A Flood Day to Dry Hard

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The news tells me that today there is an excessive heat warning in place in Wakayama. My oh-so-reliable weather application tells me that it will be cloudy all day. The gods split the difference. As I exit the bus unprepared for anything other than heat or cloud, the heavens split open in a thunderous rage of fury.

I am at Kumano-Nachi Taisha. As the thunder rolls over the sky I manage to take just one photograph of a torii gate and the mountains beyond, right then, before the rain catches up with the thunder. Luckily for me, there is a shop, so I enter, purchase, then poncho up.

I duck inside the Treasure Hall. No photos allowed, but I explore freely. I wrote about the Nachi Pilgrimage Mandala yesterday, but seeing the real thing up close is something else. I enjoy the other art, artefacts, simple objects from a time lost in the past. Most of the treasures here were discovered in 1918, but are from around the 10th century, with the shrine itself being 1,700 years old.

Stepping out of the Treasure Hall, the rain has intensified fivefold, and some of the ground has already flooded. People cower with umbrellas.

The rainwater crashes down and smashes into the roof of the shrine like a torrent of broken glass, slicing through the air with a merciless, unyielding force. I have never experienced rain like it. The raindrops actually hurt.

I came for the waterfall. Or so I believed. Right now, I feel like I’m inside one. I struggle to see where the waterfall could even be in comparison to the falling water. A monk passes me, dressed in dark blue. He carries an umbrella and seamlessly manoeuvres the flooding and the puddles, calm as you like.

Legend has it that the first emperor of Japan, Emperor Jinmu, found the waterfalls when his boat landed on the Kii Peninsula and he saw something shining in the mountains. At the time, he had been following a Yatagarasu (a mythical three-legged crow sent by the gods as a guide).

I follow the path down the mountain toward Nachi Falls. The sky bellows with more thunder, the road is full of water. Am I walking in the rain? Or am I swimming in a river? At points the water is knee-high. The drains can’t handle it. I can barely handle it, but I persevere.

I make it to the pagoda view, the one that’s often featured on the cover of a largely poorly written guidebook. They’ve never featured it in the rain. I enjoy my photograph very much.

Beside the pagoda sits a big statue of Hotei. God of fortune. The Laughing Buddha. Naturally, despite my soaking wet legs and shoes and inability to understand the point of it all, I rub his massive belly. Good luck and prosperity coming my way, again.

I venture on, down flooded sloped paths and dangerous steps, and eventually, I do arrive at Nachi Falls. The heavier rain drowns out the sound of the waterfall. There’s a story of some star-crossed lovers that leapt from the top of the waterfall in the belief that they would be reborn into Kannon’s paradise. I also know that this is one of the Top Three Waterfalls in Japan, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and also plummets 133 metres, making it the tallest in Japan.

I head down some slippery steps, careful to hold the handrail. Below, the waterfall itself. Having already taken a spectacular photograph of the rain-soaked pagoda pavilion with Nachi Falls as a backdrop, I find it to be immensely difficult to capture the waterfall from up close, due to the intense rain and heavy flooding.

I stumble back up stone steps to a bus stop. Typically, upon arriving back at Kii-Katsuura Station, the rain suddenly stops. At the Turtle Boat back to my hotel, I stand at the dock. A Japanese salaryman stands beside me, perfectly dry. He glances at my poncho and then at the sky.

From the boat, I see a crow in the air. It looks as though it has three legs, but it’s just the tail feathers, fanned out in silhouette against the sky. Something that could easily be mistaken for three legs.

Back at the hotel, I hairdryer my shoes for two hours whilst waiting for my laundry to wash and dry, before heading out in search of a crow to photograph. In the end, all I find is this lousy t-shirt.

The Men Who Scare At Boats

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There’s a massive clock outside Kii-Katsuura Station. Each tick sounds like a nail being hammered into a coffin. About a twenty-minute walk from the station, between the mountains and sea of Wakayama Prefecture sits Fudarakusan-ji, a small, unassuming Buddhist temple with a wooden boat outside.

The temple was built to face the Pacific Ocean because that is the perfect location for casting boats out to sea. The only problem with these boats was the reason they were cast out; the priests inside them were trying to reach Fudaraku, the Pure Land.

The boats were designed with a sealed cabin, no windows or doors; a claustrophobics nightmare. Ever had a dream about being buried alive? The priests here lived it. They’d climb inside, and the boats would be nailed shut from the outside. The orange wood and torii gates surrounding all four sides of the boat are a nice touch.

