South Japan

Of Buddha, Yamabushi, Emperors and Samurai

STORY AND PHOTOS BY JANICK LEMIEUX AND PIERRE BOUCHARD

e leaned both loaded bikes against the Todai-ji ticket booth, paid twice the 500-yen entrance fee and followed the excited schoolchildren being herded around by microphone-wielding tour guides. Teenage girls wore extraordinarily short uniform skirts and took snapshots with cellphones laden with Hello Kitty pendants. We had crossed and followed the Japanese-well-trodden tourist path into Nara, and were so glad! Todai-ji is Nara’s star attraction. Its Daibutsu-den hall is the largest wooden building in the world and houses the Great Buddha, a 16-metre-high bronze statue of the cosmic Buddha.

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It was originally cast when Nara was Japan’s capital city from 710 to 794 and the centre for the development of the arts, literature and a fairly new religion imported from India via China and Korea: Buddhism. Emperor Shomu ordered the construction of the Daibutsu as supreme guardian deity of the nation. In 1988, eight sites in Nara, including Todai-ji, met the criteria to be designated World Heritage sites by the UNESCO. Like bulimic sightseers, we roamed Nara’s streets amongst ancient treasures, the two-headed monster looking left and right, getting a stiff neck before hitting the flat road to Kyoto.

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Kyoto urban prefecture is home to 1.4 million citizens, 17 UNESCO World Heritage sites, 2,000 temples and shrines, 24 museums and 37 universities! ore than the focus of a 1997 conference leading to the signing of an international agreement regarding greenhouse gas emissions, Kyoto, the country’s capital from 794 to 1868, is considered by most Japanese to be the cultural heart of Japan. Kyoto urban prefecture is home to 1.4 million citizens, 17 UNESCO World Heritage sites, 2,000 temples and shrines, 24 museums and 37 universities! Our loaded bikes leaned against many more entrance gates while we visited some more of Kyoto’s jewels over the next several days. Most nights, we visited a sento (public bath) before setting up the tent behind Okazaki Park’s baseball diamond. Gion district’s famous residents, geishas, played hide-and-seek, and our hunt to see one only led to a fleeting glimpse of a turquoise kimono vanishing around a street corner.

From Kyoto to the island of Kyushu, there are many routes to choose from. The choice was easy for us, as Daisen and Sanbe-san, two volcanoes considered active, are on the San-in Coast. Rising dramatically from the Sea of Japan, Daisen (1,729 metres) is the highest mountain in the Chugoku region: an almost perfect cone and a holy mountain where yamabushi have undertaken spiritual training for centuries. These mountain priests seek to attain enlightment and obtain magical powers by following a prescribed combination of intense physical hardship, meditation in nature and esoteric rituals.

In short, mountain climbing as a path to Nirvana! Still on the bikes, showered by freezing rain at the 900-metre pass, we gave up on a chance to acquire supernatural powers and rode down to the city of Matsue.

We celebrated Sanbe-san’s volcanic activity by soaking extensively in the onsen located on its flanks. A wet towel drying on our rear dry bag became a permanent accessory while riding in a land where the ground is perforated by hot water in thousands of places. Back on the coast, Japanese cyclists whizzed by us, sometimes stopping long enough to inquire about our route and to snap a cellphone photo.

One of them, a 60-year-old man from Tokyo on a complete circumnavigation of Honshu, camped with us at Iwami Seaside Park and rode along with us the next day. After we’d left Highway #9 for a pleasant detour on a steep road where we saw a snake and stopped a second time for food (we saw him eat only one pomegranate all day), he disappeared! We didn’t have time to ask why all of the Japanese cyclists we’d met had been on the coastal boulevards rather than roaming the endless scenic roads found in their fantastically mountainous country. A Korean student and Jay Jay, a joyful retired engineer from Taiwan, were the only two cyclist encounters we’d had above sea level in almost three months of peregrination. Nationals mostly followed a long list of “very famous”: the “very famous” temple, shrine, park, tree, beach, flower garden, onsen, apple farm, ramen noodle shop, tofu-maker, etc. It seems like the “100 Famous Mountains of Japan” are for hikers, not cyclists.

Once in Yamaguchi Prefecture, we stopped in Hagi and rode around the narrow streets of Jokamachi, an old samurai residential area. Long whitewashed walls, fascinating woodwork and exquisite courtyards indicated how privileged this warrior class had been during Japan’s extensive feudal history. Ironically, Hagi’s place in history is as one of two centres of unrest that played a leading part in the Meiji Restoration and the demise of the samurai nobility. In 1868, the samurai and peasants of Hagi and Kagoshima, convinced that the feudal system was hindering the possibility of a modern, industrial-

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ized Japan, overturned the shogunate and declared restoration of imperial rule. For more than six centuries, the emperors had been nominal rulers from their Kyoto palace.

After the Meiji Restoration and at the end of 200 years of sakoku (national seclusion), Japan underwent a crash course in Westernization and industrialization, the distant results of which we were entangled in upon our arrival on Kyushu. Just out of the one-kilometre-long underwater pedestrian tunnel running across Kanmon Strait, the world’s busiest maritime pass, Kitakyushu and its heavy industry had us wanting to swim back to Honshu. Instead, we took aim at Hikosan and powered up Road #496.

