Isinglass

From our room I could see three men laying out a huge fishing net on the flat concrete inside the breakwater – perhaps to dry, perhaps so they could mend it. They were there again the next day, clambering all over it, and then it seemed more likely it was being repaired. The Boyokaku was built in the 1930s at the mouth of a small river on the western coast of Amakusa, with views out over the East China Sea. It was famous for its sunsets and there was a viewing platform but I didn’t go there. It had a Portuguese theme, I’m not sure why. There was letter from the Portuguese consul, and a Japanese translation, in the car park at the front; when you cam in from the rear carpark, there was a map on the floor with the red outline pf Portugal upon it. There was indifferent blue and white tile work here and there and some of the glass was perhaps Portuguese in inspiration. The onsen had magnificent glass panels along one wall, and two narrow windows, like church windows, over the main pool. A subsidiary pool had to streams of very hot water falling from a great height and there I stood, letting it fall upon my shoulders, which were sore from driving and also from clasping the stick as I limped along. In fact, I was much better, able to walk unaided, except on stairs, and the swelling behind my left knee was almost gone.

We had a day off. Mayu was uploading her moving pictures and I was catching up with this diary – which seems dull to me now, as most diaries are, since it consists primarily of we did this, we did that, without any obvious thematic concerns or emotional depth. Mayu is good when I complain: she says ‘themes will emerge’ and maybe they will. At best, I think, it is a form of note taking.

In the afternoon we went for a short drive up the coast to where a small circular promontory, probably once an island, extends out to sea. On the way we passed a coal fired power station, with a port for unloading the coal, conveyor belts to feed the furnaces and two squarish towers where, presumably, the coal was burned. From a distance the plant looked pristine, a white enigma on the skyline, but as you got closer you could see the rust, the decay, the industrial stains and the grime. Apparently we had passed a nuclear power station somewhere on the road behind but neither of us had noticed it. Banks of solar panels are, however, ubiquitous, occurring in the most surprising places, some of them quite small, some vast. there were towers on wind farms on the skyline yesterday. Anyway, it turned, on the peninsular, there was a castle, so we set out to find it.

I’m not sure if we ever did, just as I’m not sure if it is even there. There were certainly buildings that were perhaps replicas rather than originals. One of these was the visitor’s centre but, because it was Wednesday, it was closed. In another part we found some massive stone walls but whether these were ruins or something else wasn’t clear. Apparently, when a castle was renovated, the surviving walls would be augmented, that is, covered over, with a new wall. We stood at place where the information board said there were at least three layers of castle walls but these were, to say the least, indistinct.

There was a rebellion amongst the Christians early in the Tokugawa period which involved tens of thousands of people and ended in failure. At some point during the fighting this, and other castles, were used as forts by the rebels and one of the wall building episode relates to that episode, in the 1630s I think. The bloody end to the rebellion came at another castle, on the Shimabara Peninsular, where we will be going to morrow. Estimates vary: some say 15,000, some say 20,000, some say 35,000 men, women and children were massacred. Whole areas of this part of the country were denuded of population and labour had to brought in from elsewhere to work the fields and the fishing boats.

I think I am becoming weary of sight-seeing too. It was a relief to leave the fugitive castle behind and drive further down a maze of little roads until we reached the sea. Some farmers, a woman and two men, were bringing a load of Japanese butterburs down from the hills, where we could see orange trees fruiting, to their house, just to the right behind vegetable gardens. They looked incuriously at us. I went out onto the beach and picked up a yellow stone. Then we drove back to the hotel, with its strange art works and its taxidermed albino boar in a glass case in the foyer, a former pet of the owner’s.

15.3.23

The hotel we stayed in that night was an old inn up a narrow valley with a river running down it. There were no lifts, just a steep wooden staircase to the upper floor where the rooms were. We were given three: one for sitting, one for sleeping, one for eating. The dining room was decorated with painted panels on an ochre ground. There were two, which repeated around the walls. One showed a rocky sea coast, with small promontories where trees grew; behind the largest the roof of a shrine could be glimpsed. The other, in reverse as it were, showed a similar scene but this time with a small boat on the water. Both faded towards the top towards an outline of pale hills, receding. Our sitting room had a different version, in the same style, of a landscape with houses on the back of the door. I don’t suppose these were major works of art but they were beautiful nonetheless. I took a shot of the detail of one of them, for reference, Mayu said.

We had a private bath in room downstairs, a rectangular stone pool set in the ground, just the right size for two. Outside was a communal kitchen with beautiful tile work on the benches. People who came there for a long term stay ‘taking the waters’, would bring their own rice and cook it here. As we were leaving to go upstairs again, people from the village were coming and going to the communal bath on the ground floor.

We were going, via a car ferry, to the island of Amakusa. There we visited a tiny fishing village clinging to the side of a rocky coast. Sakitsu had been a refuge for Hidden Christians during the persecutions, which were intermittent for about fifty years (say, imprecisely 1550 -1600) but deadly serious once the Tokogawa Shogunate was established early in the seventeenth century. Many of those who were unwilling to renounce their faith went underground and worshipped in secret. They were required, annually, to abjure their faith by trampling underfoot Christian icons in a ceremony held at the Head Man’s house. Typically, they had evolved a form of prayer which they use to absolve themselves after they had performed the … The ban on Christianity was lifted early in the Meiji period and in this village a church was built subsequently, under the auspices of a French priest, over the site of the Head Man’s house.

