Yakumo Fuketsu Wind Cave

 

If you ask a Japanese person if Japanese people eat pheasant, you will almost certainly get an emphatic "absolutely not". However, just outside Susa Shrine in the mountains of Izumo, there used to be a restaurant specializing in pheasant dishes. Modern Japanese have little knowledge of historical diets in Japan. If it walks, crawls, swims, or flies, then the Japanese people used to eat it. Quite like pheasant myself, but haven't eaten it in Japan, though I sometimes see and hear one in my garden and nearby rice paddies.

After leaving Susa Shrine, I head west further into the mountains towards the next pilgrimage temple on the Chugoku 33 Kannoin Pilgrimage.

I briefly visited Fukusenbo, a Jodo Shinshu temple.

I have no idea what the standing and horizontal carvings are about....

I do enjoy wooden statues that have weathered and eroded and reveal another aspect of their personality.....

Immediately adjacent to the temple was the reason for stopping, the title of todays blog post, the Yakumo Fuketsu Wind Cave.

In English, the term for such a geological feature is a blowing cave, and in essence it is a type of natural air-conditioning.

What happens is that in the winter cold air travels into the mountain through gaps in the rocks and this cools the rocks in the interior. In the summer air passing over the cold rocks escapes at places like here. If you descend two levels in the cave the temperature is 5 degrees celsius on the hottest summer day. Traditionally the spaces were used as cold storage for various crops, but now it is for tourists to cool off.

Even the exterior "caves" have a temperature noticeably cooler.

From here I headed deeper into the mountains.

Thatched houses and semi-abandoned shrines....the interior of Shimane....

The road keeps climbing and settlements disappear and only forest on either side of the road..

Eventually I cross a pass and start to descend.....

Isolated farmhouses start to appear and then settlements come into view...

This is the landscape of most of the land area of Japan...

It has been 4 days of walking since the last temple on this pilgrimage, Tada-ji in Hamada....

The previous post in this series on Day 40 of my Chugoku Pilgrimage walk was on the interesting Susa Shrine.

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