Ise Does It - Day 8
12.11.24
23Km
Craig Mod, the inspiration for this newsletter and, indeed, this entire walk has talked about the incredible untapped potential of Owase, the city in which we start our day.
As we walk to a cafe for breakfast, a quick visit to pay our respects at the shrine behind us, I find it hard to see what he’s talking about. So much of the city is shuttered — so much of it reverting back to rubble — that I wouldn’t know where to start its rehabilitation. That said, you could do a lot worse than making sure that our breakfast stop, a Shōwa-era cafe called Iso, stays open for generations to come.
In a recent newsletter, Craig describes the Shōwa era, its history, and its aesthetic and I suggest you go take a read (and subscribe. His emails are a joy). But if you want to see Shōwa right here, right now, then here you go:
As Craig says, Shōwa style peaked in the 80s and this place just screams it. The food, the fit-out, and even the soundtrack — yacht rock and sax jazz — was on point. Painfully so, because Kalia and I were the youngest customers in there by two decades at a minimum. An octogenarian man gently guided his confused, apologising wife — sumimasen sumimasen sumimasen… — to her seat. A daughter in her 70s shouted loudly to her mother in her 90s as they worked through their breakfast set of toast, egg, yoghurt, and salad in the booth next to us. Once upon a time, this place would have been a beacon of an optimistic present. Now, it’s a deeply charming relic of a fast-fading past.
When Japan first properly entered my consciousness, it was the early 1990s and everything about it seemed futuristic. The cars, the bullet trains and the electronics were all sources of immense excitement to a kid growing up in Australia. Anything seemed possible when Japan put its mind to it.
But on my first trip here in 2016, it was obvious that my abstracted projection of Japan-as-the-future was far from my experience on the ground. Deep tradition played a far greater roll in contemporary life than I’d imagined.
But walking through towns like Owase, or Mikisato or Kata, there’s a different version of Japan-as-the-future emerging, one in which nature reclaims towns and cities that empty out because there are no young people to keep them alive. I love Craig’s optimism for a city like Owase and his vision for it becoming a centre for Kumano Kodo pilgrims, but it seems that time is very much counting against it.
Today, I learned the stones’ lessons: each step will take the time it takes and if you trust me, I will support you. It was a good lesson to learn because when ascending 697 metres of vertical to crest Mount Yakiyama, you can bet we climbed a shitload of stairs. Each stair became my friend, each step a moment of dialogue between me and my environment, and although it would be a fabrication to call the climb easy, without the anger of yesterday, it certainly was easier.
It was a delightful quirk of language I discovered on Day 2 that made this new relationship possible.
In English, we say the mountain water: no possession. In Japanese, you say the mountain’s water: the water belongs to the mountain. Therefore, — I reckoned, in my highly-suggestible state — the water could be considered a gift from the mountain to me.
Now I have no idea how this resonates for the average Japanese person (probably not, because according to Kalia they don’t talk about the cow’s milk or the chicken’s meat) but this idea of nature possessing something and gifting it to me has subtly changed how I see the environment around me.
At the peak, we rested and ate well: pork buns, onigiri, mikan, salad, and big bottles of iced coffee. A message from a friend reading this newsletter, sent a couple of days ago but lost in iMessage purgatory since, finally landed in my inbox. A short note of resonance and recognition, it blew the doors off my heart and again I let the tears roll through to deep laughter. Each time this happens, it seems to get easier and easier, and the clarity and connection that results more and more stable. It’s a wonderful feeling.
The walk down Mount Yakiyama went easily, the stones still agreeable and dry, but by the time we’d reached Mikisato and had covered 10 intense kilometres, we still had another 5 to go to Kata. Hoping for an easy walk along a road, the trail instead started to cut through forest again, sending us up and down the face of a jagged peninsula. I was getting clumsy tired, the kind that leads to rolled ankles on rocks unseen in the lowering light of the evening. I bellowed out a few FUUUUUUUUUCK YOOOOOOOOOOOUS! to no one in particular and to Kalia’s delight. It felt good to let go of the anger rather than bottling it up as resentment.
We shuffled towards Kata station, passing a barber shop whose pole had long stopped spinning. I took the faded Honda Life parked alongside as a sign that the proprietor might still be living in the back of the shop. Given the state of the rest of the town though, it could simply have been a cruel joke.
After a short wait, we slumped in to the back of a Toyota kei car in serious need of new wheel bearings and shocks. Our driver was unperturbed as she spooled up the turbo and fairly drifted us to our destination, the tiny fishing port of Kajika. As you might imagine, the fish we were served for dinner was superb.
Another long day tomorrow: 25 kilometres and about 1300 metres of vertical across a number of passes. But the walking is coming so easily now, and there’s a sense of gravity starting to build towards the conclusion.
See you in the morning/afternoon/evening!