Day 32: Tsushima-Uwajima
If you happen to know who Roger Meyer is, then you’ve probably heard of Uwajima, albeit indirectly. And if you haven’t heard of Roger Meyer, that’s an extremely old-school Pacific Northwest dad joke: in 1922, a guy named Fred Meyer started a grocery store in Portland, Oregon; six years later, a Japanese immigrant named Fujimatsu Moriguchi founded a food truck in Tacoma, Washington called Uwajima-ya, named after the city in Ehime, Shikoku, Japan where he started his first business before emigrating to the USA. I used to live in Redmond, Washington; while I was there, I was always happy to stop by Uwajimaya to get take-away J food to take home for supper. So, as you can imagine, it’s been a little bit funny seeing Uwajima on highway signs for the past couple of days; I didn’t know that the PNW grocery store was named after a town!
I slept well last night and woke up incredibly early; there wasn’t much to do other than to go over plans, maps, and such one more time. One of today’s recurring thoughts was this: is it more fun to plan a trip than it is to experience it? And is it more fun to walk, or to have walked? Without a question, it’s a lot of work at times (in the sense of physical effort) to get somewhere; is the getting there actually fun at all, or is it only when you’ve arrived that you feel good about? (Yeah, I’m skeptical of the whole the-journey-is-the-destination crowd.) For me, it really is more about the planning than the doing; there’s something wonderful about waking up in a new town, not really knowing much about it, and then lazing in bed while trying to figure today’s game plan. Before I walked into Uwajima this afternoon, I didn’t know the first thing about the place - but now that I’ve been here a few hours, I know a thing or two about it. Take, for example, this giant wooden dick:
That’s right, it’s a fertility shrine! Sadly, when Japan decided to get all modern and stuff in the late 1800s, they got rid of, I don’t know, probably thousands, if not tends of thousand, of dongs. Thankfully, the good citizens of Uwajima left this shrine mostly alone - although one creepy old dude did build a sex museum behind it that’s apparently just an excuse to show a bunch of (straight) porn. (I skipped the museum, thanks.)
I also had completely forgotten about the sinking of the Ehime Maru in 2001, although the name rang a bell. The memorial for that’s here in town as well. But wait, I should back up and start at the beginning; this isn’t some tedious out-of-order Christopher Nolan movie, after all.
So. I woke up early. I went over my plans. Should I stick with my plan of a zero in Matsuyama, or should I walk more? Should I try to find something cheaper, or should I stick with the hotel room I booked in the center of town there? Stay tuned! Breakfast was a bottle of Georgia iced caffe latte (yum) and an apple pie (think unfrosted Dolly Madison), which was (decidedly not yum). Remembering yesterday’s woes, I forced myself to wait 20 minutes before leaving just in case I had to, uh, use the facilities. Not really, so I figured I was good to go. The washing machine had gotten rid of the visual evidence, but not all of the evidence, but hey: nothing to be done but walk, so I walked.
Today’s walk looked like it was going to be relatively short and easy, but when the trail got to a 1,700 meter tunnel with busy traffic, it was a no-brainer to take a many-kilometer detour up and over the old pass in the forest, which was lovely and calm and very, very wet. Not much to report other than that the trail kind of ended by an enormous garbage incineration facility and then proceeded to join up with the main road into Uwajima for a very, very long time: yet another road walk, ho-hum. I did stop at a Joyfull for an early lunch; that was okay, not great, but it was nice to have a rest. A lovely older Japanese lady came up to me and asked me where I was from; in keeping with the Roger Meyer jokes, I said “oh, Seattle” and she said she’d spent three months there, once, and asked me if I knew Uwajimaya. Why, yes! And then I headed back to my table to eat some marginally shitty food I decided should’ve been listed as “unintentional chicken sashimi” on the menu - but hey, it’s Japan, right, so I can probably survive nearly raw, chicken, right? Well, twenty minutes after leaving, it decided to make a run for the exit, but hey, no problem, when you’re walking through a small city there are convenience stores everywhere so hello Family Mart, thank you for your weirdly dirty toilet (a first time for everything!).
The walk just kept going and going; nothing much interesting, just city streets and what felt like an overly long walk to the hotel, the JR Clement built on top of the train station. When I got there, the old dude keeping watch over the front desk said I couldn’t check in until 3 pm, but he did agree to look after my backpack, so I was stuck with doing as much tourist stuff as I could in two hours. No problem!
