Iwakuni to Obatake a Pleasant Walk Along the Seashore

 

11th November, 2014. After a good sleep in a hotel I am up before the sun and on my way down the Yamaguchi coastline on day 18 of my walk along the Chugoku Kannon Pilgrimage. Winter days are so short that I need to use all the available light. I am past the industrial areas when the sun comes up.

Usually where a river enters the sea will be a settlement....

The main Sanyo Line railway hugs the coast....

Someone getting ready to look for breakfast.....

Much of the route the road separated steepish slopes from the water....

Nice to see some sea defenses made out of stone and not concrete....

Beach used for school gym or sports class....

Every settlement has a harbour,,, usually with plentiful concrete...

A constant stream of planes heading in to land at Iwakuni. Both an American Marine base and a Japanese SDF base. American fighter jets from Iwakuni regularly buzz our village..... way below the legal altitude, something they would not do in a more populated area, they shake my house.... I guess the pilots are imagining themselves as Tom Cruise...

The Local History & Folklore Museum in the town of Yuu was intriguing.....

It was not open the day I passed by, but I believe much of their content is sea and fishing based...

Roadside attractions in Japan often veer towards the surreal and bizarre... As I approached my first thought was that it would be a restaurant and gift shop...

Sea defenses..... In general, I find the predominant Japanese attitude towards the natural world to be that it is an enemy. Something to be tamed, and controlled... like in a Japanese garden....

Not sure what plant these red berries are of.... though I have one in front of my house....

The Inland Sea is dotted with dozens and dozens of islands, many too small to have inhabitants.... in the far distance is the coast of Shikoku....

The channel between the mainland and Suo Oshima Island narrows. Stretching halfway across to Shikoku, Suo-Oshima is one of the bigger islands in the Inland Sea...

The Oshima Bridge crosses to Suo Oshima Island, a distance of about 1 kilometer. Time to start looking for a place to set out my sleeping bag.

The previous post in this series was on the previous day's walk from Miyajima to Iwakuni.

Tamawakasu Shrine Dogo

 

Tamawakasu Shrine on Dogo Island was the primary shrine for all of the Oki Islands, which until the late 19th century constituted a separate province of Japan.

Little is known about he main kami, Tamawakasu, although he is believed to be the founder and pioneer of the Oki Islands, said to be a descendant of Okuninushi.

Other kami enshrined here are Okuninushi, Susanoo, Inadahime, and Kotoshironushi.

Pretty much the main pantheon of Izumo.

Whoever the chieftan of the islands was, in the late 7th century when the Yamato government attempted to unify Japan, the chieftain was installed  as the governor of the province. Behind the shrine is a group of keyhole tombs, said to be the graves of the rulers of the area.

The family of priests who have controlled the shrine since then, the Oki Family, are descendants of the governor.

Their house is next door and I will cover that in the next post in the series.

The house, the honden of the shrine, and the Zuijinmon gate are all Important Cultural Properties, and are all thatched. The architectural style of the buildings is unique to the Oki Islands.

The honden dates to 1793, the house to 1801, and the zuijinmon to 1852

There is a huge, ancient Sugi tree estimated to be at least a thousand years old. Another fell down fairly recently.

It is called Yao Sugi, because the nun who planted it vowed to return in 800 years.

June 5th is the annual festival and it features horses. 8 horses bring the local kami from 8 different districts and numerous ceremonies are performed including galloping horses and yabusame, horseback archery. In former times horses from 48 districts would arrive.

The previous post in this series was on a scenic boat ride exploring the coast, river and main port of Dogo.

An Urban & Industrial Walk to Iwakuni

 

When I got off the ferry on the mainland, the rain had stopped, though it looked like drizzle back on Miyajima.

A dull and overcast day and my route was confined to busy roads through built-up and industrial areas with little to look forward to. No-one ever said pilgrimages were supposed to be fun and pleasant all the time.

However, I was able to find interesting subjects for my photographic compositions.

When Japan planned its rebuilding after the war, it decided to place as much industry as it could on the coast between Tokyo and North Kyushu. Close to the ports where raw materials would be imported, the population was encouraged to move to where the jobs were and so most of the population now lives in that strip. This was the primary cause of the depopulation of the countryside and the other parts of Japan, especially the Sea of Japan side where I live.

Not sure what kind of factories I passed, lots of refineries and chemical plants, methinks. Must have been hell 60 and 70 years ago before they installed pollution controls.

This huge paper mill was located just before the border of Hiroshima and Yamaguchi and so I would be spending the first of many nights in Yamaguchi.

The view from my hotel room was colourful....

The previous post in this series on my walk along the Chugoku Kannon Pilgrimage was on my early morning walk on Miyajima.

Disappeared Japan Kirobara Shrine

 

After leaving Kawamoto and passing the Higashi Ohashi Bridge, I headed upstream to the little settlement of Kirobara, and I was excited to revisit a huge sacred tree. I was disappointed to see it had recently been cut down as it had become unsafe. The following pics are from a much earlier visit.

The tree was a Mukunoki, in English, the common name is Scabrous Aphanathe. It is said that in autumn, the leaves can be used as sandpaper. This one was thought to be about 300 years old and had a base circumference of more than 8 meters. The tree was considered to be the community's shrine.

In the first 2 decades of the twentieth century the government began a "shrine consolidation" program that, in esence, closed small local shrines and moved them to a larger shrine in the area. Before the program ended they had closed 100,000 shrines in Japan, about half of all shrines.

The primary reason was to shift people's focus from local, nature-based shrines to the national shrines like Hachiman or Tenmangu, Kasuga, etc. Another reason was that in the old days, Japanese in the countryside.... the vast majority of Japanese.... would take the day off work for matsuris, and in any small area there could be many small shrines each with its own festival day. Not good for the work ethic the government was trying to instill in the population. Western observers in the Meiji Period said that Japan could never industrialize because the population was quite lackadaisical in their work ethic and time keeping.

Yet another reason was that these local shrines were often set in a grove of old, large trees, and once the shrine was closed the trees were able to be cut for lumber. This point was strongly taken up by Japans first "enviromentalist" Minakata Kumagusu.

When the locals here expected their shrine to be destroyed they very quickly installed a small Tenmangu Shrine, pictured above, and their shrine was spared. My own village was not so lucky. The section of forest immediately behind my house used to be the local shrine. It was moved to the next village and since then no-one visits it. The shrine consolidation program is little known but was almost as big a factor in the creation of the modern Japanese religious landscape as the equally destructive separation of the Buddhas and Kami.

The previous post in this series documenting my walk up the Gonokawa River to its source was on the last bridge I passed, the Kawamoto Higashi Ohashi.