Showing posts with label walk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label walk. Show all posts

Friday, March 11, 2011

A one hour walk in the morning

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Yoko dropped me off about one kilometer upstream at my favorite overlook.

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I hung around for about 20 minutes hoping for the sun to break through but I was getting cold so started to head back home.

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Yoko gets to drive up the river every morning and often remarks when she gets home how beautiful it was with the mist and sun and snow.

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I stopped in at the Zen temple. There is a nice garden behind it and I hoped to get some shots of it in the snow, but the priest wasn't home, so no luck.

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Headed down to the riverbank to take photos of the plum blossoms and scared off a heron

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And a flock of ducks. I think these might be a species of Eider. I suspect they will be heading north soon.

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We have a lovely new set of tetrapods.......

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and back to the village about an hour after I left....

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Plum blossom viewing

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Woke up to a few centimeters of of snow this morning so took the opportunity to go for a short one hour walk......

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Tomorrow I will post more of the walk, but for today here are the plum blossoms.

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I prefer the plum blossoms to the cherry blossoms..... as do the Chinese apparently.

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The harbinger of spring...............

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Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Along the tracks

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On Sunday I went down to Gotsu for the annual Kagura Festival, but after a few hours indoors I couldnt stand it any longer... outside was another beautiful clear day and as we have had so few this month and as the good weather was not likely to last, I headed off for another walk.

I got off the train in Kawahira and headed up the tracks.

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This section of the river has no road on this bank, and as it was 90 minutes or so till the next train I reckoned I could get along the tracks before it came.

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There are a few abandoned farms along this side of the river....

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Closer to Kawado I passed by a place that has fascinated me since I moved here, a hidden valley. The entrance is very narrow and choked with bamboo and undergrowth and there appears to be no trail in, but one of these winters when the undergrowth has died back Im going to try and find a way in...

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Though its the longest river in West Japan, the Gonokawa is not well known but I have yet to see a river in Japan that is more beautiful.

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I arrive safely into Kawado without encountering the train.

Kawado, the bustling commercial hub of Sakurae Town.......

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Monday, September 13, 2010

A Walk to Suga. Part 3

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This is the third and final part of a walk I took last May up in Izumo. The previous 2 posts can be found in the links below this post.

Walking along any road, in a city, in the country, or up in the mountains, you can't go far without passing a buddhist altar by the side of the road. Sometimes there is a single statue, usually Jizo, and sometimes several. Even in the most remote locations one can see signs of recent offerings.

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May is a wonderful time to go walking in the countryside. The paddies have been filled and the reflections make for wonderful mirrored scenes.

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This day there were a lot of snakes on the roads..... the filled paddies bring out the frogs, and the frogs bring out the snakes.

I passed several small shrines to Kojin, the land-god represented as a snake.

Also passed a nice shrine with many secondary shrines in the grounds. Unusually all the secondary shrines had signboards

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Finally I arrived in the village of Suga, and here was my destination, Suga Shrine.

It was here, according to legend, that Susano and Kushinada settled after the defeat of Yamata no Orochi. It was here also that Susano composed what is considered the first Tanka.....

Many clouds rise up
clouds appear to form a fence
holding this couple;
They form layers of a fence
Oh, the layers of that fence.


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Because of its out of the way location Suga Shrine does not receive so many visitors, but enough that a Miko is on duty most days.

Like many shrines there are a pair of giant cedar trees straddling the entrance.

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I carry on down the road towards Daito. I have a sleeping bag with me, but I see that there will be a bus in a few minutes that will take me back into Matsue in time to catch a train home, so I decide to leave Daito to another day.

I walked about 25k in 7 hours and visited 12 shrines......... another good day...

Monday, August 30, 2010

A walk to Suga part2

This is a continuation of a previous post

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Lower Imbe is a small hillside village that is cut off from the main road (Route 24) by a small resevoir created on the Imbe River. Here I found one of the things I am always on the look out for, a sacred grove of trees with a Kojin shrine. You can see the rope snake wrapped around the tree in the back.
These shrines are never marked on maps as they are "folk" shrines, and there are hundreds of them but you have to go looking for them. I imagine this sacred grove and shrine has been here since the village was first settled.

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Carrying on up the valley I stick to the side road that runs along the hillside above the main road. The road follows the ins and outs of the hills so mean longer to walk, but the sound of rustling bamboo and the occasional farm machine is preferable to the buzz of traffic.

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In the village of Imbe is the main shrine for the area. At the top of a long flight of steps.

In the Heian period 22 local shrines were gathered together here, and then again in the Meiji period more local shrines were transplanted here making a large complex.

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I chatted with a young man carrying his daughter. I noticed he was carrying a flute so I asked if he played kagura. he said no, but that he played in the shrine as he was the priest. Priests, like policemen, seem to be getting younger and younger :)

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The valley narrows and the road steepens as it gets closer to the pass. No more settlements. only an occasional hillside farm.

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At the pass there was a small folk altar in the weeds at the side of the road. The beckoning cat is not a religious symbol, but "folk" practises make use of anything. The bottle of sake left as offering and the gohei mark it as a shrine.

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Over the pass and I can now look over the eastern part of the Hi River watershed. This is Okuizumo, Inner Izumo, and is home to all the legends concerning Susano and the 8-headed serpent Yamata No Orochi.........

I am pleased that my way is now downhill.......

