The River (continued) 川

On the train home from the previous walk:

‘Excuse me?’

This was the second time he had said it, the first time so quiet I couldn’t hear what he said and didn’t know he was trying to talk to me.

‘Sorry, yes?’

‘Where are you from?’

Some might call him a language leech, or perhaps an eikaiwa bandit. With so few opportunities to meet English speakers and practice their rusting language skills, some Japanese latch rather desperately onto those who appear to be able to speak the language. I find the leech moniker a bit too strong, but I’m lucky in that I don’t appear to attract the most persistent leeches. Perhaps, with my dark hair and eyes, I don’t look foreign enough – I was once mistaken in England for ‘a very tall Chinese guy’.

This was about fifteen years ago, and as far as I remember, this is the last time it happened. Foreigners have become all too common, especially on trains from Kyoto, and the appearance of online language exchanges and lessons has satiated the leeches’ desire.

                                                                          川

I returned to the Yodo River on a day of nostril-piercing sharpness, the kind of day when the very air itself seems to ring with a high pitch like fine glass. I chose the north side of the river to continue my walk, fancying a different view of the river. And immediately I regretted it. The embankment was being rebuilt, new waffles of concrete being laid on the slope, and the floodplain below the embankment had been churned into a muddy string of pools.

Over the other side of the riverbank a brittle sun shone on apartment blocks, steaming chimneys and elevated expressways. Even on this side of the embankment there were signs of the approaching city. Sneaky litter-lined paths crept into the dull beige reed beds and I even saw some graffiti. In the distance, three enormous helipad-topped tower blocks partly hid a low mountain crowned with antenna and communication towers.

In England this would have been a crisp, frosty morning. In Japan it was warmer, there was no frost, but the same still, sharp feeling. The sun was the same height as in October, and October in Japan is like an English summer, it warmed my coat until I had to take it off and stuff it in my rucksack, then proceeded to heat the black fleece jacket underneath until I had to take that off too and tie it round my waist.

In Japan homeless people often converge around riverbanks. There are few places to set up their neat blue plastic sheet and wood houses in the city centre. I discovered, as I tried to find a more scenic path than the large concrete one dominated by cyclists and dog-walkers, that there were certain codes that indicated the location of homeless people’s houses near the river. I quickly learned that the winding paths through the long grass and rushes near the river were not there merely for the amusement of fishermen and people like me looking for a break from the joggers and cyclists. Some paths had clumps of wire or very often old bicycles blocking them. After weaving my way around a couple of these, taking them for detritus dumped by people not wanting to pay the city council removal fee, I discovered they led to homeless people’s shelters. These shelters were typically made from a wooden frame covered with the blue plastic sheeting which seems to be standard on building sites here.

The old bicycles and wire were in effect the homeless people’s front gate. Among the long reeds I even found small allotments to grow food. Homeless people in Japan seem a lot more self-sufficient than those in England. They often collect aluminium cans for money or tidy parks so the park-keeper will tolerate their presence.

As I was passing one homeless shelter closer to the main path a voice called out

‘Hello, how are you?’

‘Hello, I’m OK.’

I gingerly crossed a collection of old pallets to discover the source of the voice behind a screen of skinny trees. I found two old gentlemen sitting around a table playing shogi (A kind of Japanese version of chess) and looking surprised and curious to find the foreigner they had called to actually appearing before them. The younger of the two, dark hair spiky and peppered with silver, spoke the English. The older gentleman, his cap seemingly poised to fall off his head, leaned back and looked on bemused as the younger man and I tried to have a conversation with very few words. He asked if I knew shogi. I answered that I did. They took this to mean that I knew how to play it. They gestured me to join them, for my weary feet the tatty camp looked very inviting.

I had played shogi once at a Japanese high school club and I felt I had picked up a few of the rules. It quickly became apparent that I had absolutely no idea how to play shogi; I struggled to make out the kanji characters on each piece and the two men chortled over my confusion. But I was just glad to relax in the sunshine and break the loneliness of long-distance walking. Eventually, my shogi army destroyed, I made my excuses. It was tempting to ask the two guys questions: how had they ended up living here? But I hadn’t the heart and my Japanese wasn’t up to it anyway. I left the two men discussing the meaning of the English phrases the younger one had used, bid them farewell and climbed over the muddied embankment to find refreshment. A vista of smokestacks and factories greeted me, which wasn’t encouraging, but below the embankment I spied a small coffee shop.

I ate my toast and egg to the accompaniment of a radio station which used so many English phrases and played so much English-language music that I wondered if it wasn’t in fact an English-language radio station. I commented on this to the lady behind the counter, who paused her incessant wiping of the counter top long enough to consider an answer.

‘Well, I like the international music better, but actually it’s a local station. The commercials are better on this one, and’ she gestured at the embankment ‘it’s hard to get any others.’ She returned to wiping her well-wiped counter top.