Sakitsu was once an important port. It was also a site of literary pilgrimage and there was a famous inn here, now demolished, which you reached from the sea. The steps by which the poets and others embarked and disembarked were still there. At the tiny museum, the miracle of the survival of the hidden Christians was told in full and there were icons and artefacts: an abalone shell in which the faithful could see the Virgin (I failed at this), a small medallion hidden inside a wooden post from a house, a picture of a priest who more resembled a Japanese god than Christian one. People here particularly valued Christ the fisherman and performed annual ceremonies to ensure the catch was rich. Many fish hawks glided overhead, making their strange high kee-kee-kee sound; there were many cats too, obviously very well fed from the leavings of the fishing fleet.

We visited another, grander church on our way to the night’s lodgings; it too had been a site of literary pilgrimage in the early years of the twentieth century. Both churches featured small brown grim paintings of the Fourteen Station of the Cross; both had rather lovely, very simple, stained glass windows. In the second one there was an enigmatic painting of a Japanese woman, looking afflicted, with a babe in arms and another clinging to her skirts, looking down at a mirror on the ground which gave back her image as the Virgin. Again, it was not a great work of art but was still somehow moving in its simplicity.

14.3.23

Not far from the hotel there was a sign pointing off the road to another tokkotai memorial. This was a small shrine on a knoll above the sea, among trees. It was for navy fliers who had flown their sea-planes on suicide missions. All the others were army fliers. In the grass to one side there was an upended propeller with its three blades stuck into the soil. There was a buddha figure in white marble and few plain flowers laid before it. On the information board I noticed, below a blurry photograph of a sea-plane, the skull of a small lizard that had somehow got inside the glass case and died there.

We were heading for the lighthouse at the tip of the peninsula. It isn’t the southern most tip of Kyushu, but it almost is. From the promontory, with its surprisingly little lighthouse, you could see the blue outlines of islands further south and there was map naming the more distant ones and how far away they are. The Ryukyu Islands, of which Okinawa is the best known, begin down there, and the chain goes almost as far as the northern tip of Taiwan. It was one possible path into Kyushu of the sweet potato, known as the Satsuma after the clan, the people and the area which first nurtured it. It was also where most of the kamikaze pilots headed, if they weren’t targeting naval vessels.

There were spectacular views of the almost perfect cone of Mt. Kaimon, about a thousand feet high and last active more than a thousand years ago. On the way back Mayu pointed out a monument to poet, a local, a teacher, who died young, only in his thirties. A poem of his was inscribed in the rectangular stone next to the tall post giving his details.

Mt Kaimon has almost the same profile from the other side. We drove around it on our way to Sea Horse House, a ramshackle building, seemingly made of drift wood, built above, and partially upon, a rocky shore.

As soon as we had walked up the ricketty steps to the room where the aquariums were, the proprietor, a woman, was at our elbow, pointing us in the direction of one of the tanks. See, she said. See! Babies! They were tiny, mere threads of life, like actual strands of DNA. So little that there was a magnifying glass at hand so you could see them more distinctly. There were several other tanks holding various different varieties of the creature; beside one of them was a small pile of the dead, thankfully not for sale. And everything in there, much of which was hand made, related somehow to sea horses. The souvenirs were mostly pretty tacky and although it was nominally a café, there were only about four or five different drinks available, and no food. We bought some postcards.

The Bansei Tokko Peace Museum in Minamisatsuma was something completely different: a brutalist concrete mausoleum dedicated to the 201 pilots from the nearby Bansei Air Base who died in the last years of the war. There were photos, and biographical detail, about every one of those young men. I selected and re-photographed one of them, at random; Mayu said later he looked like he might have been from Hokkaido and had Ainu blood. He is clearly very young, if not the youngest: that was a seventeen year old called Yukio Araki. There was a picture of him too, a group shot in which he is at the centre, holding a puppy. The museum was the brain child of one Hichiro Naemura, a flight instructor at Bansei in 1945 and thus one of those who trained these men in how to die.

I thought it was a macabre place: the first thing you saw when you walked in was an actual aeroplane, a Mitsubishi Zero, badly damaged, in a pit of sand in the middle of the floor. Apparently it had been pulled out of the sea. Nothing was said about who its pilot had been or what had happened to him. There were many other model aircraft scattered throughout the museum, as if through a boy’s bedroom. When I was ten or eleven I used to buy them too, as kitsets which I would then make up. I had a Zero along with a Spitfire, a Hurricane and a Messerschmidt 109. And a Wellington bomber.

I took a photo of the wall as we were leaving, trying for an antidote to the obscene glorification war that was laid out inside. I don’t know if I managed it or not.

