Four Corners of Japan

I’m halfway!

It took me a 104 days walking from Cape Sata to my 10th waypoint in Ogimachi, Gifu, a beautiful (if slightly touristy) World Heritage village of thatched houses nestled in a valley. I really enjoyed Gifu, one of my favourite prefectures yet. I’m now on my way up to Mt Yari-ga-take in the North Alps, the highest point of the walk, and hiking the ultimate Japanese hike, the infamous Daikiretto, which includes dropping down a 300m hole on chains at 3000m. Looking forward to it. Sort of. A couple of days after that I’ll be meeting my Dad and hiking with him for a couple of weeks up through Nikko.

In two months time I’ll be on a plane out of Tokyo, the day before my visa expires, so I have less than 60 days to do the second half of Japan and get to the northern tip of Hokkaido. The race is on. Craig, who left me behind in Kyushu, has just arrived there and completed his walk of the length of Japan in (I believe) a record 95 days — congrats Craig!

Thanks for all your emails, texts, chats, comments and calls so far. The days are very long, and hearing from everyone helps makes the days more enjoyable and gives me some input, especially now that I’m without an ipod. Despite some hard times back in Shikoku (more about that later), I’m enjoying myself. The walk is everything I hoped it would be, and I’m already starting to realise how soon it will be over.

Summer is here and the heat is taking it out of me — the first time since Kyushu really that I’ve hit the physical pain barrier. Temperatures in the mid-30s and high humidity. Even my cactus Zebura-san is feeling it. But I’m swimming in the rivers and drinking up to 10 litres a day (yes, mostly water). I’m focusing on making it to the end. I’m still posting haiku to hydrolith and (I hope) more often to fourcorners, plus I’ve started adding locations to my Flickr photos so you can check where I am.

Well, better get back on the last stretch of road to Kamikochi. Stayed in a nice campground last night and treated my blistered feet to a fantastic onsen 10 minutes walk away. Very atmospheric at night, with flame torches burning; relaxed, robed people padding the tatami and speaking in hushed voices; relaxed, disrobed people scrubbing and then soaking among the steaming rock pools of the night. Bliss.

This morning I attempted to sneak through the IC tunnel, but whistles and mention of a large fine were involved, so I feigned complete ignorance, turned down the offer of a lift and gave them a cheery wave goodbye before they could phone any more people. It just means I now have another mountain to cross before I get to the trail head…

Ippo ippo,
~Ashioto

Astrophysicists explain the mysteries that surround it / But the record stays still while the world spins around it / All the rest are vicious lies, callous and unfounded / The record stays still while the world spins around it
Record Store, Darren Hanlon

Today’s my birthday: I’m 31. I awoke at 4.45am in my tent to the soft sound of a bullet train shooting past the adventure playground. Reaching into my pack, I found one of the worst presents ever: my iPod was gone.

Some time in the last few days it fell out of my bag or was stolen. There were plenty of opportunities for either. I leave my backpack unattended all the time, outside toilets or convenience stores. Partly from necessity, partly because that’s what everyone does here. Japan is a very safe country. My electronics bag sits in the top of the pack, for easy access, and a draw string is my only lock. The pack isn’t designed to sit up unsupported, so is forever falling over.

I hope someone at least found it, before the rain got to it, if it wasn’t taken. I’d hate to think nearly 16,000 tracks went to waste. (Or worse: deleted in favour of two dozen crappy pop songs.) There were some rare tracks on there, and a lot of blood, sweat and tears went into gathering and editing them, as readers who have been following Four Corners since last year would know. I only hope Goat, who takes his replica with him to work, hasn’t deleted “all that ambient shit”. Now’s the time to back it all up onto DVD, Ian, something we never got around to doing. Don’t delete everything by mistake.

I’m going to miss that iPod. It’s funny getting attached to a little hunk of technology, really. It’s not the iPod itself I’ll miss, of course, it’s the experience of music that it provided. I didn’t listen to it all every day, but when I did it was a little mental holiday, or a chance to learn something new.

It’s hard to say what music I’ll miss most. Probably The National’s Boxer, which I just never got tired of. A very understated album, but one that kept growing on me since I first heard it last year. It was only after repeated listens, for example, that I realised how good the drumming is, despite its simplicity. One of my memories from this walk will be walking along the footpath through the urban sprawl of Osaka with my pack on my back listening to Fake Empire, the opening track. I listened to it three times in a row that day. In the mind’s ear I can still hear the quiet reverb that kicks it off.

We’re half awake… in a… fake empire…

At the end of the day, in the moments before exhausted sleep, I turned from rock to ambient, the music of slumber. Recently I was listening to old favourites like Cinematic Orchestra, DJ Shadow, Biosphere, and Woob. The rainy season is almost over now, but there’s nothing like lying in your sleeping bag in the Japanese forest, all your muscles aching, looking up past your hanging socks to the rain pounding on the tent roof as the lush, rain-like intro to La Femme D’Argent floats you away.

Summer is here. The mercury is climbing over 30 during the day, and the humidity is high, so walking along the shore of Lake Biwa I started taking a siesta after lunch, the sound of James Gordon Anderson’s beautifully hypnotic Concord sending me off to sleep for an hour. I’d wake refreshed, and after a cold lemon sorbet from the convenience store I was ready to walk into the cooler hours of the evening. I’ve been lucky enough to have footpaths, mostly, so it was safe enough to get out my iPod and listen on random for half an hour or so as the sun set. So much of the music was completely new to me, thanks to the collective efforts of Ian, Martine and Tyler. To take just one example, I enjoyed discovering the fresh similes in Little Chills by Darren Hanlon, who I’d never heard of.

Our hands lie useless in our laps, like beetles on their backs

It wasn’t just music either. I listened to the entire Treasure Island while journeying between Iriomote-jima and Yakushima islands, the first time I’d experienced it in nearly 20 years. I sampled Walden, lectures on the use of technology in the classroom, Hans Christian Anderson, Shakespeare’s sonnets, a history of the internet, Alan Watts discoursing on eastern and western philosophy, Japanese folk tales, the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Heart of Darkness. The last thing I listened to was half of one of Allen Ginsberg’s lectures from a Basic Poetics university course held in 1980. He was proclaiming Milton to the class when the bass in the other earbud blew, and I realised I was going to need to buy some new earbuds before I listened to any more music.

Well, on the bright side, I saved myself some money. I won’t be replacing it — I’ll just have to write more instead of listening to other people. And I still have my passport, and my Nokia, which I’m typing this on. Oh, and my wallet, although there’s nothing much in there I’ll miss! One of the things I’m realising on this walk is that the more attached you are to something, the more misery you’re creating for yourself. Everything is lost eventually. It’s strange that we live in a throwaway society, and yet are so attached to things. Anyway, I should get started walking — it’s past 7am and I’m already working up a sweat. The post I was planning to write today will have to wait a little longer.

I’m in Gifu, heading north for Ogimachi, a World Heritage village of gassho, or “praying hands” thatched cottages. Yesterday afternoon I met Cozy the biker, on his way to Hokkaido, and we did the special handshake three times: once to say hello and twice to say goodbye. I walked to the park, and after the baseball team and dog walkers had all gone home for the night I had a nice cold shower under the tap. I hung my clothes up on the hilltop fort and slept on grass. There was a cool breeze and this morning my clothes were dry. I cooked up an Indian curry for breakfast and just ate a Snickers bar to get me going. The sky is blue; life’s good. No, really. It’s just an iPod.

~Ashioto

p.s. For those who haven’t noticed, I have been managing to update my personal blog fairly regularly, by writing posts of no more than 17 syllables, and have scheduled an entire week of haiku for this week. Other than one big gap, I’ve basically managed to stick to my goal of writing a haiku a day — some days up to ten.

