The morning cool makes it feel earlier than it is, due to a light breeze blowing off the bay, and the shade of the canopy spreading massively above. A couple of the camphors of Asuka Jinja would have been saplings around the time that the nobility began passing by in their finery. It was shirtsleeves for me as I listened to one of the village elders run down some statistics about the area’s depopulation, the most startling fact being that this village of Kata has gone nineteen years without a single birth. It explains in some way why the beautiful old school that once stood nearby here had recently been razed, replaced by a bland new structure now serving as a community center for the elderly. A similar fate could befall more of this pleasant little place, as one in six houses stands empty.
But there is still a vitality here. The old shrine gives a feeling of being somewhere in mainland Asia rather than Japan. A timelessness, a placelessness. This pan-Asian feeling can be found anywhere across the continent, in a pristine environment far older than man. The sea is part of it. Fishing communities anywhere have a universal rhythm, one dictated by the fickleties and moods of nature. This one has a number of fishing charters, including one couple who live on their floating dock, behind a long dead coffee shop. Their linked flotillas are crawling with mewing cats, and the cluster of empty beer cans on the table betrays what was probably a usual part of life out here.
The elder escorts me through the village to the start of my climb, up Hobo-tōge. I smile at the homonymic pun, but my smile leaves me soon enough. The climb is steep and rocky.
I could never picture the royals doing some of these tougher trails, but the evidence is surely there. The local elder had mentioned that they’ve found traces of a path even older than this one. And closer to the next village, one older still. But I, as had they, take a long rest at the site of the old teahouses situated at what I take to be the top. Yet the path continues to rise, then fall, and rise again, a trick repeated a number of times. In walking the road westward, in the direction of the Kumano shrines, the descents are longer than the ascents. But this one deceives in continuing to rise, and one can never let down one’s guard.
My feet again meet sea-level on the edge of Nigishima, the shooting location for one of my favorite Japanese films. Himatsuri (Fire Festival) is the study of local people living in harmony, and sometimes at odds, with their natural environment. It is beautiful and lyrical at times, though I hate the ending, which ironically, is the reason the film was made in the first place. Today, all is quiet but for some fisherman offloading the morning catch.
The Ise-ji climbs steeply out of the village, literally through a house disappearing into the hillside. Tiles from the bath jut from the earth like a set of teeth spilled in a vicious bar fight. The ascent levels out surprisingly soon, the trail continuing as a pleasant undulation through cedar forest.
The beach town vibe of Atashika seems a pleasant place to stay a night, especially if doing the walk in weather warm enough to swim. The trail again climbs steeply out of town, before a brief stretch of forested trail at the top leads me through the front garden of a pleasant woman hanging her laundry on a pleasant day, and past the coop of some rather raucous chickens.
After a brief pop-in to Hadasu Jinja and its vast views, I drop drop drop down to the town proper, with a quick detour over to Jofuku-no-Miya, dedicated to Chinese alchemist Xu Fu, who crossed the waters in search of the elixir of life. (He never returned from his 210 BC voyage, so I suppose it could have gone either way.) An ancient woman gingerly makes her way uphill from the train station, a walk that could be her own version of the elixir of life. A few others are out resuscitating the vegetable plots after the long winter. A massive boulder field contains the former site of Otake-chaya teahouse, but I get no place to rest as I climb again out of town toward Obuke-tōge.
I reach the pass, then climb the forested Kannon-no-michi, which is the more atmospheric, if not more challenging, of the two passes on this section. It is a wonderful roller-coaster stretch that rises and falls beside more of those Shishigaki stone walls, with a rewarding view of the upcoming Matsumoto-toge and the crescent of shoreline beyond. I detour at the top to the old Tomari Kannon ruins, in the process of being rebuilt. There are no workmen here today, so I sit and recharge with some chocolate before pushing on, finally reaching baths and beer and food at the oasis of Hotel Nami.
The morning light nudges me up the Iseji’s final pass, Matsumoto-tōge. The tall Jizo statue atop the pass is bullet-scarred, collateral damage in the attempted separation of Buddhism and Shinto in the early days of the Meiji period. I follow a lateral trail that heads through the forest toward the Onigajō ruins. Rather than following a straight line, this path too rises and falls, but the three directions of sea views proves the effort. Then quickly back down the other side toward Kumano City, whose highlight is the Hana no Iwaya Shrine, considered by some to be the oldest shrine in Japan.
At Arii, I cross the highway and enter a grove of pine trees. From the heights of yesterday, I could see these pines extending all the way down the coast, planted in earlier times as a wall to slow the encroach of future tsunami. Breaking through the other side, I see that I am meant to walk a concrete berm which, although it allows me great views of the sea, is all I will get for hours. Looking at my map I note a parallel path through the trees themselves, which though equally monotonous, will at least give me a softer surface on which to tread. I decide to split the difference, and pick up the beach trail further on. It goes on like this for the next ten kilometers.
Finally the trail leads me inland, climbing diagonally toward the forests above. I hadn’t expected a climb today, and am surprisingly more fatigued that expected, so take a break at Yokote Enmei Jizo. The path that follows is a nice wooded traverse along the upper edge of civilization, but all too soon I descend through a confusing spaghetti plate of overlapping roads and highways. This final stretch is fairly uninspiring, up until a bouncy iron suspension bridge that crosses the Kumano River. The sky is growing dark as I enter the grounds of Hayatama Taisha, where the old road ends not with footfalls but with a pair of claps.