13.03.23

Next morning it was clear I wouldn’t be able to get around without a stick. Mayu asked hotel reception for directions and they pointed us to a shop in an arcade between a major department store and a hospital. I hung out near the carpark while she went on a reconnaissance; the shop, a small boutique full of walking sticks wasn’t far away and there I bought, for 160,000 yen, a splendid iridescent purple stick made by Sinano. It’s adjustable and has a horizontal handle with a moulded rubber clasp. At first I tried to use it on the same side as the gammy knee but soon learned it’s better utilised on the opposite side. I said to the woman: ‘You’ve saved my life.’ Mayu, who translated, said she very moved by this and that she stood outside her shop for a long time, watching us walk away down the near empty arcade. It was Sunday morning, about 10 am.

We went south down the Satsuma Peninsular, taking a detour inland to visit the village of Chiran, where there is a street of Samurai houses which have been preserved and conserved. There are seven of them and they all have impeccably maintained, ornate gardens behind their camellia hedges and their old wooden gates, some of which were closed today. There was a castle nearby in the Tokugawa era and the Samurai who lived here (there would have been many more than the magnificent seven) constituted a pool of warriors should the castle need them.

We only went into one of them, where the house, uninhabited, was open for viewing although you could not go inside. It resembled the Issa House we saw in Shinano a few years ago: the primary feeling is one of the incredible austerity of the way of life and the discomfort it would have been, at least for soft moderns like us.

We walked back down the main street of the town, where a stream had been diverted into a kind of small canal that ran parallel to the road and where carp lived. When I stood before one of the pools, the fish came towards me and broke the surface of the water, opening their mouths as if to say: feed me! There were small antique water wheels set up at intervals along these miniature canals, not for any practical purpose, just to turn and gather beards of green weed. I saw some small boys intently examining the carp, who are, or will become, their exemplars when Boy’s Day comes around in May.

Further down that road we came to a small wooden two storeyed house which had once been the restaurant of Ryokan or inn, whose accommodation wing was still extant behind, though not used for that purpose anymore. The restaurant itself was now a museum commemorating those Tokkōtai who had stayed, or at least eaten here, in the days and nights before their fatal mission. The proprietor, a woman, had clearly played a maternal role for these young men who were about to die. There were many photos of her, and of her two daughters, and a section upstairs devoted to her afterlife, as it were, including her wheel chair and her walking stick (which I examined with interest). Most of the land based kamikaze missions were flown out of airfields on Kyushu and there was one of these in the Chiran area. Various items of memorabilia were collected in the display cases. Perhaps the most poignant were two completely undistinguished small grey pebbles, which turned out to be the last things one of the pilots had stepped upon before boarding his plane; they had been sent to his mother. And there was a story: two friends had flown together on their last mission but one, because of bad weather, had turned back. His friend had told him that he would return as a firefly and, sure enough, that night, a firefly had flown in the window. The friend’s fates was melancholy too. He had not been able to bear the shame of his failure and, after various visits to his and his mate’s families, he ‘disappeared’ – presumably a suicide. You weren’t allowed to take photos in the museum but I did take one of the blinds drawn against the light from the street.

Chiran tea is famous and we passed many lush fields, with their low clipped parallel rows of bushes, all the same, as we headed south. Our hotel at Ibusuki had a view of the sea, past a bank of solar panels. Here at last, while Mayu went to have a sand bath, I consulted Doctor Google. I had torn my popliteus, a small but very important, triangular muscle behind the knee: ‘The popliteus is involved in both the closed chain phase and open-chain phase of the gait cycle. During the closed chain phase, which is when the foot is in contact with the ground, the muscle externally rotates the femur on the tibia.’ As a sports injury, it mostly afflicts sprinters and downhill skiers and the cure is what I was already practicing. Rest, massage, artificial stabilisation, continued gentle activity. Whether because I now knew what it was, or because of the bandage and the stick, the onsen and the hot baths, it was already improving. That thick swollen triangle behind the knee was becoming less swollen by the day.

12.03.23

When I went to stand up from the desk I couldn’t. My left knee had locked and to straighten it was painful. I felt like I might fall over, which would have caused a degree of chaos in our tiny room. We were in a Business Hotel called the Lexton in the Red Light District of Kagoshima, with a view out the window of some kind of communications tower and, the other way, from the hallway, of Sakurajima, an active volcano. The name means the island of cherry blossoms and apparently refers to the way a cascade of red lights climbs in the sky then falls in a fiery cascade during its frequent eruptions.

The knee had been troubling me for a few days. Ever since I felt something go in the back of it while we were walking up the steps to the shrine in Takachiho, where the dance performance was. We’d had to sit on the floor and when that became too awkward for me, and I stood up, my knee didn’t seem to want to stand with me. So, I’d been managing it for a few days without too much discomfort and without having to modify our (largely improvised) schedule too radically. This was different. This was serious. For about a quarter of an hour I stretched, walked round the room, massaged the joint etc, until it felt okay to go for the walk we’d planned to the nearby Francis Xavier Park.

