A Walk up the Kumano River Valley

 

This kind of small torii, cut out of a sheet of plywood, can be found along the roadside in may parts of rural Japan. They are basically a "Don't Dump Trash" sign and don't mark a shrine. Smaller ones can be found in some of the narrow alleys of Kyoto. They are "Don't Urinate Here" signs.

I dropped down into the Kumano River valley just west of Hiroshima City and headed upstream towards the town of Kumano/ Evidence of Autumn could be seen.

This is the brush capital of Japan..... not hair brushes or floor brushes or even tooth brushes...

80% of caligraphy brushes in Japan are made here, and increasingly make-up brushes...

In a small shrine I found this strange creature. I see this a lot at shrines, where someone has found a gnarly piece of wood that looks like something, and with a little bit of work looks even more like it..... I suspect there is a name for this process in Japanese, but I don't know it....

For some reason I passed by an awful lot of small, thatched houses. many such places in the countryside have had the thatch enclosed in metal or even tile, but these were left thatched...

I doubt they are still there now, ten years later.... I know I have seen many thatched houses in my area disappear since moving here.

The main road becomes increasingly built-up with chain drug-stores and fast food restaurants.

So I stick with a smaller road that runs roughly parallel and remains mostly rural....

The previous post in this series on my walk along the Chugoku Kannon Pilgrimage was on a shrine I visited a litlle earlier.