Along the Shimoko River

 

2nd of May, 2014, and I begin day 8 of my walk along the Iwami Kannon Pilgrimage from Arifuku, the small onsen resort in the mountains between Hamada and Gotsu.

The paddies are all flooded and will be planted with rice soon.

I stop in at a deserted, though not defunct, pottery.

Behind, some of the climbing kilns, anagama, no longer in use.

I think this may be the Yoshida Pottery, as they specialize in larger more utilitarian pieces, rather than the other potteries nearby which have modern showrooms and make more delicate pieces.

My route for a few days will be roughly SW, inland from the coast, down to where Iwami ends , then up the coast back towards my area of Gotsu.

After leaving the pottery I head over a pass and drop down into the Shimoko River valley and head upstream.

Heading upstream I start to pass numerous ruins of a "ghost railway", the Imafuku Line of a raiway that was planned to run over the mountains to Hiroshima.

It was started in 1933, then halted by the war, and never completed and opened.

Since I first moved here 20 years ago, they have started to turn it, somewhat successfully,  into a tourist attraction.

In Utsuicho I stop in at the local shrine, an Otoshi Shrine.

There are quite a lot of Otoshi shrines in Iwami. Otoshi was a son of Susanoo and is a kami of agriculture and rice.

The previous post in this series on my walk along the Iwami Kannon Pilgrimage was on Fukusenji Temple in Arifuku.

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