It was a hobble but I made it along the few blocks to a dusty rectangle of bare earth with an archway and a stature on a plinth before two trees at one end. The saint’s helpers were memorialised nearby, several Japanese who operated, bizarrely, under Portuguese names. Opposite was a large, ugly, modern church where a wedding was in progress. There was another white marble statue of Xavier there, full body, with his arm flung out in a characteristic pose. I remember seeing a similar statue in Malacca, on top of a hill overlooking the town, in front of a church which had lost its roof and was now a haunt of homeless people. That statue had lost an arm and I wondered if Xavier too had lost body parts before his untimely death, from fever, on an island off the coast of mainland China. When he found the Japanese, circa 1547 or 8, unimpressed by the Christian virtues of piety, humility, poverty and rest, he summoned an entourage of fifty odd people, dressed himself in silken robes, assembled a set of lavish gifts, and progressed to the castle of a local warlord in sumptuous style. He did, however, eventually fall foul of the ruler of Kagoshima and had to relocate his activities to the west and north.

We caught a cab to the Meiji Restoration Museum down by the river. It was one of those places organised around the great man and woman view of history. Banners on either hand greeted you as you walked to the main display. Each one included a portrait and brief biography of a significant actor in the drama. Probably because of their long history of contact with Europeans, many of the drivers of the restoration came from Kyushu and particularly from the Satsuma domain, ruled over by the Shimuzu family. They were also the people who adopted sweet potato cultivation, which is another story I will try to tell later. The history is complex and I don’t have a good grasp of it yet: the greatest of the Satsuma heroes is Saigo Takamori, a samurai who rose to power through force of character and supreme ability. Again for complex reasons, he ended up in rebellion against the Meiji government he had helped to install and died in battle in Kyushu in 1877. He has continued to be mythologised: he is said to have survived and fled to Russian; or to Mars; and to have returned as a comet a few years later. At one of our onsen we ate fish cakes for breakfast which had his image upon them. A kind of holy communion I suppose.

My knee was no better for the walk. At a drug store near the hotel I bought a pressure bandage and a packet of pain-killing voltaren plasters; the bandage certainly helped, the plasters not so much. We ate that evening in a tiny restaurant, at the counter, while on the television Japan played Korea in the World Series baseball; then hobbled back, past the touts outside the girly clubs, the revellers and the lonesome wanderers, the couples all dressed up with somewhere to go, to the Lexton. There was a baby grand piano in the corner of the lobby, which played ghostly music; a kitsch display of artefacts, including a boat, from the Ainu of Hokkaido; and, away from the piano, the hotel sound system played maddeningly tinkly music, ‘lemonade’, at all hours of the day and night.

11.03.23

Yesterday was another fine clear day and we headed south down the same avenue of palms, passed the turn off to Aoshima and continued on until we saw an Easter Island statue, a Mo’ai, standing in the brown grass on the right hand side of the road: Sun Messe Nichinan. The road winds up a hill towards an extraordinary pink building which includes a tower, with a Peace Bell, which is illuminated by the sun’s rays at the solstice. These rays pass over the central figure on a platform of seven Mo’ai figures set up above the sea, facing inland. The sound of Polynesian chants echoed from above, recordings I think. Families picnicked on the grass in front of the Mo’ai and a group of school children, mostly boys, shrieking with happiness, played amongst the statues. As I stood in the shade of a palm tree a little girl, about five years old, came and stood before me, looking solemnly up, as if I might have been a Mo’ai myself.

A Japanese company spent three years repairing fifteen toppled Mo’ai statues from Easter Island; these figures are a gesture of thanks and friendship from the ranking Elders of Rapanui. They are copies, made from Fukushima tuff, of a specific formation, called Ahu AKivi, on the island, one which, unusually, faces outwards (most of the figures face inwards). Nor is it, as most platforms are, on the coast. The figures at Ahu Akivi are precisely aligned, so that they face the sunset during the Spring Equinox and have their backs to the sunrise during the Autumn equinox. Legend has it that a priest in the service of Hotu Matu, the first settler on the island, had a dream in which Hotu Matu’s soul flew across the ocean and saw Rapa Nui below him. He then sent actual scouts across the sea to locate the island and to find people to settle there. Seven of these scouts stayed on the island waiting for the Hotu Matu to arrive; and these seven who are commemorated at Ahu Akivi and at Sun Messe.

The shrine at Udo is a few kilometres past Sun Messe, on a small peninsula where thick vegetation grew, including many fine examples of cycads, some large enough to have several, or many, trunks.

We climbed a modern staircase, went through a dark tunnel through which the cold northerly wind blew, then down a series of ancient stone staircases where you could see how the tread of the feet of countless pilgrims over the years had worn away at the stones.

The shrine was on the opposite side of the peninsular, perched up above the sea, in which rocky outcrops made extraordinary shapes. Someone suggested they are made from volcanic deposits spewed out over eroded sandstone. They looked to me like something out of the Bunuel / Dali collaboration, L’Age D’Or.