One of the few Japanese castles still in its original location exists here, so that was an obvious place to go (as was the fertility shrine); that was a fine walk to get there & the castle had a great view out over the city and port.
But other than that, what else? It was threatening to rain, so it didn’t make sense to try to visit a garden; there were a couple of tiny museums as well, but either inconveniently located or not particularly interesting to me. That was fine; I headed back down the hill to the town’s tourist information center and had a fine conversation with them; I was curious if there was any kind of Uwajimaya-related memorial in town (answer: no, but she’d been to Seattle once when she was younger and loved it) - oh, and could you please recommend somewhere for supper? Why, yes, of course! That came with an explanation of the local specialty, a take on taimeshi, or “sea bream rice” - the difference being that the sea bream (a kind of fish) is raw when they add it to rice, and so is the egg - not something seen anywhere else in Japan and not something for the timid. They also do something called satsuma rice here, which apparently involves mandarin orange peel, miso, sea bream bones, barley tea, and God knows what else… OK, mission acquired.
When I got back to the hotel at 15h00, my room was available; JR (Japan Railways) must’ve built this place in the 1990s, I’m guessing; the train station’s been here for 110 years, but this feels modern, albeit in a very dated way. The room’s great; it’s nice to be back in the ‘modern’ part of Japan. I had a nice long bath, happily discovered that the restaurant she’d recommended had both kinds of rice available as part of the same dinner set, and had a brief nap before heading out to dinner. Here’s a picture:
I got there early, so there wasn’t an issue getting a seat at the counter (but my God, that place was packed on a Sunday night!). There were maybe eight menus (specialties of the week, drinks, children’s, take-away, limited-time sake offers, you name it), but Google Translate and I made quick work of it and I put my order in: one standard dinner set with both kinds of Uwajima rice (those are the two bowls in the lower-left hand corner of the picture; satsuma on the left, sea bream on the right, with two empty rice bowls next to them and the actual rice just above) and one 300 mL order of some random sake called I think SNOW HAT. Hey, sounds good to me. Ten minutes later, boom, here you go: an absolute feast. Delicious stuff, although I have to admit that the raw fish/raw egg/rice bowl was distinctly, uh, cummy, texture-wise; I can see why it would be a non-starter for most people Not From Here. But yeah, I ate everything. The satsuma rice was especially interesting as it wasn’t sweet, but also wasn’t exactly savory; I’d love to see what a Californian chef could do with the same basic ingredients. Stephen Wade? This seems like a challenge you’d easily meet…
I finished, I paid, I went back to my hotel room, and of course I called my Mom for Mother’s Day. Hey, I remembered for once! If you have a Mom, heads up, you might want to do as well…
Random notes: Not much on the wildlife front today, but hey, another butterfly!
Lots of wine for some reason today! I noticed that 7-Eleven is selling house brand Chilean Merlot for four bucks - what a deal! The free happy hour at the hotel had both white and red Carlo Rossi, all the way from California’s Central Valley, aka my home town. And the very fine restaurant I ate at also had California wine as its cheap option - Franzia. Eeesh. It’s kind of funny, but cheap wine here really seems to mean Californian. I hope that doesn’t change in response to new tariffs, but I suspect it will - I’ve already seen cheap French imports cropping up here and there…
One thing that seems different about Japan this time is the lack of vending machines that sell alcohol. I remember every hotel I stayed at ten or twenty years ago having a lot of vending machines selling beer, but they mostly seem to be gone now - I wonder if that’s true or if it’s just something I’m imagining.
Much like Nakamura, Uwajima has an enormous shopping street that’s covered (think outdoor mall). This one felt much, much bigger and still had more than a few tenants in business - but if it’s late enough on a Sunday afternoon, it looks pretty dead…
I hope someone is a covered-shopping-street nerd and has documented all of these things - they are kind of cool, even if they seem hopelessly outdated in 2025. Even better, Uwajima has covered the sidewalks almost all the way to the train station as well, so it’s easy to get around town even if it’s raining, which I gather is almost all of the time here. No wonder Fujimatsu Moriguchi felt right at home when he got to Tacoma!