The Climb to Senganji Temple

 

Kawamoto is the next town up the Gonokawa River from my village.

Halfway up the steep hillside across the river from downtown Kawamoto is a small temple, Senganji.

The temple becomes really visible in late Autumn when the trees around it turn orange, yellow, and red.

I have actually only made it up to the temple one time, after walking down from Iwami Ginzan on day 5 of my walk along the Iwami Kannon pilgrimage.

Senganji is temple number 9 on that pilgrimage.

There is no vehicular access to Senganji, only a footpath with more than 200 steps, which is, I think, a large reason the temple has been uninhabited for a long time.

There are numerous statues along the path, inlcuding a lot of Jizo but also some Kannon.

When I visited in the late afternoon in May, the shafts of sunlight illumnated many of the statues quite dramatically.

Tomorrow I will post photos from inside the temple and include what history I have been able to find out.

According to a recent photo I saw, the structure housing this collection of statues has  now completely collapsed.

The temple occuppies a narrow ledge in the steep hillside.

The previous post in this series on the Iwami kannon pilgrimage was Ido Shrine in Omori.

Disappeared Japan Rural Temple Haikyo

Disappeared Japan Rural Temple Haikyo

Nine years ago while approaching Iwami Ginzan while walking the Iwami Kannon pilgrimage I explored this derelict temple. It has now been demolished and removed.

I have actually come across quite a few derelict temples in the Iwami area. As the countryside has become depopulated at an increasing rate, there simply isn't enough people to support so many temples, whose main income is funerals.

Once a traditional Japanese structure is abandoned it doesn't take long for nature to begin its work of returning everything to the earth. The Japanese word for abandoned building is haikyo, and there is quite a sub-culture of people who like to visit them and document their visits.

I found a list of the original temples that made up the Iwami Kannon pilgrimage during the Edo period , and quite a few of the temples no longer existed which is why the current pilgrimage route is quite a different route.

Disappeared Japan Awaji World Peace Kannon

Awaji World Peace Kannon

This is the first of an occasional series of posts I plan on things I've seen that have now disappeared. Having been in Japan for more than twenty years, the number of things that have disappeared is only growing.

First up is the giant statue that used to stand on Awaji Island known as the Awaji World Peace Kannon. At 8o meters in height, when it was built in 1982 it was possibly the tallest statue in the world. Since then Japan, China, India, and other Asian countries have continuously been building ever taller statues, and ones of Kannon are quite common.

Built by a local businessman on Awaji Island, he also built a temple with a ten-storied pagoda at the site. Like many of these monumental statues, there is a viewing deck near the top where members of the public could climb up and enjoy the view.

Following his death in 1988, his wife took over running the site but apparently with little enthusiasm and it became rundown and dilapidated.  Following her death in 2006 it was immediately closed down and deteriorated further. 

The statue was made out of gypsum, hardly a resilient material, and the highest standards of construction were not used and so the statue and pagoda were in danger of collapse and have recently been demolished. These photos were taken in November 2018.

I have visited several of the other giant Kannon statues in Japan,  but the only one I have posted about on this blog is the one near Kurume in Kyushu. It was also built in 1982 and is only 61 meters tall, but is a more professional statue.

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Rural Love Hotels

After spending the night near Kirishima Jingu I headed south on my 28th day along the Kyushu Pilgrimage. Pretty much all downhill, my favorite kind of walk, late morning I passed through an area with quite a lot of small love hotels clustered together.

The top photo is a former love hotel that now advertises itself as a lodge. You can tell it's not a love hotel because there are no curtains to hide the vehicle and its number plate, a standard feature that helps protect guests identity. The vast majority of these love hotels are of the cabin / chalet type.

Some of them, like the one pictured above, have been abandoned.

All the cabins were unlocked so I peeked inside a few..... fairly rudimentary and completely lacking in the luxury and exoticism associated with urban love hotels//// though this room did have the mirrors.

A few of them looked a little less run-down with a fresh lick of paint.....