Tear man out of his outward circumstances; and what he then is; that only is he.
Johann Gottfried Seume (1763-1810)

July finds me resting in Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan, and something of a halfway point on my journey across Japan. Not quite halfway in distance, but halfway in time, which means the second half of my walk is going to need to be at a faster pace than the relatively leisurely stroll I’ve been on.

As you might have guessed from my emails to Ian, it’s a journey that’s had a few ups and downs. After leaving Ian in Matsuyama and setting off for the interior of Shikoku, I’ve been coming to grips with the reality of Seume’s aphorism. When you have no job, no money, no home, no friends or family to spend time with, no company (except for a tanuki that does a double-take and then flees in terror), occasionally no food, no phone, and almost none of the normal accoutrements of modern life, you begin to realise how much of your identity is bound up in the people and things you surround yourself with. Strange things start to happen to your brain, and thoughts of updating your blogs start to seem as meaningful as publishing your clogs.

cast off the rope

and row out the silence

of a wine-dark sea

After a few months on the road, I’ve returned to the city a slightly different person. As you’d expect. Curiously, while I’ve been realising more and more my profound Westernness, more and more people are commenting on my essential Easternness. Perhaps that has something to do with my lengthening beard, I don’t know.

Anyhow, I’ve uploaded to Flickr a selection of photos from the first half of my walk, arranged chronologically below. Tomorrow I shoulder my pack again and set off for the grave of Matsuo Basho, my ninth waypoint, and then continue up the narrow road to the deep north. Hokkaido.

More anon,
~Ashioto

Cape Sata

Kirishima

Kuruson Gorge

To Aso

Aso-san

Beppu to Shimonoseki

Yamaguchi

To Hiroshima

Hiroshima

Matsuyama

Ishizuchi-san

Motoyama

Iya Valley

Shodo Island

Himeji

Osaka

To Kyoto

Kyoto

Hey y’all, the Goat here at Club Mountaingoat, Brisbane, de facto Operations Command for Four Corners of Japan Inc, where I fill my non-working days and nights manning the phone and the fax machine, dining on coffee-with-12-spoons-of-sugar and Snickers bars (trail habits I can’t break) as I field requests for interviews with the Japan Times, Outside, Good Morning Australia, Backpacker and Goat Farming Quarterly (wrong number); keeping this site purring along and doing my damnedest to track the meandering progress of my erstwhile expedition partner as he trudges — crawls? — languorously northward. I know I am due for another installment of What Went Wrong in Shikoku? but still can’t bring myself to do it, largely ’cause that would force me to think hard and deep about what happened there, and self-analysis still sounds too much like hard work. So I’m immersing myself in my own blog, which is mostly occidental in theme and requires much less painful self-analysis.   

Meanwhile, Ashioto-san has been typically quiet on the website-update front, but he does on occasion grant yours truly a glimpse via email of his mysterious perambulations. The latest, a few days ago, informed me that he had achieved a milestone: the halfway point in time (only got 80 or so days left). So he is obviously not breaking any land-speed records (leaving that to Craig, who appears to already be in Hokkaido!!!), and at this rate is going to give us readers the vicarious thrill of a frenzied last-minute sprint up the coast of Hokkaido to get to his finish point on the northern tip (and then back to Tokyo and onto a plane) before his visa runs out sometime in (from memory) mid-September. He still seems to be living typically close to the bone financially (but that makes for more entertaining reading for us as well — thanks, Chris!) somewhere in the Kansai area.

On the good-news front, he added that he had treated himself to a new pair of shoes, and am once again appreciating the magic of Goretex. Plenty of Snickers at the moment, and scored a bottle of very good Bordeaux wine (and corkscrew), after finishing another one with a guy selling Italian food on a lookout above Osaka. Polished the rest of that off last night while soaking in a waterfall pool.

Jeez, why was I feeling sorry for the bastard?

Good times and quality wine make for boring reading, Ashioto-san. No more of that, please. Oh, wait, there’s more:

All of which disguises the fact that I’ve had some very dark days — worse than Shikoku, as for the first time I considered quitting. Having my phone cut off and not sleeping very much probably didn’t help. Seriously considered taking that one extra step to true homelessness and just disappearing for a while, seeing how long I could last off the grid.

Excellent.

Why did he lose the phone? Simple economics. The bastards at SoftBank screwed both of us so many times, it hardly seemed worth carrying the thing. I had no phone for my month walking through Shikoku, and after my ex-girlfriend stopped answering when I called to chat from public phones, I had no phone contact with anyone till it came time to rendezvous with Chris. I found it beautifully liberating, though they obviously have their uses. As for the sleeplessness, I think I’ve mentioned before that I never got more than an hour or two of unbroken sleep on my whole walk. Prolonged poor sleep, of course, can stretch frayed tempers to breaking point — and Japan is not the place for delicate dispositions.

Chris apparently reconsidered bailing out after sitting down and chatting with a homeless guy in Osaka – whether it was a well-educated homeless guy or whether Chris’s Japanese is improving, I don’t know. Anyway, some good days hiking on a real trail with no rain and occasional flashes of pure freedom have me back on something of an even keel, for now. Thank ____ for my ipod. Continuing my poetry education from Ginsberg [Chris downloaded a lot of Ginsberg poetry lectures to fill his days -- as though he wasn't already suffering enough...] (who also had to suffer comically idiotic students) [an English-teacher joke, heh-heh] and of course the sweet joy of real music.

Almost at Kyoto — should arrive tomorrow. Going to take a triple zero, maybe four. See some sights, do some writing, sleep, and try to wrap my head around the second half, which will have few, if any, zeros and a razor thin budget. Meeting up with James [former colleague from our school in Brisbane, now living in Kyoto]– hope the drinks will be on him, because otherwise we’ll be drinking water. Was saving the expensive bottle of wine for him, but after carrying it for two days I changed my mind. It was very, very good…

Knowing James, you made the right choice, Ashioto-san.

On Friday night I got home from work rather inebriated to find a little You-Pack envelope on my doormat. Inside, after fumbling with it and a sharp knife for a few dangerous minutes, I found the pixie hat I left by mistake in Chiiori. I mentioned last time that Chris had detoured up the mountain to collect it for me. It was good to see it again. We’ve (the hat and I) had some good times — okay, some times — together over the years. For example, on the Appalachian Trail…

..and before that, in Japan, where it kept my head warm during three years of solo hiking in the mountains outside Tokyo. In those days I slept in the Nylon Coffin, a tunnel-like excuse for a tent, and used a candle lantern for light and warmth. It was such a tight fit in there, I was always bumping my head on the lantern, and the pixie hat is scarred with candle burns. It has some history, it tells a story, and I’m very grateful to Chris for retrieving it for me.

Something else he sent for my archives: 

And on the flip side:

 I’ll have a bottle waiting. Or two.

~ GOAT

Waypoint one

on the long journey:

Martian dreams

The day I arrived at the foot of the volcano, on Day 18 from Cape Sata, I was wet and tired. I was wet because it was raining, and tired because I was carrying a lot of food I couldn’t eat. Ian and I have alluded to my equipment troubles several times. I haven’t really explained, partly because I haven’t written much, partly because cursing the fuel pump cup of the fuel bottle pump of a well-known and supposedly infallible hiking stove rarely makes interesting reading. My curses are blunt and unimaginative, I assure you.

