October 5, 2019 - Cape Ashizuri, Western Side

Cape Ashizuri is a fairly remote part of Japan, and the distance to Temple 38, Kongofukuji, is the longest to any single temple on the pilgrimage. In fact it is also one of the very few places where a Henro must backtrack over, more or less, the exact path they walked to get there. Rather than retrace exactly my path of the previous day, I had decided to initially go up the western side of the cape, before cutting across the peninsula to Shimonokae, where I had stayed the night before and then strike inland for Temple 39. There is an option of going all the way along the western coast, but that leads to either 8 extra kilometres and an inland trail or about 15 extra road kilometres. The western coastal road might be nice scenery, but it would mean the best part of an extra day walking for me.

However, first thing in the morning, Kongofukuji, Temple 38, was so nice I went back for a second visit with rested body and the day’s early light, just as a tourist. I didn't regret this at all.

After that, as I left Ashizuri township proper I heard some music and drumming. Being a bit nosy I went in and stood around under some temporary tarp awnings and watched some little kids play Taiko drums. They did very well. It turned out to be some sort of sports/presentation day given by the local primary school.
They had about a dozen kids ageing from, I guess, about three years old to maybe six or seven who put on different acts for all the parents who were under the shelters. It was quite cute, in an off the wall sort of way. First, after the older kids did the drumming, the whole student complement did a combined dance to Disney songs although the words were in Japanese, then they did some sports activities. They had pole climbing for the oldest, races on stilts for all, then they had a really odd basketball like game.
In the stilt races the very youngest kids had wooden blocks with rope loops, just like we made from jam tins when we were young. But the older ones were on stilts of various sizes, some were only about 4 inches off the ground but the very oldest ones were maybe one and a half or 2 feet above the ground and they could use their stilts quite skilfully.
In the basketball game all the children broke up into two teams of mixed ages. There were two baskets about 2 m tall and the children had to throw a whole lot of red or white beanbags into each net, depending on the colour of the beanbag and the team and the net. Which was all fairly straightforward, until two blokes dressed as Demons came out. While the Demons were running around, rolling a great big ball and banging a gong, the kids had to stop. The Demons came out twice during the competition. And then the third time the Demons grabbed the baskets and started throwing the beanbags out as everybody counted. By the time they had thrown all the beanbags out it turned out that one team has scored 42, the other team only scored 40.
I think it was the complete complement of children from the primary school because it was such a big age range.

As I started to leave they began doing some running races where the children ran around marked lines on the playing field. The older ones did okay but a tiny boy did the smart thing. He just cut across the racetrack. Then after that the teachers had to go out and hold their arms out to make the small children run the long way around the track rather than take the logical shortcut.

At least one of the grandfathers who was also under the shelter took a sneaky picture of me. I spotted him and gave him a smile.
My walk up the western coast took me to John Manjiro’s house. A non descript old Japanese house in the small village of Nakanohama. The village is down in a valley that the coast road skirts then passes over by a bridge. When I came up out of the village back on to the coast road I met a young Irishman called W.. He was not Henro, the only walking European non-Henro I met. He was just walking because he wanted to. He told me he had been working in Japan for three months, I think doing some sort of care taker role at a camp somewhere. Apparently he had seen me in the distance a few days ago. We walked together and talked until we reached the larger town of Tosa-Shimizu where we parted ways. I had a business hotel lined up but I arrived before check in time, so I had to sit outside on the steps till a guy came and opened the reception office.
The reception guy showed me the way to a nearby, backstreet laundromat. In the early evening I took all my dirty clothes there and spent half an hour thumbing through a pile of manga that had obviously been left for the amusement of the laundromat patrons. One particular one was called “Sho-Comi” It was printed in pink ink, had lots of pictures of girls in the adds and seemed to have an inordinately large number of people kissing in it. Maybe the ink colour alone should have been a warning. Shojo is manga for teenage girls.

Leaving the laundromat I stumbled across a small eatery. I tried my luck, though it looked like the owner’s front room. I couldn’t speak any meaningful Japanese and he couldn't speak any English. We got by. There were three big bowls of food on the counter. From one I asked for something which looked like a stew of potato and glass noodles. It was nice and I had a second serve. He also had lots of bottles of spirits on the shelves behind him, so I assume it was also a little bar.

That night I pondered how fairly odd it was that just about no places on this part of the island had Wi-Fi, or at least working Wi-Fi. For a place that’s supposedly as technically advanced as Japan I found it a bit surprising. I could understand the small mum and dad accommodations not having it but some places I stayed at advertised they had it though it didn’t work. This night’s business hotel didn’t have anything at all. You would think it would be a requirement for “business people”.

Posted on May 25, 2022 03:20 AM by kittsw