Poison Gas Factory haikyo

Actually this isn't the poison gas factory itself, but rather the power plant that powered the poison gas production facility. Most of the factory was destroyed in 1945.

It is located on the tiny island of Okunoshima just off the coast of Hiroshima Prefecture in the Seto Inland Sea.

From 1929 until 1945 the Japanese government maintained a top-secret installation producing more than 6,000 tons of Mustard Gas which was used in their campaigns in China.

There are still a couple of other structures left on the island but I did not have time to visit them.

There is a very good little museum on the subject on the island.

I wrote a guide to Okunoshima which can be found here

Nowadays the island is famous as Rabbit Island because of the hundreds of rabbits running free that are descended from some rabbits released here in the 1960's.

Love Hotel Haikyo

Halfway up the side of a mountain, miles from anywhere, literally clinging to the side of the mountain. we came upon an a small abandoned Love hotel.

Literally built into a crevice, a stream passed underneath the building.

Each of the 4 rooms were decorated with different themes, though the building had been stripped and vandalized so it was not clear exactly what the themes were....

This one seemed to have an underwater theme.

Not sure how long this place stayed in business. In this part of the country the love hotels are built between towns, not in towns, so this one would have serviced customers from Matsue and Yonago.

Each of the 4 rooms had floor to ceiling windows with fantastic views over Nakaumi (the Inner Sea) and Daisen, but Love Hotel customers are not usually concerned with the view :)

On Battleship Island

Since Gunkanjima re-opened to visitors last year the tours have proved to be very popular. I was lucky to get the very last seat. The part of the island that is open is at the industrial end, and visitors are fenced in and herded by guides.

 

When inhabited the island had schools, a hospital, a temple, shrine, a brothel, cinema, and a pachinko parlor. All things that are needed for a civilized life. However absolutely everything had to be shipped in from the mainland including all the fresh water.

 

The guides give plenty of explanations and information (in japanese only), and the island has applied for World Heritage status, but they would need to make an effort to make information available in English. Of course there is a part of Gunkanjima's history that the guides don't mention.

 

During the last years of the war the mine, like most mines in Japan at that time, was worked by slaves, mostly Korean and Chinese. The slaves were of course not paid, and the regulations for controlling the slaves called for "extreme camp security, inferior clothing, overcrowded sleeping quarters, primitive sanitation with no bathing facilities, limited medical care, and minimal amounts of the poorest quality food—which was to be withheld as necessary to ensure discipline." Obviously, the death rate was very high.

 

While some Japanese companies that used slave labor have apologised and paid compensation, Mitsubishi, probably the company that benefited most from slave labor, have absolutely refused to pay anything, and their continued denials make for a sad indictment of Japanese corporate greed, though the main thrust of their argument is that to admit to it would saddle Japan with "a mistaken burden of the soul" for hundreds of years. An excellent article on the subject is here

 To make the place a World heritage Site without dealing with this unsavory episode of its history would be a mistake, I think.

Shots of the island from the boat are in this earlier post

Battleship Island: The ultimate haikyo

Gunkanjima (Battleship island) is the nickname of Hashima, a very small uninhabited island about 15k from Nagasaki. Why that is its nickname should be obvious from this first photo.

 

Originally much smaller than its current size, at the end of the 19th Century coal was discovered under the island and Mitsubishi began mining. As rock was brought up from the tunnel digging it was used to expand the island and protect it with a big sea wall.

 

At the mine's peak in the late 1950's the island had a population of 5,300 people, which translates to a density of 216,264 people per square mile, certainly among the highest in the world.

 

In 1974 the mine closed and all the people moved off, and the buildings began to crumble. Incidentally, Japans first large concrete building, a 9 storey apartment block was built here.

 

There are regular tour boats from Nagasaki that circle the island, and since 2009 there have been tours that actually visit the island, though only a small section, fenced off, is currently accessible, but the plan is to extend the accessible sections. Photos from on the island tomorrow.

 

Fans of the 2012 James Bond movie "Skyfall" may think they recognize the island, and in fact it was used as a model for the lair of the villain Raoul Silva, but it was filmed on a lot at the studio in London.