Beyond the cafe, I was accompanied by the asthmatic whine and sudden roar of planes, sinking slowly for Itami Airport. The crispness of the morning air was gone – soon it would be time to view the cherry blossoms.

                                                                  The City 市

The heavy guillotines of flood barriers and overlapping rail and road bridges marked the point where I needed to regain the south side of the Yodo River. I crossed one of these bridges, which swayed slightly as heavy trucks rolled over it, and doubled back to find the entrance to the Ogawa River. A lock separated the Ogawa River from the Yodogawa River, through which several barges laden with river sand entered while I crossed the narrow walkway above.

It was all so square, when the Emperors, Fujiwaras, and even love-smitten geisha went through here, the river was a rounded marshy bend. Now, a new cut takes the Yodogawa straight to the sea, bypassing the centre of Osaka.

Beyond the lock a new world of flashy apartment blocks, small brown parks and tatty riverside warehouses, from where the dredged river sand was unloaded, emerged. The buildings greeted the river without reserve, and I was no longer limited by the embankment, but instead squared off from the river by private property and allowed back by the grace of public parks.

I broke off from the river anyway, to find the Museum of Osaka Life. The museum has a recreation of an Edo-era street, complete with a range of shops from the time. There are shops selling kimonos and fabric, and another one selling spinning tops and catch-ball which have become traditional unique Japanese toys. This desire to make things unique and traditionally Japanese is a persistent thing in Japan, a product perhaps of the insecurity of being a peripheral island off the coast of a large continent, a continent which produced religions with huge numbers of followers, important inventions and improved administrative systems. In fact, the first use of kendama (Japanese catch-ball) in its modern wooden form was in Nagasaki, so probably made its way to Japan via Dutch traders. And spinning tops are a familiar toy across the world, they’ve just been replaced by more interesting toys.

The noticeable thing for me about the displays in the museum was again the similarity to England. There was the construction of row-houses, similar to the terraced houses in England; then, following World War Two, a housing shortage — people living in old buses that had been converted into houses. Rather like the pre-fabricated buildings in England to combat the immediate housing shortage. Next came the big concrete housing developments, again very similar to England. The museum was great, lots of models and maps, the two things I find most fascinating in museums.

Among the displays about the period during the Second World War, I found a map showing the extent of fire destruction during the bombing raids. Pink areas showed the parts of the city destroyed by fire due to bombing – virtually the whole of the centre of the city was coloured pink, only a few islands of partially and non-damaged areas remained.

                                                                        市

In April, (the beginning of the school year in Japan) I had moved from Osaka to the seaside town of Tanabe in Wakayama Prefecture. I had started work at a new high school, picnicking under the cherry blossom while we waited for the first classes of the new school year to begin. Tanabe was ideal: the corner where the coastal Kii-ji path of the Kumano Kodo turns inland along the Naka-Hechi path which leads to the first of the three great shrines — Hongu.

But today I had to return to Osaka. I wandered through a riverside park alongside the Ogawa River to get to a monument that marked the disembarkation point for Kumano-bound pilgrims. Along the way I disturbed sparrows dust-bathing in the first real warmth of the year, and homeless men reading books.

Ogin, the geisha from nineteenth-century Kyoto, arriving on her merchant’s boat, would have found herself surrounded by hundreds of other thirty- koku boats plying their trade at the riverside warehouses that ran right up to the water’s edge; a koku being roughly the amount of grain necessary to feed one person for one year. The boats would have crowded all along the shore and between the multiple wooden pillars of Tenmabashi – the Tenma bridge. The only crowds now were office workers streaming across the double-decker aquamarine steel span of the modern Tenma bridge to the stations on the other side. On the water below, a few flat, glass-topped tourist boats plied for a meagre trade.

For the Fujiwaras and Emperors, there was likely no bridge at all. To stop here was to avoid the timber port further along the river just before the Inland Sea, hardly a fitting location for royalty to disembark. This northern edge of the Uemachi plateau was also conveniently drier than the soggy eastern reaches of this raised area on which palaces, monasteries and later castles would be built.

Tucked away in a back street behind Tenmabashi station I found the monument to the beginning of the Kumano Kaido (an alternative name for the Kii-ji route), an unremarkable brass plaque set in oblong stone:

Ogin had reached the area of Hachikenya 八軒家 (eight houses), named for the eight boating inns that lined the river here. Over the roofs of these boating inns could be glimpsed the curved eaves of Osaka castle.

At the time of the Emperors and Fujiwaras (one of the powerful clans that dominated the 1200s), this was Watanabe-tsu, the port of the Watanabe clan. The Watanabes emerged as a powerful force towards the end of the tenth century, coming to gradually take control of the shipping and trade routes around the mouth of the Yodogawa and its connected rivers like the Kizu River. The lumber port at the mouth of the Kizu River, nearer the sea, was essential for importing the timber needed for the construction of large temples such as that at Todaiji in Nara.

I left walking the section of the Kii-ji that runs through the centre of Osaka for another day and made for the convenient subway station.