Day 35: Ōzu-Matsuyama
Well, wouldn’t you know it, but that wasn’t French sparkling wine in the lounge yesterday evening: it was actual honest-to-God Champagne. It’s been a long time since I had any of that! Damn what a lovely treat. And dinner afterwards was excruciatingly French, right down to the miniscule portion sizes; it was nowhere near enough food for this hungry, hiking Bear, but whatever - I bought a snack on the way back home at the 7-Eleven but fell asleep without eating it because that’s what this bear does when he’s exhausted.
I slept incredibly well - woke up early-ish, had a delicious orange juice from the complimentary minibar, and ran another bath in the enormous hinoki bathtub. I lay there quietly contemplating my incredibly good fortune for quite some time - I’m healthy, I have an incredible husband, I live in a comfortable house surrounded by nature and friends… I’ll spare you all of the details but yeah. Hashtag gratitude, motherfuckers. I am one lucky Bear.
Breakfast was another experiment in severe minimalism - small portions, but exquisite. Funny, but although I’m maybe technically hungry after meals like that, the incredible luxury of it makes me not want to eat anything more. After a month of grilled fish for breakfast (large portions, nothing special), I was happy to have a small portion of really good fish for a change. Heh.
I packed my trash, left the unopened bottle of sparkling wine in the room (lovely that you’d offer it as a souvenir, but no way am I dragging a heavy bottle around with me until I feel like drinking too much), and headed to the office to check out. After paying, I finally did the thing I was fairly certain I’d never do: ask someone for help. Given that it was a fancy hotel & given that they generally spoke excellent English, I figured it would be okay to ask them to call a tiny country inn and book a room for me - there’s one specific night for which there are no good sleeping options other than one tiny place that’s notorious for being run by a cranky old Japanese dude who only takes reservations over the phone. Why yes, they’d be delighted to help, so I stood there for what seemed like ten minutes while they spoke with that innkeeper, stopping to ask me questions like “okay, so where are you staying the night before and which temples are you going to be visiting before you get to the inn?” It was kind of fascinating to hear the conversation - not that I understood most of it - and I of course was cringing at the time and effort they were going through, but hey: I think I need to stop already with assuming that no one does anything unless they’re paid to do it and remind myself that many of us just do stuff because we enjoy being of service
Boom. Room booked, problem solved - so what to do with my day? Traditionally, there are something like 50 kilometers from Ōzu until the next temple, but there aren’t many places to stay along the way, none of them are online, and on the whole it’s a bunch of road walking, albeit rural - and I felt like taking a break, so I decided I’d walk to the Ōzu train station, put my pack in a locker, walk to the town of Uchiko (maybe 15 kilometers), explore that, then take a train back to Ōzu, retrieve my pack, and then take a couple of trainspotter-y trains to Matsuyama, the capital of Ehime prefecture.
So that’s what I did. No problem finding a coin locker big enough for my pack; there is a bekkaku temple along the way, about 5 km from the station, so I figured that’d be my first stop. That, I’m afraid, was the most depressing temple I’ve seen yet. Not only did it burn down recently, it’s been replaced by an extremely pedestrian building and it’s now more or less in the middle of a cloverleaf highway onramp, so it’s noisy as hell and feels like a rest area. Ouch. I also ran into the smoking European dude along the way; I was right behind him for a while but he had a habit of crossing streets even when the crossing sign was red, so he outpaced me pretty quickly. I was amused, though, to see him taking off from B8 at top speed, blowing past the Japanese-only sign that points the way to the secret feature and the only real reason I wanted to go: Kobo Daishi (again, he’s the dude who brought Shingon Buddhism to Japan and who’s basically the guy responsible for the pilgrimage) apparently once spent the night under a bridge here and slept memorably poorly, so there’s a sculpture and shrine of Kukai sleeping under the bridge here (noisy as fuck, because not only is it under a busy road, but there’s now an expressway over head as well - poor fucker can’t get any rest even thousands of years later!) as well as a carp-feeding station. Yes, you can express your devotion to Kukai by chanting sutras and feeding fish underneath a bunch of traffic. Awesome!
All through the morning, though, the walk was the worst kind of roadside walk: heavy traffic, narrow verges, and as un-tranquil as it gets. As stated before, that’s the one time I’ll get out my earbuds, so today was a Severed Heads day for some reason. Strangely, Dressed In Air came on at just the right moment:
Once there was a time when I could say that I was dressed in air
Now I'm not so sure
Once there was a time when I could say that I was in the right
Now I'm not so sure
Maybe one day we'll meet under a bridge
Indeed. (Whatever that’s supposed to mean.) Anyhow, I fed the carp - and a group of pilgrims arrived with a guide to properly recite the sutras, which was beautiful. Again: I am a lucky Bear.