The shrine itself is in a deep cave, at the back of which are two breast-shaped rocks which give forth a milky liquid. This is where Toyotama-hime, the daughter of the Dragon god of the Sea, whom Hoori married, gave birth to their son. She knew that in the process of giving birth she would revert to her sea shape and thus she asked Hoori not to watch her while she was doing so. He of course could not restrain his curiosity, looked, and saw her as her shark (or dragon) self; and was profoundly repulsed; she fled below the sea and was never seen by him again. Their son, however, survived, and he is the grandfather of the first Emperor, Jinmu. There were indeed two breast-shaped rocks behind the shrine in the cave and they did give forth a cloudy liquid. There was also a beautiful red lantern there; and some enigmatic paintings on the shrine itself.

For two hundred yen you could buy five clay balls which you threw towards a rope that marked out a circular pool on top of one of the sea-side boulders. Men had to throw with their left hand; women with their right; if your clay ball landed inside the rope circle, that was good luck. Mine all missed, though not by much; one of Mayu’s either rebounded into the circle or knocked some other person’s into it. I’ve given good luck to someone else, she said, and laughed.

On the way back to the car we passed another tori gate which led up the hill to a forest shrine. Some venerable monk is buried up there. I said I hoped he was loved and respected; to which Mayu replied, sardonically, he was certainly respected, otherwise they wouldn’t have put up a monument for him. After that we drove on by the sea for a while then turned inland and crossed the southern spine of the island to the city of Kagoshima, overlooked by the perpetually steaming volcano Sakurajima and built on the shores of a bay which is part of a massive caldera formed after the Aira volcano had an enormous ‘blow-out-and-cave-in’ eruption around 22,000 years ago.

10.3.23

We have had fine clear weather since the overnight rain at Kikuchi a week ago, but as we drove south towards Miyazaki, there was a haze thickening in the air and we woke next morning to light rain which got heavier as the day went on. We had been planning to visit several places on the coast south of here but in the event only went to one of them, a shrine at Aoshima. We drove out of the city down roads lined with immensely tall palm trees, like those you see in Los Angeles; the footpaths along the main drag of Miyazaki city are covered with hooped verandas made perhaps from a kind of plastic which was a pinkish yellowish opaque colour and somehow evoked the glamorous 1920s. Our hotel is by the river and from the seventh floor, looking seaward, I can see half a dozen bridges, including a red railway bridge which is sometimes crossed, spectacularly, by purple-black trains.

Aoshima (‘blue island’) is about half an hour’s drive south of the city. We made it in pouring rain that sometimes covered the low road in sheets of water; but it eased slightly as we parked the car and made our way to the causeway that leads to the island itself, where the shrine is. It was low tide and on either hand we could see a formation called the devil’s washboard (or sometimes the ogre’s washboard): long parallel banks of raised and tilted rock. These are formations laid down on the ocean floor in the Miocene, seven million years ago, then uplifted; the hard sandstone and soft mudstone erode at different rates under the ebb and flow of the ocean waves and thus the pattern is formed.

A cold northerly blew across us as we walked out to the island and through the big red tora gate to the shrine. Aoshima is roughly circular and covered with a dense growth of palms, called biro palms on the information boards but, according to palm experts, actually a variety called Livistona chinensis whose seeds were, most likely, carried north from the Ryukyu Islands on warm sea currents many thousands of years ago and endemic here ever since. They flourish in the warm, wet micro-climate of the island.

The shrine, which you enter from the south about a quarter way round the island, is renowned for its power to initiate, bring together or bind relationships: en musubi. En is concept that eserves its own essay; musubi means to bind. Rice balls are called musubi, as is the tying of a sash or a ribbon. I saw in the rain a beautiful young woman in a wheelchair reading aloud from a scroll with her fortune upon it, while her friend, also young and beautiful, held an umbrella over both of them. When she reached the end of her recitation, she looked up and they smiled at each other with such joy it lit up the gloomy afternoon for a moment. I took a photo of Mayu paying her respects, with her pale green umbrella held over her head, at the shrine.

We saw more groves of palms along the shore as we made our way back to the mainland, sometimes mixed in with a growth of pines; and I recalled the old Imperial anthem which claimed dominion over palm and pine. The words come from Rudyard Kipling’s Recessional, written for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. We used to sing it at assembly when I was at secondary school. Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, / Lest we forget—lest we forget!

There were some wetsuits hung out to dry over a blue balcony overlooking the car park; one of them was a pleasing yellow colour. The rain had eased and we made our way back to the City of Palms in clearing weather, to spend the rest of the afternoon at the hotel, whose décor, baroque sixties style, included pearly plaster swans as table stands at the landing on each floor where the lift opened. And other extravagances.

The shrine at Aoshima is somehow connected, but I don’t yet know how, with the story of two brothers, Hoderi and Hoori, the sons of Ninigi, himself the grandson of Amaterasu, and the man who bought civilization to Japan – in particular rice cultivation. Hoderi was a fisherman and he possessed a magic hook, given to him by his father, with which he could catch any fish. His younger brother Hoori was a hunter, who also possessed magic powers and could bring down any animal with his bow and arrows. Hoderi was jealous of Hoori, however, because he could hunt in any weather, whereas Hoderi could not fish when the sea was rough. He proposed that the two swap their luck, a bargain which soon led to disaster. Hoderi was a poor huntsman and Hoori an indifferent fisherman; furthermore, he lost Hoderi’s magic hook somewhere below the waves. More to the point, perhaps, he met the Dragon Lord of the Kingdom beneath the sea and, in time, fell in love with and married his daughter. I think it was at Aoshima that he came ashore with his new bride; hence its reputation for en musubi.