Water, a small supply of food, and a fuel lamp were placed inside before the priest’s departure. The lamp was there so the priest could keep reciting sutras and appeals to Kannon until they found the Pure Land, until they reached the end of their journey, or their life.

Some of the boats washed up in Kii-Katsuura Bay. A few priests escaped. Most died of starvation, drowning, or dehydration. To stay on theme, I book a night in Urashima. To get there, I have to board a boat myself. This one features no death, just a turtle mascot. The four huge buildings making up the backdrop are all part of my hotel: one on top of a mountain with an observation platform, one at the side of the mountain connected through a network of tunnels, one at the base of the mountain by the dock, and one that isn’t shown on any maps but is there, accessed through the labyrinth.

Checking into my accommodation I’m provided a map. The hotel is so large it features a multitude of interconnected buildings attached through tunnels and cave systems carved into a mountain. The place describes itself as a resort and spa. It has everything: five onsen baths, a games centre, karaoke rooms, a Lawson Stores, shopping streets, massage parlours, restaurants for eating, ballrooms for dancing, ball rooms for ball games, conference rooms, well you get the idea.

There’s one area where I have to take multiple escalators rising the length of 154 metres that take about five minutes. There’s rest areas between each escalator with sofas and tables, just in case the standing becomes too much. I exit onto the 32nd floor and admire the view.

On one of the random floors, I find a replica of an original painted tapestry held in the Treasure Hall at Kumano-Nachi Taisha Grand Shrine. I’ll visit there tomorrow, weather permitting. The full tapestry features the Nachi Pilgrimage Mandala, which displays all the details of this area, from the top of the waterfalls down to Fudarakusan-ji. Here, at the bottom, one of the boats is being cast away into the Pacific Ocean.

Walking through the hotel, I feel as though I’m in some cult dystopian movie. Everyone is walking around in matching yukata. Some of the tourists are not Japanese and wear their yukata crossed the wrong way, for funerals. Everyone goes for breakfast at the same time, for dinner at the same time.

The hotel feels almost haunted, some entire areas are abandoned. It would be the perfect setting for a horror movie. It makes me feel like a rat in a maze or a character in Severance as I navigate the hotel’s endless, echoing corridors.

Having just about explored every length of the hotel, I decide to end the day by soaking in the healing power of a hot spring bath. Of the five to choose from, I opt for the one carved into a cave that looks out onto the Pacific Ocean.

The onsen is so peaceful that I no longer feel as though I’m in a hotel. Sadly, I’m not allowed to take photographs in the onsen, for obvious reasons, so instead, here is the view from the 32nd floor looking out into the bay, the 40 degree sky, and the town of Nachi-Katsuura.

I sit, submerged in hot water, staring past the cave and out to sea. I think of the lost souls who once set off from this shore, sealed inside a boat, nailed shut.

A Spiral, a Darkness, a Fever, and a Staircase

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I wake up in pain. Cramp. My leg screams. I’m in Fukushima Prefecture, Aizu-Wakamatsu, an old samurai town with a historical past. I’ve been here for a few days. I feel oddly connected to this place in a way I’m really not sure how to describe. Aizu is famous for its samurai and a red cow named Akabeko (translated to mean red cow).

I leave my hotel. The sun is so bright that the sky isn’t blue, but white, yet there are no clouds. It’s like walking through a thick fog of heat. Imagine you’re a little tiny person the size of an ant, walking through an oven set to 180 degrees. That’s what it feels like. I walk across the sheet pan in the direction of the mountains, vaguely knowing that I will arrive somewhere spirally important.

In Aizu, the legendary red Akabeko cow can be rubbed and is said to heal illness or sickness. The thing I like about Akabeko is that they have bobbing heads, so every time I walk past one I push its head down and smile as it nods up and down.

A little further up the road, Aizu-Wakamatsu is offering politeness lessons:

Don’t talk to women outside. Must bow to your elders. The two conflicting lines bother me, because as I photograph the sign, an elderly Japanese woman starts speaking to me in Japanese. Obeying the rules, I just bow my head and walk away.

A black Seven Eleven with none of the usual green and red stripes greets me funereally; I’ll soon find out why it’s black. The cascading sunshine and the black stripes make me feel as though my eyes are glitching. Outside the entrance to Sazae-do Temple, there are sweeping steps that twist all the way up, but someone has placed an escalator to one side. You have to pay 250 yen to ride it, but the cramp is threatening to return.