Monday, June 7, 2010

A Walk to Suga

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The weather during May remained unseasonably cool, so I talk advantage and went on another exploratory walk. I started in Nogi, now little more than a suburb of Matsue. A cookie-cutter town of convenience stores, pachinko parlors, and drab, utilitarian buildings.

My route was to roughly follow Route 24 up the Inbe River and over into the watershed of the Hi River around Suga.

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After about 30 minutes I was in the foothills on narrow lanes with mostly older, more traditional houses. The person in this house is obviously really into bonsai!

As usual I stopped in at all the shrines along the way.

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In the village of Noshira I found this that looks like a shrine, but is in fact a "kyo", translated as "church". Its a branch of Izumo Yashirokyo, a religion started by the then head priest of Izumo Taisha in the late 19th Century when the state basically told priests to stop preaching or dealing with "religious" matters. If they wanted to deal with religious issues they should found their own churches. The state had appropriated the Torii symbol, so only "shinto" shrines could have a torii, so many of the shinto-based Kyo simply use a simple gate with one crosspiece.

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Also in Noshira I found an interesting shrine with a huge mask of Uzume or Otafuku. As Uzume is one of the kami enshrined here it is most likely her.

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And then, paydirt!!!!! I found 2 examples of something I search for and hope to find on my backcountry explorations, a pair of Phalli!

I chatted for a while with a lady visiting the shrine, but she professed to not know anything about them, which may be true, but its more likely that she didn't want to talk about them with a foreigner.

I have an extensive collection of photos from small fertility shrines I've visited, but I've hesitated to post any as about half the visitors to this blog are from a certain North American country wherein many citizens react strangely to such topics. They either get offended and indignant, or they react like giggling Elementary schoolgirls.

Anyway, to have found these two really made my day and my steps had more spring to them.....

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Route 24 is a fairly busy, 2 -lane road, that has been straightened a lot and bypasses many smaller settlements. I chose to walk the old sections of road that snake along the river. Its a longer walk, but there is almost no traffic, often the things to be discovered are in the small villages, and I'm more likely to meet friendly people. Sure enough I soon came upon a small unmarked shrine to Kojin with the rope serpent wrapped around the base of a tree. It looked like nobody had visited the shrine in a few years.

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There were a lot of snakes of the non-rope variety out and about. This one was a bit over a meter in length. No idea what species it was, though if it was a 4-lined Rat snake I wouldnt be surprised.

Thursday, May 27, 2010

A winter walk up Maruyama

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Driving from my place to Iwami Ginzan, which I used to do regularly a few years ago, you pass through the village of Mihara, and as one is doing so the 480 meter high Maruyama (Round Mountain) is distinctly visible for quite a ways.

One fine January day the weather was warm and the light was bright so I decided to to find out what the views were like from the top.

I drove up the long, narrow valley that runs up from Tanijyugo, parked and headed up the forest track that climbed over the ridge and dropped down to the base of Maruyama.

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Half way up Maruyama there was a clearing in the trees that offered a wonderful view over Mihara to the saddle of the ridge called Oe-Takayama. The highest point is a little over 800 meters, and behind it lies Iwami Ginzan. According to a painted signboard in the village at its base, there is a trail that goes up and along the ridge that I've always hoped to climb one day, though I suspect that the trail, like so many others around here, has long since disappeared by not having been used for decades.

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The road up to the top of Maruyama switchbacks up the north side, so there was still unmelted snow.

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Just below the highest point are the foundations of what used to be a castle, though fort or watchtower might be a more appropriate english word.

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From the top, the view roughly south. Somewhere down in there is the Gonokawa River and my village.

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But this is the view I had hoped to find. About 25k away, the snowy peaks of the volcano Mount Sanbe, at 1,126 meters the highest point in Iwami.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Golden Week-end walk day 2

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I was up walking at first light. Not sure of the time as I havent owned a watch in more than 20 years. In the shrine at Mitsu I found a small but interesting Kojin.

From here I headed inland, south towards Matsue. The road sign said 10 kilometers, but I would be following a zig zag route to visit small shrines up in the hills.

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I stopped in at Sada Shrine, once the most important shrine in Izumo until Izumo Taisha took that role in the late heian period. This is the home of Izumo Kagura, believed by many to be the root of all the kagura in western Japan. Excavations in the area around the shrine have found the earliest traces of the Yayoi in this part of Japan.

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By 7 the paddies were a hive of activity, with planting or preparations for planting underway. In my village because of the strange weather we are still a week or two away from planting. I also noticed someone unloading bamboo shoots from their bag. This year there are none in my area yet.

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At an old temple, numbered 27 on one of the pilgrimage routes, I found this lovely wooden Jizo. Most Jizo are stone.

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The morning got hotter as I approached the city. Lots of traffic and convenience stores.

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I hit the shore of lake Shinji about 2k along from Matsue. The road around the lake was a non-stop line of traffic. This is Golden Week.

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The first place I headed was the ashi-yu ( foot bath) outside of the Ichibata railway terminal. My feet appreciated the soak in the hot water. Ashiyu can be found in many onsen areas, and I imagine they are from the time when most people in Japan travelled as I have been, on foot.

It was noon, 24 hours exactly since I started my walk. I had visited 16 shrines, a couple of which that were not marked on the map. Now its time to sit down and find out about what I have seen.