9.3.23

Takachiho is famous for its beef and at the local market, where we paused before setting out to drive south, there were two big black statues of a bull and a cow. Sometimes on the road we passed byres where these animals are mostly kept. They are long low sheds with walls that can be opened or closed, as the case may be. Warm in winter but not so salubrious in summer perhaps.

We were on our way to Saito, where there are burial mounds from early in the common era, from the Yayoi and Kofun periods, when there was an influx of new people coming via Korea into Kyushu and from Kyushu into the rest of the archipelago. We drove through a beautiful landscape of dry yellow grass, with small and large mounds everywhere, interspersed with fields where canola, tea and other crops were growing. Miniature daffodils flowered at the side of the road. Something profoundly pleasing about the preservation of the ancient monuments among working fields. The tea was grown in rows of low sculpted hedges, manicured, like topiary. I tasted a couple of leaf tips: bitter, astringent, but certainly tea.

At the end of the road was the museum, an extraordinary structure, with the main building like an upright, rectangular, military fort, made of large square blocks of stone, with the low grey glass and steel admin area to one side and a flight of stone steps leading upwards on the other. The entrance mimicked the entrance to one of the tombs we visited later and the displays were themselves underground, in complex, beautifully lit spaces in which you could trace the progress of the various cultures through time. Stone age people were here before the massive eruption of the Aira caldera 22,000 years ago and also before the ice. After the ice came the six horizons of the Jomon people, who were themselves succeeded by the Yayoi, who seem to have moved eastwards from northern China as the land began to dry out, into the Korean Peninsula, from which they were in turn pushed out by further waves of people fleeing the desertification which formed the Gobi Desert. There is still controversy as to whether the Yoyoi replaced the indigenous inhabitants or merged with them: the latter is the preferred version among Japanese historians and in this museum there were displays in which skulls were used as a basis for reconstructing how the people looked in such a way as to support the assimilationists. One of the really interesting maps, from the Jomon period, showed how there was a trade in shells that went from the east coast of Kyushu, through Okinawa and the Ryukyu Islands, Taiwan, the Philippines, New Guinea and beyond into western Melanesia. Somewhere to the north there is a tomb (‘kofun’) shaped like a scallop shell.

There was one tomb you could go into. It was a round mound inside two moats and you reached it by climbing a staircase and then going down the other side. Unlike many of the tombs, it lacked an inscribed marker on the top, saying who was buried here. One legend says it was made in a single night by an ogre who was lamenting the death of the woman he loved.

Through the dark door there was a simple, rectangular chamber, with massive stones set as the roof, smaller blocks making the walls, and a cobbled floor which may not have been the original. It was cool in there and faced you with the simple fact of mortality: all that could possibly inhabit such a place were the bones and accoutrements of whoever the living person might have been. This one was late, about the sixth century CE and by then the graves tended to be full of military hardware, including iron swords, rather than mirrors and jewels, which had been common earlier.

On the outskirts of Miyazaki, in an old forest of pine trees, is the pond where Izanagi purified himself when he returned from the underworld, where he had gone to rescue his sister/wife Izanami. In this he was unsuccessful – she had eaten food while there and her body was corrupted by demons or perhaps by worms. While Izanagi was thus engaged, washing himself, he gave birth, through his right eye, to the sun; through his left eye, to the moon; and from his nose, the storm god. The pool, Misogi-ike, is roughly oval and covered in lily pads which were a light purple colour. In amongst them a solitary dabbler, with a brown and white face, fed upon weed and on a couple of rocks half out of the water a dozen or more black turtles sunned themselves. They had a leathery look and their black shells seemed to incline towards the purple of the lily leaves. I saw one sitting alone by itself on a rock by the shore.

In Heiwadai Park on a hill in Miyazaki City there is the Haniwa Garden where about four hundred replica haniwa figures, made of unglazed clay, are displayed on the mossy ground under trees. The originals are funerary figures made to be placed upon or within burial mounds like the ones we had seen earlier in the day. They were common all over Japan, not just on Kyushu, and apart from the human figures there are horses, sometimes armoured, birds like Moa, and replicas of boats and houses. Those with wide open mouths, round eyes and one hand raised are dancing girls. They have eerie resemblances to Olmec statuary, roughly contemporary, but on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.

Some of the figures are dignified, even tragic but others are comic and some, indeed, look very like actual portraits of the dead; though we cannot of course be sure about that.