I don’t know what it is about today, but as soon as I step off the escalator and into an open area of monuments, the suddenness of place hits me, catching me off guard. To summarise what happened: on October 30, 1868, during the Battle of Aizu, the Byakkotai, a group of teenage samurai thought they had lost the civil war. They saw smoke in the distance, thought the castle had been sieged, so they killed themselves, not far from where I stand. Learning this, I become swallowed by sadness.

Their bodies were left outside for days, until a man, Isoji Yoshida, decided to take it upon himself to move the bodies of the dead children and bury them. For this, he was arrested. Katamori Matsudaira, the 9th lord of Aizu, wrote a poem in their honour. It goes:

“People will visit, and their tears will fall upon your graves. You will not be forgotten.”

There are monuments here for everyone involved. For the dead children, for all who died. The tomb of sixty-two fourteen- to seventeen-year-old samurai. It’s devastating. I try not to bring myself too much into these stories. But this place, these dead children, their story found its way in. I think what gets me is they don’t mention the word suicide, they explicitly state every time that they killed themselves.

I weep my way around a cemetery before turning toward the temple I originally came up this hill to see. There is a prayer wheel that, when you turn it, creates a mournful sound said to be heard in the underworld, comforting the spirits of the Byakkotai warriors. “Please turn it quietly with your heart.”

Sazae-do, a wooden Buddhist temple constructed in 1796, is famed for its distinctive spiral staircase that ascends and descends in an intricate, intertwining path. Encircling the ramp are 33 Kannon statues, each believed to grant the same spiritual merit as completing the entire Aizu Pilgrimage route to anyone who passes by them.

At 16.5 metres tall, three storeys, and shaped like a hexagon, you enter from the right side, climb the spiral staircase, and exit back down another way. You never see another soul. This valuable structure is the only wooden building of its kind from the mid-Edo period still standing in the world. It’s also the only known double-helix-shaped wooden structure in existence.

I breathe a heavy sigh before exiting through the gift shop and buying a shirt featuring Akabeko. I think about people, those loved and lost, on days when we exist together, and days when we don’t. At five o’clock, Yuyake Koyake starts playing, the song that tells the children to go back home. It elevates my sadness.

I head to a steak restaurant for dinner. I eat the red cow’s bleeding heart.

Before the Wind Blows It All Away

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Today I’m travelling back in time, specifically, 20,000 years in time. I’m in Miyagi Prefecture to see the Museum of the Forest of Depths of the Earth. I don’t really know what to expect. When I arrive, there’s a small outdoor garden of evergreens and summergreens. There’s a single flower in the middle of the lawn, with a sign before it stating: Be careful not to step on the flowers. The sign uses the plural form flowers, and it bothers me slightly.

I believe the single flower is a panicled hydrangea. The garden has been recreated. “Let’s go into the grass and observe,” says another sign. The whole point of the place is to compare the vegetation of the Ice Age with that of present-day Sendai.

There’s an architecturally stunning structure in the gardens. It’s the only one of its kind in the world. Inside are the 20,000-year-old remains of a wetland coniferous forest. It might not sound very impressive, but when I walk through the doors of the museum and see the sheer size of the trees, it causes me to stagger.

The museum is fascinating. In 1987, an archæological dig found, just five metres below the ground, the preserved remains of fossilised trees, along with artefacts from the same era. There’s a separate tree root I’m encouraged to touch and smell, and it carries some weight.

Aside from the trees, I can also learn about the Paleolithic Age. There are the remains of a campfire that was excavated here. Bits of broken pottery. Deer fæces. Arrowheads. Glass boxes of skulls. Carnival Cutouts: the breath of ancient times.

Having touched a 20,000-year-old tree root, the only thing left to do later is visit a mountain, so I decide to walk to the coastline. Along the way, I pass a tsunami evacuation tower made from steel. It can safely evacuate 300 people to a height of at least six metres.

As I stare at the tower, the sky suddenly fills with grey cloud, and it begins to pour. I run into a nearby park but find nowhere to hide, eventually sheltering beneath a small Jizo statue. The smug Jizo is smiling and holding a rain wand.

Behind the statue is an embankment highway that runs along the Nanakita River and Sendai Bay, designed to help prevent tsunami waves. The tides must get pretty high here anyway, as on my side of the barrier are dozens of dead crabs, seemingly washed over the wall and cracked open on the concrete below. The Jizo shares his little shelter with the stench from the Sendai Gamo Biomass Power Plant. It stinks.