On Day 17 I’d spotted my first road sign for Aso, and celebrated by a splurge at the supermarket, gathering among other things the ingredients for a “pot lasagne” I’d been fantasising about in the rain. Cheese, eggplant, capsicum, mushrooms… even now these simple nouns are making my mouth water. So imagine my disappointment an hour later when I discovered my fuel pump was broken – again. The first time, in Kagoshima, I’d managed to get to a hiking store to get it fixed, and  — I’d thought – learned how to fix it, but no matter what I did the fuel pump was not fuel pumping. There would be no lasagne. So now I was carrying too much weight.      

a warm smile:

the deaf and dumb man

needs no more 

In a somewhat gloomy frame of mind, then, I trudged along the road to the eastern side of Aso-san. And came across the Kijin Onsen, a small onsen with a few A-frame log cabins out the front. I hadn’t slept under a roof for three weeks, or bathed in a week, and at that instant decided to treat myself to a night in an onsen. The owner was friendly, and showed me one of the cabins. The lounge room was daggy, but so comfortable looking, with a couch, one of those low tables with an electric blanket you put over your tired legs, a gas stove with a kettle, a coin TV I would never use, an adjoining kitchen, bathroom and toilet, and an enormous second floor loft with enough futons for half a dozen people. How much, I asked. Gosengohyaku-en, he said. Perfect, I replied, before my brain had processed the amount. But this was back in the early days, when I could pretend I had the money – and besides, it was worth it.

I had the entire onsen to myself (”People mainly come on the weekend”), and it was a beautiful bath house of dark wood and sunken slate. A series of private rooms faced out from the softly lit entrance room of antique furniture, the outside wall of each bath room made entirely of glass. Outside, the forested night was lit up with spotlights. Inside, steaming water poured from a section of bamboo into the stone pool. I stripped off, stepped in, and soaked and soaked and soaked. It was, without exaggeration, the best bath I’ve ever had.

My feet still ached afterwards. I didn’t care: dinner was pot lasagne.

The next day was, without exaggeration, one of the hardest climbs of my life. I took the road less travelled up Aso-san, from Hino-toge to Taka-dake. It is, apparently, not a common choice, as the gorse was thick, the mud slippery from rain, and false paths disappeared into the gorse in seemingly every direction. The climb included a 600m ascent within 2km, and with my pack weighing upwards of 20kg — I was loathe to discard all that food, which my dinner had barely dented – it took me four hours. On the way up I lost my pedometer and my temper, both ripped from me by the iron grip of gorse, which I despise even more than sasa. 

why I walk?

as someone once said:

imponderable 

Fortunately, it was a beautiful day, and my equilibrium quickly returned once I reached the top. Blue skies and views of the 25km wide caldera on all sides. Aso-san has presence. The five peaks of the central cone cover a large area, and include the highest peak of Taka-dake (1592m) and the peak of the active volcano Mt Naka, my first official waypoint, which was steaming impressively. Except for gorse, very little grows above the treeline, and large areas are completely barren. The mountain is the colour of Mars, and looks like I imagine Mars will after a few hundred years of terraforming. I spent most of the day wandering about the slopes of Mars, and then taking photos on my SLR in the late afternoon sun. I hope they come out, because the light was stunning. Whether for that reason, or another, or because my brain was beginning to change from all the walking (in ways I don’t yet understand), I was suddenly, inexplicably, overcome by a feeling of profound happiness. Something about this volcano was good.

I’d got an email that morning from this Craig guy who was walking Japan in the same direction. We’d been in email contact for a few months — after he’d discovered this website – though I didn’t know much about him. He’d started from Sata much later than I had, but was burning rubber on the highways and I wasn’t surprised to learn he was already at Aso, staying at a youth hostel. He hadn’t climbed Aso-san yet, so I’d sent him a quick text on the way up the mountain: meet you at the top. The only other person walking the length of Japan northbound in 2008, and I might be meeting him at my first waypoint. Two strangers in a strange land: there was no doubt what I would say on meeting him. I wouldn’t be able to resist: “Mr Stanton, I presume.”

As it turned out, we didn’t meet at the top, and I got lost that night, and didn’t find the hostel until long after it was locked up for the night. Busy taking photos of cows silhouetted against the Martian sunset, I’d tarried on the mountain too long, and then discovered my headlamp was dead on a moonless night. I ended up sleeping in some sasa next to a cemetery, and texted Craig the next morning to say I was waiting at Lawsons, the local convenience store. An hour later, just as I was about to leave, Craig appeared with his video camera rolling.

“Mr Ashioto, I presume.”

Damn. You bastard. 

“Mr Stanton, I presume,” I grinned wryly.

“I was thinking of getting to Beppu in three days,” he said.

“Sounds good to me. Let’s have a look at the maps…” 

~Ashioto

Well, I’ve been back at work in the heart of Brisbane for a week, making a depressingly slow ascent of the mountain of debt that is all I have to show for my little Oriental misadventure. Not much more than two weeks ago I was sleeping by the roadside, having prolonged and one-sided dialogues in my head, living off white bread and “peanut whip” (if I was lucky), walking from temple to temple in a bedraggled caravan of white-clad neo-pilgrims. And already Japan seems far more than a fortnight (”two weeks” for Americans) and an eight-and-a-half-hour flight away. I haven’t regretted being home for a second, and I sometimes have to remind myself what I did up there, how I lived up there, what I learned about myself and the Japanese up there, and why the hell I got my sorry arse out of there with no desire ever to return.

But I’m not ready to write about all that yet. I can barely even let myself think about it. So I’ll relay some of Ashioto’s latest couple of messages instead.

The first one, the main one, turned up in my in-box on June 11. It opened with a couple of haiku:

In deep Shikoku
a disturbance in the force:
An alien walks

I can empathise with the alien sentiment. I have never felt more like I didn’t belong than on the lonesome rural roads of Japan. Perversely, I felt invisible as well. You enter a convenience store where you know they have rarely, if ever, seen a non-Japanese face. You note the quick flash of unease in the face of the shop staff even as they dutifully offer you an unconvincing Irrasshaimase!; sometimes, with your back turned, you hear two females giggling quietly as though daring each other to serve the gaijin. But never, ever, will they attempt conversation with you, let alone ask you what brings you and your pack to this atrophying backwater. The relief as you exit the store is both palpable and mutual.

Let’s experience
sasa-induced psychosis
on the edge of cliffs

‘Sasa’ is bamboo-grass, or dwarf bamboo. Thickets, nay, jungles of the stuff engulf the understorey of some mountain forests; sometimes the sasa is the forest. My hike along the ridge from the summit of Tsurugi-san led me, after a lengthy spell of tiresome lost-ness, into such a quagmire of dense, clinging, path-obscuring, waist-high sasa. It’s like dragging your legs through a swamp. When it’s late, and he doesn’t know exactly where he is, and he just wants to get his arse off the ridge and down to somewhere flat and open (preferably with a stream, a toilet and a convenience store nearby), the disgruntled hiker may find himself hurling unsavoury epithets at this detestable shrub, words I can’t repeat in a family site like Four Corners — but one of them rhymes with ‘trucker’.