Over a circular lawn a white magnolia tree was flowering, dropping its petals onto the grass below. Two pigeons, with green wings, pink feet and blue beaks, were grazing for seeds in the moss among the haniwa. As we were walking back we found an aviary where half a dozen white doves, looking somewhat bedraggled, were imprisoned. Over all stood the brutalist column, the so-called Peace Tower, completed in 1940 at the height of the Japanese Imperial expansion (but before Pearl Harbour). The ostensible reason for it was to to memorialize the instalment of Japan’s first Emperor Jimmu, the descendent, some say, of the sun goddess. It was originally called Hakko-ichiu, which means ‘Eight World Regions under One Roof’ and was the slogan of the Japanese Imperial Army. The Americans made the Japanese remove those words, hand-written by a brother of the Emperor, from the tower during the Occupation. Stones to make the tower were gathered from all over what was then the Japanese empire.

The sovereign deity in the Shinto pantheon is Amaterasu, the sun goddess, and for some reason stories about her are clustered in and around the town of Takachiho. The town is built on a slope heading down towards a gorge and our hotel was on the left about a third of the way down: more like a traditional ryokan, with tatami mats on the floor, beautiful woven bamboo ceilings and pale green venetian blinds. Also, no lifts and no onsen. A hot bath did duty instead, a simulacrum, with some mysterious additives that are good for the body. Next morning, after breakfast, we headed out to Amano-iwato to find the cave where the goddess had hidden herself after an argument with her brother, the storm god, which left her feeling humiliated and ashamed.

As we were paying our respects at the main shrine I heard a cock crow, with a long melancholy after cry which sounded the unutterable sorrow of the world. There were two splendid roosters perched on a rail next door; later, with the addition of another cock and hen, they wandered across the path and went foraging, or dust bathing, in the gardens on the other side. I’m not sure what kind of bird these are; they look a bit like the jungle fowl that are the ultimate ancestors of all our domesticated chooks.

After Amaterasu sequestered herself in the cave, darkness fell upon the earth and all the other gods, in consternation, gathered together to work out what they were going to do about it. They met in another cave, further up the river, and there was a path you could take to see this cave. It ran alongside a rushing river, deep in the ravine below and then, as we climbed, it ran over shallow rapids there beside us on the path. People had gathered small stones to make cairns: they were everywhere, on the rocks beside the river, on the big boulders that lay scattered here and there, on the muddy surrounds of the path. Some were tiny and some quite large; some approximated, how I do not really know, the shape of a buddha. The cave opened under a vast proscenium and when I stood at the altar of the shrine for a moment or two, the air was cold and still and the presence of the otherworld, very strong. I kept thinking, perhaps irrelevantly, of lines from Coleridge; a savage place / as holy and enchanted . . . when I looked back into the world I could see the red flowers on a wild camellia tree bending over the cave mouth.

We still hadn’t found the cave where the goddess had hidden. It turned out to be on the opposite side of the river, behind the main shrine where we had first gone, and that the only way to see it was to take a guided tour. It was very short and the explanations, given by a tall young man in white through a portable amplifier, all in Japanese. With a twenty or so others, I looked across the river at what resembled a rock fall more than a cave. There had indeed been changes since the goddess was here, flood and earthquake damage. You used to be able to walk to it on the other side of the river but now the path was closed. No photographs were allowed.

When the gods had met at the other cave, up river, they hatched a plan to entice Amaterasu out: they would hold a party and the sound of revelry would spruik her curiosity. The party became hilarious, especially after the goddess of dawn danced a lascivious dance and showed her breasts and perhaps her other parts too; and Amaterasu did indeed come out to see what was happening. Some versions say she was told there was a woman there more beautiful than she was and then, when she asked to see her, was shown her own image in a mirror. One of the other gods took the stone that had been placed as a door in front of the cave and threw it in the air so far that it came down in Honshu, near Nagano, where we will be living once this trip is over. There is a shrine at Togakushi where the rock fell, it’s near to our new house.

The Takachiho Gorge is on the Gokase River, a far more spectacular place than the (relatively homely) surrounds of Amaniwato on the Iwatogawa River. It was also far more populated with tourists – even one or two gaijin, which we didn’t see at the other place and have hardly seen anywhere else we’ve been. You can hire boats and row them into the gorge below the waterfalls. They looked quite precarious to me and I noticed there was a safety officer, with a motor boat, stationed on the water in case of emergencies. He was looking at his mobile phone. Here too, when you walk up the gorge a way, the path has been wrecked in a recent flood and so closed off. In a sacred pond near the bend in the road, huge grey fish swam languidly, one with a blunt nose, the other with a pointed one. They looked like sharks, fresh-water relatives of the sea-born fish. In fact, they are a sturgeon native to the river. The gorge was formed, at some distant date, by a lave flow from an eruption of Mt Aso – some event inconceivably large, like the past eruptions of Lake Taupo. There were grey basalt columns plunging into the dark aqua water.