A little further up the coastline, I try to find what I’m really looking for. Usually, it’s pretty easy to find a mountain. But when you’re searching for what’s recognised as the smallest mountain in Japan, it gets trickier. I eventually do find it, half-hidden behind a factory car park.

I climb Mount Hiyori, Japan’s smallest mountain. Well, I don’t actually climb it. I just stand next to it. It looms at three metres now. Smaller than it once was. The 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami took most of it. But still, someone left a summit marker. Still, it has a name. And I’m glad for that.

Around me, the wind starts to rise. I think about the ancient forest floor, perfectly preserved in silence. The looming shadow of a tree long gone. I think about how we keep naming things, even after they’ve almost disappeared. I think about how some things vanish slowly, and some things vanish all at once.

I walk away, back into the storm, careful not to step on the mountains.

Quivering Heights

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I’ve come to Mount Hoju in Yamagata Prefecture to experience one of the best views in Japan. At the base of the mountain is the usual buzzing of tourist-targeted shops selling shaved ice, overpriced noodles, and fish-shaped waffles. Beyond that is the oldest beech wood building in Japan, home to a massive wooden statue of Buddha.

The statue is Yakushi Nyorai, the Buddha of healing. They say that if you have an illness or ailment, something you want cured, you rub that part of the Buddha, then climb to the top of the mountain and you will be miraculously healed. Naturally, I rub the Buddha on the neck and hope my scars fade.

Next, it’s time to climb the mountain. The road to the temple is 1,015 stone steps surrounded by thick woods and strangely shaped rocks. Cedar trees make up the mountain forest. The Risshakuji Temple at the top of the mountain means “Mountain Temple,” which is the perfect name for it, considering it is atop a mountain.

Some of the steps are in sections of 108, to represent the 108 Buddhist sins. There are Jizo statues scattered throughout the ascent adorned with coins. There’s a monument engraved with another poem by Basho, and it’s a famous one:

Such stillness,
the cicadas’ cries,
sink into the rocks.

After the second set of 108 steps I’m already worn out. Half a million steps last month, I now find myself humbled by a mere 216. I’m already close to spiritual defeat. The day is hot, the air quality poor, and it’s very humid. It has a way of wearing me out, I suppose.

It’s so hot that every now and again there will be an ever-so-slight breeze, and every time there is, I notice it. A lot of the Japanese people are carrying these little portable electric handheld fans. A country famous for fans, so it makes sense. At about 550 steps there’s a massive rock that everyone is photographing.

Further up, there’s Risshakuji, founded in 860 AD, a small temple of minimalist qualities. From here I realise just how high up I am, that I can make out the city below. The thing that’s unusual is there is no barrier here. I could fall off the mountain in an earthquake, and that’s exactly what almost happens.

The mountain shakes, ever so slightly. A shift. Nobody else seems to react or notice. It’s just the subtle shift. The whole thing took a tiny step to the side. The mountain itself… adjusts. It’s not dramatic. Nothing tumbles. There’s no sound. But I feel it. And for a moment I am filled with dread. Then it stops. I wonder if being on a mountain is the worst place to be during an earthquake.

Very close to the top of the mountain is a post box. At the bottom of the mountain there is a post office, a mere 940 steps away. I naturally feel sorry for the postman whose job it is to walk up and down a mountain every day to collect what is likely just the odd piece of mail.

1,015 steps. I reach the top. The cicadas’ song fills the humid afternoon here, sharp and piercing, like needles being driven into a heart. Their cries echo, sinking into the ancient rock.

A cemetery at the top concludes the climb. Crooked gravestones pushing through moss. Everything here is slanted, aged, dignified in its entropy. I sit beside the tombs, trying not to melt into them. The mountain temple echoes these themes of death, decay, and transcendence as it climbs through cemetery terraces and silence.

I stand to rest, to catch my breath, to take it in. My shirt clinging to me like skin, thirst calling me to a vending machine back at the base of the mountain. But I linger. Amongst the graves, everything feels tilted. Stones, time, even thought.

Walking down is the reward as I can see it all. All the views, all the way down. There’s something about a good vista. I say goodbye to the top of the mountain, and goodbye to the vista. Hasta la vista. Until I see the view again, opening like lungs exhaling. I can see the whole valley now, softened by haze.

Back at my capsule hotel, I voluntarily entomb myself in a plastic drawer like a very polite corpse.