Chris had just come down out of the mountains from Tsurugi and have to get out of town before dark. He was in Sadamitsu, where [Route]438 cuts the IC. ‘IC’, I think, means ‘interchange’, though I was never certain. But I know exactly where he was. There’s a michi no eki  (”road station”) there where I spent a long, hot afternoon dodging the cleaner while I guerilla-charged my batteries, shaved, and stealth-bathed, writing haiku about the weirdos you always find in road stations in any country to pass the time (The boy drags his feet/As though they are a burden/Carried grudgingly…Like the cleaner here/I walk with a pronounced limp/But I limp faster…and my favourite, Excuse me, good sir/Is that a dog you carry/Or a monster rat?). I had spent the night under a bridge near the beautifully preserved indigo-merchant street of Udatsu, then followed the Yoshino, longest river in Shikoku, for half the day before turning inland. From an observation tower at the road station, I got my first view of distant Tsurugi-san along Rt 438:

Chris never climbed Tsurugi, which wasn’t actually one of our Waypoints. It sounds like he was pretty keen to get out of the centre of Shikoku and head to what passes for civilisation on the rim of the island:

Do I have some stories. Last shopped in Motoyama and been living on that since. The campsite at the west vine bridges was nice [I don't know what he means here -- I never knew there was a campsite at the westernmost, more touristy of the vine bridges] but set me back ¥700, leaving me ¥501. I was saving it for emergencies, like fuel, but the Oku-iya vine bridges cost ¥500 to enter  [I was lucky -- nobody collected campsite money or vine-bridge money from me -- a typical tourist-trap scam] so I spent it on the waypoint. (My new motto is ‘Give yourself to the journey because no one will give anything to you.’) Luckily I was wise enough to go for the value pack of 600g soba, and…my Whisperlite is actually performing when I need it [Chris had problems with his brand-new stove from day one -- I've never heard of people having trouble with this supposedly invincible mountaineering stove]. I thought I needed it when I had an enforced zero alone in a mountain hut on Ishizuchi and it failed on me, but this time I really would’ve been eating raw soba. Lunch today was my last quarter of sprouting carrot, my last square of cheese, and the last squirt of your peanut whip [a parting gift -- I never wanted to see the stuff again, but he'd had trouble finding some]. About two days worth of food to see me the last 100 kays to Takamatsu.

Food was surprisingly difficult to come across in inland Shikoku. It sounds like a petty complaint, but more than once I went a few days or more without sighting a convenience store, and Chris and I agreed that our travels in the Japanese backwoods gave us a new appreciation for the Sunkus, the Lawson’s, the Family Mart and the Su-ri-efu (”3F”). Strangely, there are no 7-11s on Shikoku (they are on every street corner in Tokyo) — actually a major problem as they are the only konbini where a gaijin can access his savings account via an ATM. And the absence of a convenience store means some pretty horrific ‘meals’ scavenged from darkened ghost-town obasan stores, where potato chips and stale, month-old meron pan (melon-flavoured buns that taste, as my American friends would put it, “like ass”) were the most appealing choices. We traded lots of horror stories like these when we met up, agreeing that finding a Snickers bar, which packs a lot of pleasure and energy for a 120-yen investment, was like stumbing upon a gold nugget. If his stove is working, I hope he at least helps himself, as I suggested, to the odd cabbage leaf or spring onion from farmers’ fields. I don’t think they’ll miss them, if he’s subtle — and prolonged stealth-camping makes you very, very subtle.
 

Even before the food ran low, I had problems with exhaustion, of a kind I haven’t had for a few years… Only managed 5km from the west vine bridges before I had to sleep. Fortunately found the best campsite yet, a hidden beach below the highway on the Iya River, about a kay before Chiiori. Awesome. Between my nap and that night (turned into a zero) I slept 12 hours and was still tired.

Chris had been walking continuously for a lot longer than I when we met — I’d had that week of post-Hokkaido recuperation before Shikoku — and was noticeably slower when we were walking together, even taking my generally faster walking speed into account. Understandable. I felt pretty good for most of the month I walked through Shikoku, but obviously a poor diet doesn’t help your performace.

His visit to Chiiori, above, would only have added to his exhaustion. He couldn’t have afforded to stay the night there, which meant that he did the long, hard climb up the mountain to the place (it took me 57 minutes of fast walking) merely to retrieve the pointy pixie hat I’d left there, before backtracking down the damned mountain to the river — unless he scored a ride in the farm truck. Appreciated, Ashioto-san. That hat was worth it.

Did 35km today over 438 from near the Tsurugi chairlift. Despite everything I felt pretty good burning down the mountain with my belt cinched as far as it can go. I was on a mission: to get to Takamatsu to buy food, and get to Himeji by Saturday to meet Jean Yves. Even the Valley of the Suffocated Scarecrows and the Town of the Geriatric Zombies couldn’t slow me down for long. 

Shikoku for some reason is riddled with scarecrows. Even the riverbanks near fishing spots are peopled with crude humanoid figures. I suppose fishermen don’t like to share:

I had an eerie encounter with the Suffocated Scarecrows myself. What an asset to the beauty of the area — and not a farm or garden in sight:

I’m glad Ashioto saw them as well. I doubt anyone would have believed me. As for the Geriatric Zombies, maybe he means these overworked labourers somewhere in the Iya Valley:

And then: I get to the shitty town of Sadamitsu around 5pm. I try my Australian VISA card at the post office on a whim, and — it works! Oh my ____-ing God, it works! And then I find a supermarket. The joy, the absolute joy. Four Snickers bars, icecream, pineapple…

Western readers might find it hard to comprehend the ecstasy Chris was experiencing here. We were both a hair’s breadth from true homelessness during our walks — I got out in time but he’s less than a third of the way through. And to make things even harder, we were in Japan. The country’s contradictions have perplexed thousands before us, but surely one of the most perplexing is how the second-largest economic superpower on the planet can have such a primitive, almost third-world banking system. I mean, you can’t even use a credit card in much of Tokyo — forget about it in rural Japan. ATMs are rare and erratic. Sending an international money order is an exercise in Patience and Tolerance that I always failed — I rarely left a post office when I wasn’t in a state approaching rage. When I think of the two or three times in Hokkaido and Shikoku when I was at my very lowest ebb, ready to murder somebody or call it all off and go home, I recall that problems accessing my own money were often at the root of the problem (in Hokkaido, after a half-hour ordeal in an urban post office, I was actually informed that it was no longer possible to send a money order home to cover some credit card payments — an exercise that takes about two minutes in Australia — and I left there limping, furious, and wondering if I’d taken a wrong turn and landed in Botswana. I ended up shoving about $700 worth of yen in an envelope and posting it home…). At least twice in Shikoku I was in a similar state to Chris — on one occasion I was down to 2,000 yen and was prevented from accessing my dwindling savings via a post office ATM because it was Sunday.

Christ, even typing these words is making me furious all over again.

Today is Saturday, and I was hoping Chris would in fact be in Himeji, another Waypoint, relaxing, enjoying the castle, and close to meeting Jean-Yves, a friend we ‘met’ via this site who lives in the Osaka area. Hopefully he can rest up there for a day or two. After Takamatsu, however, he still had to walk through the island of Shodoshima on the Inland Sea, to visit the Unshipped Rocks, another Waypoint. This was made more challenging by his not actually knowing where the Rocks are. We had packed up and hit the road in such a frantic state we never really got around to finding out. Luckily I was able to track down some vague directions on the internet and forward them to him — but I’m anticipating an entertaining read in his next post.

Anyway, better finish demolishing tonight’s share of the ¥4000 and crack open a chu-hi. 6.40pm and pouring rain, sitting in a bus shelter…

Ah, the good times. But don’t waste too much sympathy on Ashioto-san. He doesn’t have to go to work on Monday. And a couple of good friends and former colleagues (thanks, Nerolie and Natasha) and I have ensured he won’t be reduced to eating sprouting hunks of carrot for the next couple of weeks at least…

Yesterday’s brief message indicated that he was running rather behind schedule, but was at least having a ‘joyfull’ (sic) time eating on the northern coast of Shikoku:

Your generosity is going towards a good cause. My stomach thanks you. From Joyfull Restaurant, Takamatsu…

~ GOAT

Ten days after last drinks with Ian in Matsuyama, I find myself in central Shikoku, where the rainy season has arrived with a vengeance. A tough but spectacular climb of Ishizuchi-san behind me, I’ve now reached five of my waypoints, with the sixth, the vine bridge of Iya Valley, in my sights.