That night we went to a performance in a hall at the local shrine, up a hill at the bottom of the main street of town. About a hundred people gathered, sitting on the floor, to watch four out of a cycle of thirty-three dances sometimes performed, in their entirety, at a local village. Such performances begin in the early evening and go all through the night and on until the middle of the next day. Masked and gowned figures, to flute and drum accompaniment, turned slowly and repetitively on the stage. The theme, at least of the first three, was the story of the goddess in the cave, as sketched above; but the fourth dance showed a couple, Izanagi and Izanami in the form of peasant locals perhaps, who first made sake, then drank it, then got drunk. In the context of a village show, at this point both Izanagi and then Izanami would begin to flirt with members of the audience and things might get raucous. Here, however, they merely went through the motions. The band leader interspersed the various dances with long explanations, during one of which he said that when the dancers dance with masks, their bodies belong to the gods and they let the gods play with their bodies and souls, with their beings. When, however, they dance without masks, they dance to honour the gods. This show, or one like it, is performed here every night of the year; a similar show is given at Amano-iwato; and on the solstice the entire cycle of thirty three acts is danced.

At the Blossom Hotel in Oita, our room was on the 13th floor. Six and seven floors above us, on the 19th and 20th (the top) floors, were the baths. The outdoor bath consisted of a large, hot infinity pool which looked across the city to the mountains in the west; and next to it a cooler bath of blue carbonated water, accounted very good for the skin. Or the soul, which ever comes first. The indoor pools, only slightly less spectacular, were on the 19th floor. In the seventh floor open air carpark I saw some of the extraordinary plumbing that makes such a wonderful thing possible. We stopped at a Lawson’s on the way out of town to buy a lead for Mayu’s phone so she could re-charge it in the car. While she was inside I watched two working men, one old, one young, smoking. The older man, who had a violent coughing fit, smoked cigarettes while the young fellow vaped. When they’d finished they climbed into a small truck with the word ‘Howdy’ on the side, and drove away.

We had more vouchers to spend and our quest to find a place to do so led us, serendipitously, to the town of Taketa – a lovely place, with the ruins of a castle on a high hill looking over a town where old and new mingled harmoniously together. Oka Castle, once though to be impregnable, was demolished in the nineteenth century; only the foundations, massive as they are, remain. We saw them across the valley from a small hilltop park where, despite warnings about the presence of wild boars, we climbed for the views. Mayu spotted an optometrist’s shop on the way in, where a thin man in a suit and a pink tie with pastel dots upon it, shiny black shoes, fixed my sunglasses, for nothing, (or rather, for ‘En’) by screwing back on the wing that had fallen off. He used a Philips head screw and I learned that here the two kinds are called the plus and the minus screws, for reasons that are obvious once you think about it. While he was working on my Ray-Bans, at the other two counters old people were being fitted with hearing aids.

After lunch in a French themed café called La Pause we walked further into the old part of town, down narrow streets past the so-called Samurai houses, with their ochre and tiled walls, their low wooden gates and their compounds where once horses would have waited and now K vehicles park. A turn in the road led up a hill to a place where there was, on the right hand side, a red shrine to Inari, the fox god, and on the left a path, leading past bamboo walls, to a cave where, once upon a time, Hidden Christians worshipped. It was a small chapel hewn into the rock, reaching by a zig zag path. Halfway up was a stone cistern, with a spring, and two ladles left for those who wished to purify themselves or perhaps drink the water within.

The chapel itself was closed off with white-painted wooden grills, and reached by a flight of modern timber steps. At the top it was possible to get your phone past the grill to photograph the altar within: like a tiny church itself, in pink, with a square and then a rectangle, in which a miniscule crucifix could be seen. Apparently, at whatever period it was, a missionary sheltered here and the local lord, for unknown reasons, tolerated his presence. Although Taketa has a population of 22,000, it is still a small town and it was impossible to imagine that local people would not have known about this place.

At the railway station Mayu found someone who told her how to spend her vouchers. While she was doing so I walked down to the river bank, where there were flights of stairs going down into the water, as if there had been baptisms here, or other festivals where it was necessary to go down to cleanse or purify yourself. It seemed a sight you were more likely to see in India than in Japan; but then again, what do I know? I thought I’d lost Mayu for a while, at some shops further down from the station, but then I found her again, trying to make up the 8000 yen or whatever it was with purchases. It turns out that local businesses are grateful for the custom: they are compensated by the government for whatever is spent upon the goods they have for sale.

We drove on, through cedar forests, coming across roadside depots where the logs were stacked in neat piles, all trimmed and sorted according to their size. At the bottom of one valley was a very large timber yard where logs of all diameters were gathered awaiting the trucks that will take them hence. Some plots of trees are clear-felled, leaving the usual devastation behind, but we noticed among the stumps and the debris small seedlings of the successor trees growing. The practice of silviculture is very sophisticated here, I think. As we were climbing out of one of the last valleys we came across an extraordinary structure, a ruin, which had been built around a central stand of a large cedar tree. Perhaps a children’s playground, Mayu suggested, a vast Jungle Gym, much decayed and heavily impacted by the most recent earthquake. You would be taking your life in your hands to try to climb in it now. In amongst the ruins were some standing stones, trilithons like you find at Stonehenge, but concreted, rather crudely, together.

Takamori tree house, we found out later, was made, quite recently, in order to support the venerable cedar tree at its centre, after a typhoon damaged it and there was talk of felling it. The tree is itself a god, whatever that means, and the place where it stands, somewhat contradictorily, is sacred to the river god.

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