Approaching Yakushi Pass amongst fall colours intertwined with emerald spruce plantations, loud chanting, roaring, stomping and blaring filled the chilled mountain air. A group of yamabushi decked out in full worship regalia — pointed straw hats, conch trumpet, rosary and cloth collar affixed with pompoms — were working themselves up to a trance at the lower Hiko-san jinja. A crowd of onlookers had gathered around the lively ritual and within a few minutes red coals from a fire were spread out as each yamabushi walked barefoot over them. We’d stumbled upon the season’s closing of the mountain and witnessed a 1,300-year-old ritual!

Once we’d gotten down from this holy pedestal, the Hihokan Sex Museum in the coastal onsen city of Beppu provided a perfect antidote to the piousness. A bizzare — and gigantic — collection of replica animal members and zany sex toys led the way to a mechanized exhibit of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs like we had never seen them before!

The Yamanami Highway, a two-lane road rolling over grassy plains, stopped abruptly on the rim of Aso Caldera. With a 128kilometre circumference, many smoking mountains and an underground saturated with boiling water, it is the world’s largest active caldera. This hasn’t stopped people from settling in, and inside the outer rim are towns, villages, trains and — lucky for us — paved roads. Fortune smiled on us again after we’d climbed the 15-kilometre switchbacks to Naka-dake crater lake. The summit was open to visitors — toxic gas emissions and eruptions often make it offlimits — and the sky devoid of any obstructing clouds on the steaming turquoise lake.

Across the Ariake Strait, the Shimabara Peninsula topped by the smoking vent of Mount Fugen provided more awe-inspiring volcanic moments before our arrival in the city of Nagasaki. In front of the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb

Museum — where we spent some enlightening and disturbing hours — is Hypocenter Park, where a square black stone column marks the exact point above which on Aug. 9, 1945 a 4.5-ton plutonium bomb was dropped. The explosion took place at an altitude of 500 metres — meticulously calculated to provide “maximum light propagation” — killing 75,000 people in the first few seconds.

Like the rest of Japan, Nagasaki has recovered spectacularly from the final days of World War Two and is a vibrant city. But a rainy one when we were riding around to find another perfect urban campsite. For the first time in Japan, we broke down and checked into one of the “business hotels.” It was a squeaky-clean compact room with everything needed by “salarymen” (wifi connection, trouser-press and porn channels!), who, for the most part, patronize these clone establishments. On our second night there, we opted for the Municipal Track and Field along the Urakami River, where health-conscious citizens did laps. But not before going for Nagasaki’s “very famous” champon, the local ramen speciality topped with squid, octopus, pork and vegetables in a salty broth!

With frost covering our panniers on many mornings and the growing realization that we would leave Japan in a few weeks and regress to less pleasurable ways of washing, there was no more holding back on hot-springs visits. The sheer abundance of onsen on Kyushu made it easy to keep up a daily habit and maintain prune fingers, tarnished jewelry and wet towels for the remainder of our journey to Japan’s far south.

According to the Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters), the Japanese islands were pulled up from the sea by two gods. One of their descendants, the Sun Goddess Amaretsu Omikami, is the imperial family’s ancestor. Japan’s emperor since 1989, Akihito, can trace his earthly lineage 16 centuries back to Ninigi-no-Mikoto, Amaretsu’s grandson. Both the birth of the Japanese islands and the coming to earth from heaven of Ninigi are considered to have happened at Takachito-dake in the Kirishima highlands. We were attracted by the national park for less mystical reasons: smoking volcanoes, 15 volcanic craters, 10 crater lakes and more than a dozen hot springs. We quickly learned why the mountainous area inland from Kinko Bay is called Kirishima, or Fog-island! While the whole of Kyushu enjoyed clear skies, every wayward cloud in the region gathered at the top of our long climb to the “scenic” area. We could hardly see the white line on the pavement!

Down from the “island,” the Naples of Japan, the city of

We’d stumbled upon the season’s closing of the mountain and witnessed a 1,300-year-old ritual!

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Kagoshima is a warm, sunny place sporting — as its Italian sister does — a great bay and its own Vesuvius, the brooding cone of Sakurajima. A continuous stream of smoke reminds everyone that 1914 — when the volcano poured out over three billion tons of lava, overwhelming numerous villages and converting the island to a peninsula — could happen again anytime.

No ash was falling on the city that day and we sat in a park by the famous statue of Saigo Takamori, eating some discounted grocery-store sushi. Although the great Saigo Takamori had played a leading role in the Meiji Restoration in 1868, he changed his mind 11 years later and led the ill-fated Satsuma Rebellion to restore samurai power and status. When defeat became inevitable, Takamori retreated to Kagoshima and committed seppuku. Following bushido, a set of values followed by the samurai, he chose self-disembowelment over dishonour.

Typically, the A-Line ferry office had electonic toilets with built-in deodorizer, flowing water recordings, bidet, dryer and heated seat, but didn’t accept credit cards. We withdrew more yen to buy tickets to Okinawa — from there, we reached Taiwan on a Arimura Sangyo ferry — and headed for a lap around Kinko Bay, our last pedal strokes in the Land of the Rising Sun. Number 99 of Japan’s 100 Famous Mountains, volcano Kaimon-dake (922 metres) was waiting at the southeastern end of Satsuma Peninsula and had warmed up the surrounding land to allow for sand baths. Buried under a heavy layer of naturally occurring hot black sand, dozing off to the ultimate white noise of the sea waves, we were in no hurry to leave this fascinating country and found comfort in knowing we would be back next spring in time to follow sakura blossoms northwards. Sayonara Nihon!

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