It’s taken some time to get used to the idea that Ian’s walk is over. Walking Japan was his idea to begin with, and this is something we’ve been talking about, organising, and working toward together for over a year now — four since the concept came to us one night over a flask of scotch on a Queensland mountain. But any expedition of two can continue with one, and Four Corners of Japan is no exception: I’m still Hokkaido-bound. And he’s not out just yet. There’s a lot more to the Goat’s tale then he’s told thus far, and I’m looking forward to reading more from him.

Both a slower walker and a slower writer than Ian, I’ve got some catching up to do, but I’m going to do a brief recap of the five waypoints and a few other incidents within the next week or so, and hopefully be as up-to-date as I’m going to be before I land on Honshu for the second time. So here’s the second half of my promised trail notes…

***

KYUSHU
Section Two: Kirishima-yama to Aso-san

Kirishima-yama to Aso-san, a journey from one active volcano to another, is a much more varied and enjoyable experience than the first leg from Cape Sata. For a start, there’s no Route 269…

The road curving past
another old mountain hut
with broken windows.

From Kirishima Mountain, walk down along a winding mountain road to the Ebino Plateau. Whatever you do, though, don’t pitch your tent in the “abandoned” camp ground, otherwise you’ll be hit with a ¥1100 fee in the morning, including a galling ¥300 for “facilities” like broken toilets. Plough on, and at the bottom of the descent you’ll find a little fruit and veg store. The giant eggplant is cheap and light, and, together with the spicy eggplant sauce you bought in that dusty supermarket last week, will make the tastiest meal you’ve cooked yet. Keep following Route 30, and go straight when it turns into 53. Just before you do, make sure you stop for an enormous punnet of strawberries from the roadside stall. The season is nearly over, and at ¥100 they’re the cheapest you’ll ever pay. Not to mention delicious. I was living off roadside stalls for a while. Sadly, it’s not a custom that you’ll find any more in western Honshu or Shikoku, so make the most of it in Kyushu.

Slip a coin (and card)
in the honesty box of
the strawberry stall.

Route 53 snakes under and over the IC expressway — don’t even think about walking on one of those engineering marvels — a number of times. A bit past the schools, you’ll see a sign for “Iino Sta.” Turn left. This sign has English, but the character for ’station’ is a useful one to know: the left half means (and resembles) a horse, and the right half looks like a box with two legs. The place where people go to catch a horse. I never actually saw the station, possibly because I got pleasantly lost in the narrow residential streets for ten minutes. If you come across a rice field with 30 fish kites strung from living poles of bamboo, you’re on the same track. Follow the signs to 221, turn right, and if you need it, the JA gas station mechanics will draw you a great map to the next turn off, Kuruson Gorge.

By the side
of the new highway:
Old graves.

First, though, you’ll want to stop in at Family Mart, the first convenience store in a few days. I’ll have a lot more to say about kombinis and food later — a lot more — but after several days in the rain some hot fried chicken and a chu-hi were in order. (No Snickers bars, unfortunately.) Suitably refreshed, it was time for the gorge. Kuruson Gorge was a real find. A small road along a river was marked in my atlas, and seemed preferable to the highway, but I wasn’t expecting some of the most enjoyable hiking in Kyushu. It was a forgotten place, not something you’d go out of your way to see, but all the better for the lack of attention. Map boards and information signs were overgrown and mossy, picnic shelters and fishing huts rotting into ruins; a small logging operation the only human presence. It was raining, and everything dripped. The pale emerald river was wide, with deep pools and sand bars and huge boulders with trees growing on top, peaks on either side hidden in cloud. It was perfect for fly-fishing, and I did see a couple of fishermen before I left the last of the logging trucks behind.

When I say I am
a believer that doesn’t
mean I have a god.

The road soon became a gravel track slowly rising up towards the river’s source. I paused to take a photo with my phone and sent it to Ian, congratulating his choice of atlas as a stroke of genius — a ¥1000 present in Tokyo when it was my turn to be counting down to the next payday. (It may be called the ‘Basic Atlas’, I wrote, but this track is marked!) If you do go this way, though, you’ll eventually come to an unmarked crossroad. A rotting map board indicates a bridge below, and a zigzagging climb up ladders on the other side to a mysterious house on a rock. East, a road climbs up away from the river towards ‘Upper Village’. That wasn’t on my map, however, so I kept going straight ahead, climbing over the fence with the big sign.

(My Japanese still isn’t great, but I’m improving. For the curious, the sign said in full something like this: “Ebino Municipal Council, Miyazaki Prefecture. Road closed. WARNING: Do NOT pass this point. Impassable due to fallen rocks and trees. The road eventually disappears under landslides, and the tracks are deer trails only. Hikers will find themselves clinging to the edge of a cliff 10m above the river, and look up to see the detour they should have taken 100m above. You will attempt to climb the 90% incline with only saplings to hold on to, they will probably give way, and your last thought as you and your stupid cactus plunge to the river will be “Why didn’t you buy the Advanced Atlas, Ian, you cheap, cheap bastard!” So don’t say you weren’t warned.

P.S. If you do ignore this sign and go on, please don’t litter, or else the cute blue elephant will get very, very angry.”)

Past the sign, it gets really overgrown, and the road sort of goes away after a while. It’s pretty cool — you really feel like you’re finally getting off the beaten track. When in doubt, look up, and the road will be above you. As long as you only hold on to living wood, a 20 minute climb will see you safely back on a gravel track slowly rising up towards the river’s source. The next day, you’ll climb out of the gorge and Kumamoto will be laid out below: a patchwork of farms lit up in sunlight like the promised land. Descending, you’ll pass a piggery. Whether because of the pungent odour, or some other reason, there are more crows than a bad director’s idea of a Hitchcock tribute. Hundreds of them, sitting on every surface and filling the sky with their deliberations.

A murder of crows
plots loudly among the eaves
of a piggery.

If, like me, you’re still keen to avoid the highway, another shortcut will take you from Mizukami back up to 1000m and down around the dammed valley that is Lake Shiiba, the road whipping in and out past every single feeder stream. It’s worth it for the late afternoon views of the massive dam wall and the look down on Shiiba, the village jammed into the gorge below the wall. The driveways are so steep that steps are cut into the centre. Kids play baseball on the single field, a postman zips about on his red motorbike, and a Japanese flag flies above a house.

There’s now no avoiding Route 265, and a series of steel bridges and tunnels takes you straight there. There is nowhere to camp for kilometres, just highway above the river, so you should avoid walking down here late afternoon. (If you’re really stuck, a service road takes you down underneath the highway to the relatively dry river bed.) Next is the Kunimi Tunnel, 2777m of dripping echoes and failing orange lamps, hugging the wall like a cockroach. The sound of oncoming traffic is intimidating. First there’s a hum, deepening into a growl, a roar, then the ring of light on the tunnel wall, the rush of air, and finally from around the corner:

Spelunking
at full throttle on
motorbikes!

They bullet past. Your petrolhead neurons fire in futile excitement for a few seconds, then it’s back to trudging in darkness. Once you emerge on the other side it’s only another day and a half to Aso, through some pretty but almost deserted towns. One afternoon I actually began to wonder if I was missing out on a global catalysm, the town was so still.

Small town at midday:
Just barber’s stripes moving and
electronic chimes.

