Long before coming to Japan, I’d been intrigued by the Kumano Peninsula, that geologic mandala haunted by gods, and by the holy mountain men who set out to meet them. The roads too that traverse the area had great appeal not only to me but to the nobility of a millennium before, whose pilgrimages were so popular that their great numbers were referred to as a parade of ants.
Over my decades in Japan, I’ve walked all the routes, including the lesser-traipsed “connective tissue” sections that conjoin them. All these routes received UNESCO world heritage status in 2004, with the Nakahechi section proving the most visited, paired as it is with Europe’s Camino de Santiago pilgrimage. Yet somehow the Iseji section maintains the most charm, harkening back to what all the old trails would have looked like in times past, climbing a series of mountain passes separated by long stretches of farmland in the north, and punctuated by fishing villages in the south. In the modern day, these liminal sections have been well built upon, and one is tempted to skip them by train (which is not necessarily inadvisable). But those with time and perseverance can find plenty to discover over the week or so that it takes to walk the old road.
Obvious from the name, the Iseji links the Kumano Shrines with the Ise Grand Shrines that are not only the domain of Japan’s premier Shinto deity, but were one of the few tourist destinations for feudal period commoners whose movements were strictly controlled by the ruling Shogunate. Standing before Ise’s innermost shrine, I offer thanks for my own freedom of movement, which leads me along the gravel path, as the spherical form of the residing Sun Goddess is just beginning to enter the heavens.
Ise’s outer shrine is an hour’s walk away, through the fascinating Furuichi section that had once been lined with brothels and inns. Had this been 150 years before, I expect it would have been quite the lively scene, as one of the five major pleasure quarters of Japan. Today all is quiet, just a few cycling school children. One of the inns, Abura-ya, was the scene of a multiple murder in 1796, which soon inspired a popular kabuki play, Ise Ondo Koi no Netaba, But it, and most of the other inns, have been replaced by bland new suburban homes. Only Asakichi Ryokan remains, stacked up in a jumble of wood upon the side of a hill. The name infers that it originally dealt in hemp cloth, as the Ise region had long been dotted with shops handling silk and hemp for offerings to the Grand Shrines.
Beyond the outer shrine are the occasional stele denoting where the Meiji Emperor had stopped while on his own pilgrimage to Ise in 1869. What was going through his mind as he stood before the most holy of shrines to Amaterasu, his mythological ancestor? Much of the scenery I am passing through was right out of his own journey, as the countryside looks to have changed very little out here, in the old homes and reasonably unspoiled rural landscape.
Unlike the Emperor, one could simply take the train out to Tamaru, as here is the true start of the Iseji, Tamaru is one of those in-between places characteristic of Japanese towns connected by rail line. With a character neither rural nor urban, history and charm seem to have hopped a train toward other places. I long to do the same, after a set of looping masugata right-angle turns detour me through a quiet neighborhood, then dumps me onto the unpleasant and busy Route 13. This stays unpleasant and busy for far too long, but I enjoy the way the hydrangeas are coming in, and how the fading beauty of the azaleas still commands equal attention.
Big concrete Fudō-ji temple fails to move me. But it is development’s last hurrah, and I move deeper away from the symmetry of structures to follow the curves of a more natural landscape. I finally leave tarmac and begin the climb over Meki-tōge, whose name bears the curious characters of “Female Demon.” Recent legends state that there was a demon who ate travelers along this stretch, but all I see are traces of ox-cart wagon tracks, which lead to the deep cutaway of rock that marks the pass. I take lunch at a small Kannon altar, then descend to pop out of the forest beside a dam that looks more like an alpine lake. After the labor of the albeit brief climb, a swim would be in order, but on a day hotter than this one.