Ise Does It - Day 2
06.11.24
19.3Km
One of the reasons I’d set my self the rule around no social media, no news and no email was so that I might avoid hearing of the outcome of the U.S. election. If it didn’t go the way of the folk I love and — by extension — my way, I’d be none the wiser, able to continue in my little Hinoki-scented bubble. As I type that line, I realise just how naive I was and, in some respects, just how selfish a wish that was: “Please, allow me to deny your reality while I walk through the mountains of Japan!” it seems to suggest.
Had I managed to remain properly out of touch, I’d have had plausibly deniability. But when I opened my phone to message my dad, the first two lines of a family chat told me all I needed to know. The opening snippets of messages in other chats only added more colour, if not outright confirmation.
Kalia and I ripped the no-news band-aid off together. I read the headline and the latest count from The Financial Times, careful to avoid scrolling any further down the page. She asked for — and I gave her — a hug. But for all my intense engagement with and outrage at the news in the run-up to the election, I look now across the table towards Kalia’s U.S. passport and can only wonder what it must be like to be a Democrat-aligned American right now.
What was supposed to be an at-most 15 kilometre day turned out to be an almost-20 kilometre day. By the time we reached Tochihara station, my knee was starting to hurt and Kalia had entered what she called the “tunnel vision phase”. That I once considered walking, as Craig Mod did, the full 31.7 kilometres from Iseshi to Kawazoe — the station beyond Tochihara — now seems like madness. Punishment, too, because from the window of the taxi from Iseshi train station to Tamaru, all I could see were car yards, petrol stations, supermarkets, and sports stores. I wasn’t sad to be skipping it.
We made a quick detour at Tamaru to climb the mound upon which the local castle once stood, wandering around its tarp-and-scaffold simulacrum. Sat a short distance away were two old ladies, sun on their backs, deep in happy conversation. anata no shashin o totte mo ī desu ka I said, reading clumsily from my iPhone’s translation app. One of the pair looked shocked and said something back. I looked at Kalia, who speaks some Japanese. “She wants to know if you want to take a photo of her”, she said. I gestured to both of them, they both giggled and both nodded.
I don’t know why taking portraits has been so hard for me, although I suspect that it stems from a pretty profound discomfort with having my own photo taken. There’s a photo of me as a child on the Alte Brüke over the Neckar River in Heidelberg, Germany. Sandwiched between my mother and our friend Karin, 5-year old me is sticking my tongue out as far as I can. Perceived as insolence at the time — and therefore worthy of punishment — it was really just a crude way of saying “I can’t do this anymore”. So why would I subject anyone else to it?
The portraits that I took today — the first I’ve ever openly and intentionally taken — started with a halting, awkward conversation and a feeling of shame, too. They ended with an indelible memory of a moment in which I connected with people I’ve never met, and never will meet again. And all because I chose my fascination for them and their stories, rather than the fear. If this all sounds a little earnest, so be it. It’s something I can be proud of.
Two more firsts for today: our first mountain pass — the Meki-toge — and at the lookout at the top, Kalia’s first Tim-Tam. It was a special moment.
The walk from the lookout to Tochiahara was mostly farmland and farmhouses that, but for the shoes at the front door, could almost all have been abandoned. Having lived in the Netherlands where open blinds were the norm and open nudity beyond them not uncommon, the shut-tightness of housing here surprises me. Sighting a Honda Beat across a tea field, abandonned under a tarp next to a remarkable post-modern house, was a rare moment of levity in an are-we-there-yet kind of stretch.
Kalia had booked us in to farmstay accommodation a short drive from Tochihara station. We figured we’d have to call for our lift, but like magic, our driver was already there. Honestly, some kind of spell must have been cast over the whole afternoon, because from the station he took us far up a valley to collect the sweetest spring water I’ve ever tasted. Then at the farmhouse, our host took us to from one building to the next to chop cedar and cypress, light a fire, and make rice the old fashioned way.
In between lessons on Japanese country life, he told us about his travels — Korea, Canada, and Hawaii — and his appreciation for the folk who walk the Kumano Kodo and keep the tradition alive. He says his hospitality, unprofitable as it is, is a way of helping pilgrims along their way: it’s what his family’s done for a hundred and twenty years. If his ancestors fed every pilgrim as well as he and his wife fed us, there’s a lot of happy folk out there.
We end the night with his wife offering us each one of her previous collection of kokeshi. She’s giving these wooden dolls away to the people that stop by this place and I get the sense she’s preparing for a different stage of life. She wants us to have something happy to remember this day by. She hopes the cute heads of our kokeshi will help us put Trump’s out of our minds. With everything that’s going on and that might be about to happen, it’s a parting gift I gladly take.