On the hour, or on certain hours, little ditties play over loudspeakers, broadcasted through the entire valley, some of them recognisable as Western lullabies or old hymns. Sometimes there’s an air-raid siren instead.

Red sun rising
apocalyptic behind
jagged caldera

And then you’re there. Descending into the Aso caldera, the town of Takamori ahead at the foot of the central volcano. It was raining when I arrived, but after three long, slow weeks on the road, I was glad to see the peak of my first waypoint. I was finally getting somewhere.

~Ashioto

What goes first on a long journey through Japan: your body or your mind?

A side-project on all my long walks is observing with the keen interest of a sadistic scientist the effects, physical and psychological, of the experiment on the poor subject: myself. And my preliminary conclusion is that my month of walking the back roads of Shikoku wreaked the greatest damage on my psyche. I felt good, physically, for most of my 31 days on the road. So good, in fact, that after my single day off at the Kazura-bashi vine bridge quite early on, during which I was bored, with nothing to read or do save mundane chores, I’d vowed not to have any more. My leg didn’t trouble me after the first few days, and compared to the daily battles with sometimes brutal mountains (well over 300 of them if memory serves) on the Appalachian and Long Trails, most of my walking in Japan was relatively easy. They were long days, and the heat and humidity were often oppressive, but it was just road-walking after all.

Here’s a very rough sketch of my route:

I have no idea how far I walked, but given all the mountain roads, all the twisting and turning that a thick black line can’t show, and given that my average daily mileage was probably 30-40km (18-24 miles)…well, it was far enough. And if you’re wondering why that thick black line ends so suddenly near Matsuyama, well, that’s about where my mind and my body finally got together in a conspiratorial huddle and decided enough was enough. And they sent me the most spectacular of signals that the journey was over — in medical circles it’s known as ‘diarrhoea’. Sorry to send you any graphic images, but from my perspective the image was far more graphic. It was really quite a spectacular semaphore from the deep south that enough was enough.

Chris and I finally rendezvoused a few days before I quit — not that the two incidents were connected. Not entirely. Turns out he’d deviated from his route to veer south from Matsuyama on the off chance that we might be able to meet up. It’s funny, ordinarily I would walk a hundred kilometres in the other direction to avoid most people, but a month (or in his case nearly 50 days) of solitary walking, during which the best conversation, in my case, (post-Chiiori anyway) was with a Frenchman talking in his second language, was actually a powerful incentive. I knew he was in ‘the area’ but with no phone, and with his turned off or behaving badly for most of the time (my body had been the wild card early in my trip, but for Chris it was a succession of equipment hassles) organising a meeting wasn’t easy. At last, as I left Ozu following a tour of the grounds of its truly beautiful castle, he did something I had come to believe was about as likely as me ever going out with another Japanese female. He answered the phone.

“Where are you?” I asked. I was at a convenience store, making the most of a last early-afternoon beer and $1.35 ‘hamburger’ before I re-entered Inconvenient Land.

“I’m looking at a sign as we speak, and it tells me I’m 18km north of Uchiko. Where are you?”

“Just leaving Ozu. It’s about…dunno. Haven’t looked at a map in a while.” Why ruin the surprise by knowing what was ahead? “Think I’m about 10km south of Uchiko.”

We agreed to meet at Uchiko train station at 4:30. That gave him a generous few hours, but he’s a slower walker than me — especially when I’m motivated. Not many people can match my speed on roads when I’m either running away from a woman (my best ever mileage on the Appalachian Trail was when I did a fast 30 miles in my determination to leave a certain female in my dust) or striding towards something or someone I’m actually looking forward to seeing. And I was really motivated on this hot bright afternoon. That morning I’d woken in my campsite behind a roadside park, after my usual three-four hours of sleep, in a valley smothered in fog that seemed to symbolise the funk I’d lately descended into. Here’s the haiku I wrote as I tried to dry off the tent fly:

The valley of fog

That buried Ozu Castle

Is overflowing.

And my low spirits weren’t solely due to my poor sleep. Walking alone can be very soothing, a time for analysis of the big questions, making plans for life-changing actions, or just surrendering to the healing rhythm of endless hours of footsteps and the squeaking of the pack. But it can take you to some dark places as well. If you’re the brooding type, like me, if you tend to pick over the words and actions of yourself and others, the mistakes you’ve made, the lost opportunities, if you’re prone to regrets and pulse-quickening recollections of occasions you imagined yourself wronged, a long walk gives you ample time to descend into your dark places without distraction. You have nobody to share your feelings with but yourself; in my case I tend to find myself consumed by imaginary conversations with real people with whom I debate the opinion I’ve just arrived at, the revelation I’ve just experienced. My journal gave me a nightly opportunity to let some of that darkness out, but I was usually too tired to devote much energy to it. And in truth it was Japan itself that was increasingly setting off the brooding. I wanted to see Chris as much to unload some of the nasty thoughts I was having about the place as to share reminiscences about good times on the walk.

It’s not Japan’s fault. It’s not up to Japan to make itself more amenable to me. I was the visitor — even after almost four years spent there, I was still a visitor. That was one of my revelations — that I would never belong there. That I would never fit in, any more than I fit in back home. The inevitable letdown of the final — mark my words, the final — relationship failure with a Japanese woman, right before Shikoku, didn’t help. The little things that annoyed me — the senseless noise, for example, even in the countryside, or the garbage along the roadside, the retarded quasi-cute warning signs everywhere, the constant staring from car or shop window, the countless times my friendly “Good morning!” was flat-out ignored, the absurd shyness, the outright rudeness or worse, the way most of the attempts at real conversation came either from the obviously mad or the ones that believed I spoke fluent Japanese, the two times I actually felt like an African-American in the Deep South immediately post-segregation – began to accumulate until they were like a tumbleweed of pain rolling around in the pit of my gut. A better person would have let it all slide. But I’m a brooder. I have a low tolerance for what I see as stupidity or impoliteness.

Here I am, for example, a couple of weeks earlier on my worst day in Shikoku, in the accursed village of Kuchiyanai. I don’t want to go into the reasons for my rage (believe me, the picture doesn’t capture the absolute fury that engulfed me in the hour before I took the shot) until I have the space to do the incident justice, but I’ll just say that if you ever have the misfortune (and the time, since the joint is a good hour and a half of hard walking from this godforsaken town) of visiting the Kuchiyanai Youth Hostel, do me a favour and burn it to the ground as you exit. Thanks.

Now, see, I can’t even laugh about it now. Just typing those words, my stomach is all knotted up with anger. But imagine walking on alone into the hills after you’ve felt that kind of emotion. How do you let it out? How do you calm yourself down? No computer, no phone, no friends. No dog to kick or girlfriend to harangue. Good god, that night there was not even any beer (told you the place was cursed). Again, a better person would probably pray or meditate or forgive, and move on. I moved on, alright — to the nearest roadside shrine, where I bunked down right on the floor, in vengeful sacreligousness sans beer, for another sleepness night of reliving the injustice. I was walking before 5:30 the next morning. Bad kharma, getting busted sleeping in a shrine in a pile of cookie wrappers. That’s right: dinner wasn’t exactly a meal to remember either.

So, Uchiko. I walked on, quite fast, and in a couple of hours had made myself at home on a bench outside Uchiko station. Chris didn’t show. I had a shave in the station restroom — still no Chris. I sprayed on some of that piss-weak Japanese deoderant, like I was waiting for a girlfriend, plugged my recharger into the back of a Coke machine, perved at the comely maidens of Uchiko (looking is still allowed in my new rules), caught up on my journal. Watching with some amusement the phalanx of unwanted taxis, their drivers smoking or sleeping or doing stretching exercises in the park, I wrote my only taxi haiku of the walk:

Uchiko station

Where Uchiko taxi drivers

Dream of better things.