From there, more road walking - ugh - until finally the trail left the main road, crossing the river to a smaller, quieter town that was surprisingly quaint, with lanterns painted with iris and maple lining the old, narrow, main street. Then, out of nowhere, something especially interesting popped up:
Whoa. What a stunning image - and I know the text is small here, so I’ll paraphrase: from what I could gather, Matsumoto is famous for something called Galaxy Express 999; he left behind a picture painted in his old elementary school reminding children to not lose sight of their hopes and dreams; I chose to re-think this as what so many of my friends felt as children: that we were stuck in this place, that our true selves and richer lives lay elsewhere, if only we could find a way out of there. And that picture, well - he was apparently mesmerized by trains running through the rice fields as a kid, so who wouldn’t paint a picture of the Galaxy Express coming to take you away to a better world? Amazing.
(And as an aside, of course another reason why the countryside feels so depopulated might have something to do with the Second World War: because the big cities were largely destroyed, children and families had to relocate to the countryside - maybe over time, once they were able to get back to the city, they never looked back? I wonder…)
I stopped for a cold bottle of salt lemonade and watched a repairman fix a vending machine. I kept walking; just before the trail finally left the road and went into the forest, there was a small coffee stand with coffee and doughnuts, so why not have lunch there? It was good:
So friendly - it made my day receiving a doodle of a bear with a friendly message. And then it wasn’t too much longer until I reached my destination, the town of Uchiko. I didn’t know much about the place, so I went into the first museum thing I saw; the town theater was under renovation, so only the dressing room was open for visiting, but wow, an English-speaking volunteer showed me videos on her iPad, showed me the mechanics of the theater, and discussed bunraku and kabuki theater as well. As always, that’s a win all around: a retired person gets to share something interesting about their home town, money changes hands to renovate the building, and I, the tourist, am massively entertained. The ticket came with entry to a couple of other places; I now know that sumac trees were planted here in the 1800s and used to create wax, which earned a shit ton of money until paraffin replaced that stuff, for example. Overall, it was a fantastic afternoon exploring a village that still felt like it was somewhat stuck in time.
And then, well, time to scoot along to finish my day. I hightailed it back to the train station, bought the cheapest ticket, realized that’d mean waiting an extra hour, then spoke to the station agent who helped me get a supplementary ticket to undo my mistake. Somehow, she managed to do it for 300 yen less than the automated machine was asking for, so even better, right? Back to Ozu station, pick up my bag, and realize I’ve got a 45 minute wait for the slow train on the old, coastal line to Matsuyama. No problem, the tourist information office mixed up a sample of the town’s hipster cola syrup (verdict: eww, no thank you), I found a FamilyMart and ate an egg sandwich, and then climbed aboard a very, very small train.
Back in the day, if you took the train from Matsuyama to Ozu and then onwards to Uwajima, you did it on a slow coastal route; much later, they built a newer, inland route with a lot of tunnels to make the journey faster. Along the old route, there’s a train station that used to be closer than the sea than any other train station in Japan - it’s famous! It was wild seeing that almost every passenger on the train today had their video cameras, tripods etc. out and recording just because they were finally going to see that station. And, well, I miiiiiight have taken the slower, older route for the exact same reasons.
Finally, just to really hammer home my trainspotter cred, I got off of the train in suburban Matsuyama at Iyoshi station and walked across the street to Gunchu Port station, which is run by a different, private train company that built the first train line on the island all the way back in 1888; their main train station is not the same as the JR (Japan Railways) station, but my hotel is there (surprise, built on top of the station), and not only is it owned and operated by the Iyotetsu railway company, but… well, that’s a story I’ll tell tomorrow. For now, though, I’m going to head to an underground food court across the street, eat tempura, and then I’ll hit the hay.
Random notes: It wasn’t planned, but I was out walking both before and after school today, meaning that large groups of schoolchildren were out at the same time I was. Each town had different color caps; Niiya, for example, the artist’s hometown with irises as their logo, had iris-colored caps for their schoolchildren, but other towns tended to have yellow. Walking back to the train station at the end of the day, a little girl looked up at me, broke into a huge grin, and yelled SANTA CLAUS! So yeah, that’s a thing on multiple continents for me now 😀
At breakfast today, there were two other Western men there, both with beards, both worn way too short. Guys, come on: it’s awesome that you’ve grown a beard, but you really don’t have to keep it as short as a Hustler centerfold’s pubic hair. Feel free to let it go a little but longer. (Prince, as always, is the exception to the rule here.)
I did my laundry tonight, go me! Can’t wait to have proper sock functionality again. I’m going to need that the day after tomorrow when I get back on the trail - I’m skipping 35 kilometers between Uchiko and Kumakogen. I’m sure it’s lovely, but I would like a short break, a visit to Montbell, and a nice hotel for a couple of nights more.
BTW, if Matsumoto’s picture seems familiar, you might recognize it from a bunch of Daft Punk videos. That’s right, he’s also responsible for Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem.