact a modern hotel with onsen, of the original castle, only ruins remain on the other side of the road.

I returned to the Kumano Kodo route, squeezing through mikan orchards with the trees bursting through the fences and screening shrubs that lined the narrow roads. I headed out of Yuasa along a slow-moving river. A startled heron launched and flapped lazily upstream to be lost in the misty mountainsides — it could have been a pterodactyl.

The weather may have been dull and grey, but it was better than the days of rain that Fujiwara Teika records in his diary of his journey along this section of the Kumano Kodo in October of 1201. Teika was a minor member and poet of the Fujiwara clan, at first rising high in the court of the former Emperor Gotoba, until he fell out with his patron after a series of poetry competitions and a personality clash.

I passed into one of those strange motorway netherworlds, an island of long grass, shrubs and stunted trees with a background noise of deep roaring, Doppler-shifting to high hissing waves. The map showed a tunnel or underpass beneath the motorway. At first I couldn’t find it, and then, when I did find it, I couldn’t believe it. It was so small, hidden behind long untrampled grass and filled with bamboo poles and plastic sheeting for road maintenance projects that I took it for a service tunnel. I checked back and forth, but no, this definitely was the tunnel I was supposed to pass through. I had to advance at a crawl, squeezing past mounds of cement bags. I emerged at the other end at the top of a flight of concrete stairs overlooking a river and a road disappearing into a tunnel in the hillside opposite.

The persimmons that still hung on the trees, in the gardens of old houses lining the route, were now either an overripe red or grey, rotten, bird-pecked hulks. The mountains were closing in, the river narrowing; it was time for another of the Kumano Kodo’s mountain passes, the Shishigase Toge. Bare rock of varying shades and mixtures of brown, grey and orange crumbled in parallelogram patterns leaving outcroppings like the nose of a rusting, aged stealth fighter. I picked my way over crumbled rock and through gates in electric anti-monkey fences. I saw no monkeys though.

At the top of the pass, in daisy filled clearings were signs showing how there were once tea houses up here. It was hard to believe — today the place was deserted. It was difficult to conjure up the image of somewhere with so many people passing through that a tea house owner would consider building a shop that would be so obviously difficult to supply.

The eerie desertion made a detour to a small shrine in the woodland reminiscent of the Blair Witch Project. Overgrown stone walls like New England farm boundaries marked the limit of the shrine compound. There were strange grunts and shrieks that echoed through the woods. Later I would hear gunshots, or possibly a bird-scarer.

As I dropped down the pass a familiar smell wafted through the dark trees and over muddy earth. It brought me back to my childhood. I remembered dinner-times and Chinese food. I could smell bamboo shoot. My mother used to add it sometimes to her version of sweet and sour chicken from a small tin. In the middle of the path I found a chewed bamboo shoot, the source of the smell. It was freshly chewed, but I couldn’t see what had chewed it.

At the bottom of the pass was a park area with boardwalks over marshy ground, benches, and a beautiful unspoilt valley. Japanese people often complain there are no green spaces in their country. It isn’t really true; there just aren’t many green spaces near to car parks, train stations and roads that aren’t overrun with people. Walk a little way and you could find yourself in a beautiful park and valley like this. I was the only person there.

A small road led me along the valley; I stopped to read the sign at the Kutsukake (Hanging Shoes) Oji — so named because pilgrims and their mounts would change their straw shoes at the oji. A middle-aged man approached, leaving his nervous looking wife hovering near the bonnet of their car. He had the kind of pencil moustache I thought had been left behind to Japanese soldiers in films of World War Two. He bustled up the slope to the oji and asked me “Do you have English?” I contemplated this for a moment. Was he asking if I was English or if I spoke English? I assumed the latter and replied that yes, I did.

“This is Kutsukake Oji,” he machine-gunned.

“Ah, yes, it is” I replied, looking at the blue sign that said so clearly in large white letters in English and Japanese. It then dawned on me that this was a question, not a statement. But my answer had sufficed for he was scrambling back down the slope and shouting directions to his long-suffering wife before they disappeared in a cloud of blue exhaust smoke.

For the first time since shortly after Kainan the sea was visible beyond a railway line and tightly packed houses at the end of the valley. I passed another oji where Fujiwara Teiki and his entourage had made mallets and given them to the poor. Mallets didn’t seem to be a particularly useful thing to give to the poor; I tried to imagine what they would use them for. Knocking in tent pegs? Banging in fence posts? Nothing seemed to quite fit.

Taie Oji, the final oji in the valley was a stunningly understated shrine with raked gravel grounds and momiji maple trees just beginning to change colour to a deep red. Fujiwara Munetada, the Minister of the Right, had made it here by October 19th of 1109.

The town of Gobo seemed near, but the Kumano Kodo took a long left hook to enter the town, which made the final section of the walk really seem to drag. I made it even longer by deciding to go in search of an oji which appeared on the map to be just off the road. The footpath squeezed me along the backs of houses and through tunnels of skinny bamboo. When I finally reached the oji I found a small stone marker in a clearing, no sign, nothing else. I used the bamboo tunnel as a toilet stop so as not to feel the detour was completely wasted.

The Kumano Kodo route passed near to Dojoji temple. This is one of the oldest temples in Wakayama Prefecture, and famous for a tale that is performed in Noh theatre to this day (quoted below with thanks to the japan-experience.com website):

In 928 a young, handsome, monk by the name of Anchin was on pilgrimage to Kumano in the south of the Kii Peninsula. In the mountains between Dojoji and Kumano he was invited to stay the night in the home of the village headman who had a beautiful daughter named Kiyohime who became infatuated with Anchin and begged him to stay with her.