Three hours later, after I’d imagined all kinds of nastiness involving trucks and tunnel walls, a familiar visage came shuffling up the street with his dodgy Leki poles (I’m a Black Diamond man) protruding from his pack.

The inevitable walk into the hills ensued, to a wooded park overlooking the town, and the first non-solo stealth-camp of my walk. Then the inevitable catch-up, sitting in the dark on the concrete floor of a lookout tower, drinking the inevitable cans of kombini liquor and telling the inevitable stories. We compared notes till way past my bedtime (8pm), swatting at mosquitoes, enjoying the release of uncharacteristic companionship. We both got to let out a little darkness, though I must admit I had a little more to share than the ever diplomatic Chris. When we finally set up our tents in the dark, it was right there on the path. In the morning when I woke at 5:30 (slept in), I heard the soft patter of a local’s footsteps taking a morning walk right past our shelters, but they’d vanished without a word when I crawled out. I blamed Chris for this change in fortunes — the closest I’d come to a stealth-bust on the trip. Looking at his tent, you’ll not be surprised that he hasn’t been quite so lucky, once being woken by an unimpressed farmer jerking his tent stakes out of the ground.

The jinx effect of Dr Lynch was only beginning — but it’s way, way past my bedtime now, and you’ll have to wait till my next post for the details….

~ GOAT

* So, Four Corners is obviously over for me, the walking/brooding part of it at least. But I’ll be manning the keyboard here at Four Corners Headquarters in beautiful Brisbane; stay tuned for more misadventures from my expedition partner (who should by now have scaled Ishizuchi-san and started towards Tsurugi-san), as well as further reminiscence from yours truly. As well as outlining the circumstances (sans diarrhoea, unless requested) of my departure, I envisage a few more posts focusing on memorable days (some good!) and a kind of day-by-day overview of my journey.

As a shameless personal plug, I have started warding off the post-adventure depression with my own blog, with a somewhat wider field of interests, The Goat That Wrote. Drop by anytime.

Day 26, Uwajima, Ehime

My life has certainly been a lot simpler since I stopped trying to explain my complicated circimstances, the whole Four Corners thing and my nightmare in Hokkaido, my retreat and change of plans, and now my highly unorthodox Shikoku pilgrimage, and just answered the daily Are you a henro? questions with a simple “Hai.” Yes, I am a pilgrim — and to many of the image-conscious Japanese I’ve met, the white temple bandana I’ve taken to wearing was the first clue. I’m a pilgrim, I say, and I don’t attempt the full story (hard enough even in English) unless pressed. Sometimes, in fact, I’m arrogant enough to feel like I’m one of the few real ones in Shikoku. Sure, I’m no Buddhist — I’m no anything. No, I didn’t start at temple # 1 over in Tokushima, and in all likelihood I am not going to follow through to # 88 up in Kagawa. I don’t pray when I reach each temple, nor join in the group chanting sessions that always ensue — I drop my pack, and stroll around the place, trying to get a feel for it, trying to find (not always successfully) a quiet corner where I can imagine the pilgrims of centuries past shuffling through the gate, covered in road dust, close, sometimes, to death (thousands of henro died along the way — the pilgrimage after all was especially attractive to the elderly and the ill, seeking miraculous cures or the cessation of some trouble), grateful to have gotten one step closer to closing the circle. I don’t talk to the Daishi as I walk — I sing rock’n'roll songs, and write dozens of my own. I don’t live by any code of abstenance — it’s a rare day (and an unbearably tragic one) when I don’t start my walk with a can of caffeinated goodness and conclude it with one of amber perfection poured down my grateful throat in an explosion of goodwill for the universe. I look at girls in passing cars and exclaim my appreciation in such profane outbursts as Damn! or Sweet Jesus! And I don’t wear the henro uniform of white pants and jacket daubed with prayers (my orange-sleeved hiking tee is a far safer choice on busy roads); I have no conical kasa bamboo hat (which comes with a rain cover for inclement weather); my stick is not the approved wooden staff but a vastly more efficient Black Diamond lightweight trekking pole. But I think I pass the pilgrim test in more important ways.

A pilgrimage needs first of all to have deep significance to the pilgrim. I’ve already described the long attraction Shikoku has had for me. Every day now is like living the dream. I completed my Shimanto River mini-pilgrimage several days ago, reaching the mouth, battered with angry surf, on a day of wretched weather after following it along its 196km course from its source as a stream in the hills of backwoods Kochi. Since then I have been back on the ‘official’ pilgrimage route; since then I haven’t missed a temple, and have met and talked to several henro, testing the limits of my slowly improving Japanese ability (the best English conversation I’ve had since leaving Chiiori weeks ago has been with a young Frenchman on Ashizuri Cape). But almost all the henro these days do it by car or bus. Sometimes they remind me of stamp collectors or trainspotters, frantically ticking off temples in their albums before leaping back onto the bus and jetting off to the next one. As one henro explained to me, most Japanese don’t have the luxury of seven or more weeks to walk the pilgrimage — which explains why most pilgrims are retirees, but not why even most of the retirees do it at high speed in huge tour groups. I suspect that the God of Convenience is at work on the pilgrim circuit as everywhere in Japan, and that the completed album of beautiful caligraphy is of more importance for its owner than the hardship and deprivation traditionally associated with pilgrimages worldwide. This is why I respect the real, walking pilgrims so much. Most of them are old — many are smokers too, which doesn’t help! — and they are in it for the long haul. A few carry a tent, as I do, and one, a 47-year-old electrician from Nagano who shared my second tsuyadou temple accommodation a couple of nights ago, won my admiration when he told me that he also has a predilection for camping hashi no shita: under the bridge.

A pilgrimage, surely, isn’t supposed to be easy, and nothing about it should ever be convenient (except for beverages). I don’t think the hardship — or just the plain monotony of walking for eight or ten hours a day — will bring me closer to God, but I do think it makes me a better person, or at least a stronger and more self-reliant one. And I am in daily contact with nature, which for me is what ‘God’ means, anyway. For the last few days, for example, I have had wonderfully close contact with two or three snakes per day. This part of Ehime is crawling with them, and the recent hot, humid weather really draws them out to bask on the edges of the paddies and roads. The other day, as I crouched with my camera over my second one in 10 minutes, an older hiker joined me (he was 70 but looked 50) and responded, Mamushi dake wa kowai: “It’s only the mamushi I’m afraid of.” But I haven’t, to my knowledge, had the pleasure yet. There are the tombi, the ever-present raptors — I suppose they would be called kites in English — that soar and dive and wage constant war with the crows above fields and rivers and forests. I’m always amazed that they allow the crows, so much smaller and less ferociously armed, to drive them off. The forests are alive with birdsong. And the fields and gardens are at their verdant peak — my timing could not have been better.

Even among the ‘true’ walking henro, sleeping rough seems to be the exception rather than the rule. Cheap hotels are often the campsite of choice, but I have met a few who will bypass hotel for park and shower for restroom sink. As for me, in 25 days in Shikoku I have only paid for accommodation four times, and I’m hoping my new status as hen na henro (”strange pilgrim”, as I describe myself), will lead to a few more free temple bunks. I have been enjoying my new stink-free lifestyle (soap is allowed now under my pilgrimage rules, so long as it’s not used in natural waterways) and find that shirts and underwear are pretty dry by morning on these balmy nights. I have still not been ’sprung’ (as we say back home) camping illegally in public places. I could write a guidebook on crossing Shikoku on under a thousand yen per day.

Yesterday I had a great chance meeting in the forest. Since entering Ehime prefecture the pilgrim ‘trail’ — nowadays surfaced and busy roads where the pilgrims of yore trudged along dirt tracks — has diverged from the roads each day to lead the very few who follow (even most of the walking pilgrims stick to the tarmac) up and down surviving Edo-era mountain paths and through little mountain villages. You stand a good chance of encountering the generosity often aforded to pilgrims on such a path — I was given three enormous buntan, a kind of gigantic grapefruit grown everywhere down here, recently — and the graves of deceased pilgrims sometimes survive by the trail. The gentleman I met was a 64-year-old from Hiroshima who had already walked the circuit a few years back, in 40 days. A true hiker, he explained with great fondness his hike on New Zealand’s Milford Track, and his plans for the Rockies next year. This time he was doing the circuit anti-clockwise, the route traditionally chosen by those who had committed some great sin that required redress. I think we were both pleased to get the chance to talk to someone on the lonely — and arduous — path. The generosity I’ve experienced continued this morning at a Sunkus convenience store, when a woman rode up on a bicycle and handed me a home-made breakfast of still-warm rice, an umeboshi salted plum and fish cakes. I’d have preferred pancakes, hash browns and fried eggs, but I hiked on in a very good mood and I’m sure I had burned off those carbohydrates by the time I got into Uwashima.

Chris is in Shikoku and it’s just possible we may be able to meet somewhere between here and Matsuyama, if he’s willing to deviate severely from his original course. My plan at the moment is to visit Uwajima Castle, an original, unreconstructed stronghold, and the temples just outside this city, then continue north via the pilgrimage temples, climb Ishizuchizan — and then, we’ll see. My bad knee seems to have healed, a pilgrimage miracle in itself, and like the Appalachian Trail, the Hachijyuhakkashou is turning out to be something of a corridor of chance…

~ GOAT

Fellow Japan hiker Craig Stanton plans to establish a trail across Japan. I think he’s slowly realising what a herculean task that is, but Goat and I have been surprised by the number of people interested in attempting the walk. A trail needs trail notes, and seeing as they give a taste of daily life on the road, I’ve written up some rough notes for the first part of my walk, spiced up for general interest. (I’ll add the boring but most useful info like distances later.)

KYUSHU
Section One: Sata to Kirishima

From Cape Sata, the southern most point of mainland Japan, the first point of significant interest for the north-bound hiker is Kirishima Mountain, part of the spectacular Kirishima-Yaku National Park. A volcano with a series of peaks, craters and lakes, Kirishima-yama includes Takachihono-mine, according to myth the peak marking the site where the gods pulled Japan up out of the primordial sea. What better way to start a journey across this ancient land than to see where it all began?

Curious feeling:
To realise that you smell
just like a wet dog

There is little to say about the first stretch of road, Route 269 from Sata to Miyakonojo, except that it’s the quickest way north. Mostly I got very wet, and if you’re starting in April the chances are that you’ll get wet as well. You get a crash course in tunnel walking in the first couple of days, as the road wriggles up the coast — not the long, well-lit tunnels with elevated pedestrian paths and guard rails you’ll see in the mountains later, but the short, unlit, old tunnels with barely a foot between the white line and the wall. You’ll be glad to have bright clothing, and I was grateful for the wristband reflector Ian had found at a ¥100 shop. (Many tunnels seem to be in the middle of repair, but mostly this just means lots of equipment lying around and electronic signals for the single lane, rather than anyone actually repairing anything.)

In a storm,
I love the slack-jawed
motorists

You’ll get your kicks where you can. When you’re slogging through mud on the side of 269, in the middle of a typhoon that (as I later heard) makes the evening news, the look on people’s faces as they drive by makes it slightly less unbearable. Perhaps, like me, a man will take pity on you, turn his car round, and offer to take you in the opposite direction from where he’s going. I felt sorry for the rain pouring through the open passenger window as I tried to convince him I was okay and wanted to walk ALL of Japan. I think he eventually decided I was a nutter, and sadly pushed the button to close the window. We watched as the window slowly sealed shut, like the airlock of a spaceship, leaving me to the elements.

Rice fields
croaking happily
in the rain

Southern Kyushu has a rather desolate feel. The villages are run-down, roadside restaurants advertising ramen, soba, and udon to hungry walkers are closed, and hardly anyone seems to be out. Blue collar workers drive little trucks down the empty roads with loudspeakers mounted, broadcasting traditional music and recordings of sermons — whether political or commercial in nature I was never sure. The main industries seem to be farming, car repair, and hair dressing, with an occasional pachinko parlour or post office the only building that looks new. The few people about do ingenious things with signs, umbrellas, and green vegetables to avoid looking you in the eye and saying hello. It’s not all bad: you’ll see cherry blossoms heralding spring, tiny plots of rice growing right on the ocean’s edge, and a woman will run out to you and hand you three mandarins.

If you’re camping, you’ll find few good campsites — or maybe you just don’t know where to look yet. I spent one night just north of Nejime on the headland, with the road three metres behind me and the cliff three metres in front, my orange tent catching headlight beams all night, waves crashing on the rocks below. I spent most of that day returning to Kagoshima on the ferry and train to get the fuel pump on my bottle fixed, catching the last ferry back to Nejime. Another night, during a storm, I camped in what turned out to be someone’s driveway.

I’m sorry
for dogs on short chains:
well, almost.

By the time you get to Miyakonojo, you’ll be glad to see the back of Route 269. It probably has as much to with the breaking in (or breaking down) of equipment and muscles as anything else. In any case, things get better. From Miyakonojo, take Route 31 north-west. You might have a bit of trouble getting out of town, but just when you think you’re lost, a giant map will appear on the side of the road. There are some nice rural stretches of road, almost like the ones you imagined before you set out — traditional farm houses, fields, gardens, a few dogs. Be nice to the loquacious woman in the fruit and veg stall and she’ll give you three apples. (It’s always three, I’ve discovered. There might be a cultural reason, but I think three is just the lowest number that feels generous.) When you insist on buying some strawberries in thanks, she’ll give you some very sour salted plums for good measure (”Foreigners don’t like these, but they’re really tasty.”)

Don’t worry, you won’t be able to miss Kirishima Mountain. The name means “fog island”, and the mountain gathers every cloud for 100km to itself. The peaks emerge from the clouds and dominate the sky. Unless you want to do the entire Kirishima Traverse, turn left onto Route 223, towards the shrine where the imperial family come every year to pay their respects to the elder gods. Turn right onto 480, and then it’s a steep 7km hike up a winding road to the park visitor’s centre. The ancient cedar forest is beautiful. The visitor’s centre is a good place to camp, once everyone’s gone home. There’s a closed (or abandoned) camping village 200m further up the road, and the toilets at the visitor’s centre have lights to write by and power points to recharge your phone, ipod, camera, and internet tablet — by now all depleted from the lack of sunshine.

A crow crows
in the deep crater:
echoing

The next morning, finish climbing Takachihono-mine (1574m). Appropriately for the peak marking the origin of Japan, the crater on the way up has good phone reception, if you wave your phone around a bit. As anyone who’s climbed Mt Fuji will tell you, a volcano isn’t always beautiful up close. Barren and stark, with black rock crushed to ash by the footsteps of the countless pilgrims before you, and silent except for a lone crow cawing in the sulphurous crater. The shrine at the base of the final ascent is surprisingly small, almost primitive, little more than a few stones. On a clear day the view from the top is said to be spectacular, but although I managed to get some photos of the summit with blue sky, the weather was already closing in again when I began my descent.

~Ashioto

Next: Kirishima to Aso