Anchin insisted that he must continue on with his pilgrimage, but to appease her he promised that on his return journey he would once again come and stay at her home. Some time later however, she heard from some travellers that Anchin had bypassed her village on his return journey and she became enraged to the extent that her face took on the appearance of a serpent and she chased after him.

When Anchin crossed the Hidaka River he heard of Kiyohime's pursuit and asked the ferryman to not carry her across, but when she reached the banks her anger increased and she transformed completely into a giant serpent and swam across.

By now Anchin had reached Dojoji Temple and begged the priests to hide him. They suggested he hide inside the big bronze temple bell, but when the serpent arrived she wrapped herself around the bell, burst into flames and heated the bell till it was red hot and Anchin was burned to a crisp. She then committed suicide.

From which a few lessons can be learned: don’t stay with the village headman, keep your promises, and don’t hide in bells.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to visit the temple, I really needed something to eat, I had eaten only a small snack since breakfast and once again the Kumano Kodo had singularly failed to provide anything resembling an eating establishment along its route that day. I trudged along a road that gave me a gnawing sense of déjà vu, I was just pondering the reason for this when I was very nearly flattened by a postman on his motorbike. I had heard him coming and opted to head for the side of the road. Sadly the postman had decided to skim past me on the very side I had chosen for refuge. There was a squeal of rubber on tarmac, a volley of swearing from me, and apologies from the postman before he rode off.

I remembered why I had been here before. Some months earlier when I was a novice on the rural railways of Japan, I had boarded a train to Wakayama City from Tanabe. What I failed to realise was the train didn’t go all the way to Wakayama City. Instead, it was a shuttle service to Gobo that connected with a train to Wakayama City. At Gobo I remained on the train and was somewhat surprised to discover the train appeared to be going backwards. My error dawned on me as the train driver announced the destination as Tanabe. I got off at the next stop opposite Dojoji Temple and walked back into Gobo in time to catch the next train to Wakayama City.

There were no restaurants near the station in Gobo and I had to push my aching feet further to a major road so I could find a buffet-style eatery and give the staff palpitations. Gobo seemed like a place determined to punish me.

                                                                 Gobo to Kirime

The exit from Gobo proved to be ugly — modern highways with all their associated tat and tackiness. But I needed to follow them in order to cross the Hidaka river (I couldn’t swim across it like a serpent). Beyond the river, in the chill, sunny air, the vista improved. I climbed above the valley, past yet another cement works and wiggled my way through a village where the walls around every house seemed to be covered in purple morning glory. There were wealthy people living here, a fact often hard to notice in Japan. Usually big houses are hidden discreetly behind big walls; ostentatious displays of wealth, especially in housing seem frowned upon. These houses lay in open lawns like American mansions, announcing the owners’ wealth to any who passed. Status-symbol cars are common in Japan, but status-symbol houses are extremely rare.

After taking advantage of a couple of opportunities to get lost, I reached the coast road. Climbing a steep flight of stone steps to a shrine overlooking the sea, a cool breeze developed and dark clouds began to roll in from the north.

I crossed the Oji Bridge named after the nearby shrine and followed the coast road. In places workmen were replacing the open drains along the side of the road with covered ones. I had frequently wondered how often drunken salarymen, cycling home from their after-work drinking rituals had come a cropper in these open drains. Here there would no longer be any chance of that, much to the benefit of their long-suffering housewives and employers.

I discovered too late that the part of the map I thought I had been tracing my route on was the wrong part. I had crossed the main coast road and was now threading my way through a collection of ‘vinyl houses’, large tubular plastic greenhouses in which flowers seemed to be growing.

A farmer in a white pick-up van tooted from behind. I became annoyed with the map and farmer. The farmer pointed me up a track which I felt clearly couldn’t be the right way. I followed it for a short while anyway before cursing the farmer and turning back. Slowly it dawned on me I was looking at the wrong part of the map. The farmer had been pointing out a shortcut that would put me back on the right road.

The vinyl housing seemed to be endless along this stretch of the coast. It was broken only by a beautiful rocky cove above which an ugly concrete restaurant announced “Here it makes the sea and the sky meet”. In a foul mood, I thought “Here it makes the beautiful rock and the ugly concrete meet” would be a better tagline.

This stretch of coast had that worn-out, sun-bleached look that seems to characterize large sections of coastline in England. Grim, dilapidated old housing mixed with tacky seaside shops selling cheap plastic rubbish behind grimy windows. I stopped and ate my packed lunch on the concrete side of a river outlet, hidden from the road and watched fishing boats manoeuvring in and out of a harbour.

The sun came out and my mood improved with the weather and my newly-filled stomach. The route climbed to a scenic oji overlooking Inami bay. I walked through the docks at Inami looking at stretched fish drying on bamboo lattices. On leaving Inami I asked directions from a man who made up with enthusiasm what he lacked in intelligibility. From the few indistinct words I could grasp from his wildly gesturing monologue I guessed I needed to turn left somewhere. I did so, but too early and wasted a good 20 minutes repeatedly consulting my faintly photocopied map to work out if I could recover the route without having to turn back.

I established that I could and stopped at an oji shrine perched at the top of a steep flight of stone stairs overlooking the rocky coast. Worn, jagged strata of chocolate brown stone stretched into the crashing surf, and trapped between the strata, like food trapped between fingers, lay washed-up gravel and dark sand. I sat looking at the view for a long time pondering the millennia of forces that made this landscape.

Kirime oji was situated in pleasant woodland just behind the station in the small village of Kirime. Although the station was tiny, it was staffed and the hedges in its pretty garden were being trimmed as I arrived. The hedge trimmer’s cable snagged on a bush and I unhooked it without its operator realising. My unseen good deed for the day done, I boarded the train home.