Hikes around Sakurae

Kawado to Ushiroyama to Ichiyama (18K)
November 2, 2004

Ive been wanting to hike up Ushiroyama for quite some time. As I look down the valley I live in, across the river behind Kawado and Oda and Ichiyama, Ushiroyama dominates the view. We start at Kawado station and head first for the hamlet of Shitani. Nestled against the mountains on the other side of the Yato river from Kawado, Shitani, like my own hamlet, is not a place you pass through on the way to somewhere else. The road leads only to Shitani. Its composed of about 20 houses, and at the top of the hamlet we find the shrine, a small wooden building with no tori, but set in a grove of old Japanese Nutmeg trees. In Kyoto there is a nutmeg tree that is over a thousand years old, and while these are not that old, they must be hundreds of years old.
An old gentleman passes by pushing a wheelbarrow on his way to his garden. Traditionally, the Japanese did not keep farm animals, so fertilizer for their gardens came from humans. This gentleman is keeping up that tradition, as the smell informs. Despite the appearance of being a modern country, most Japanese homes are not connected to mains sewage. The output from the toilet is kept in a tank under the house. Every few months you pay a company to come and empty it. They sell it on to a fertilizer company and it is then sold back as garden fertilizer. The old way certainly makes more sense to me.
According to my map, there is a footpath that leads from Shitani up to the main road going up Ushiroyama, but the old guy tells me it no longer exists. It hasnt been walked in many years and so has overgrown. I can see the ridge where the road is, and it cant be more than 400 metres, but Japanese woods are dense with undergrowth, so instead of trying to find a way through it we decide to backtrack where we have come from and then walk around the mountain to where the road goes up from Oda. Now that the main road along the river bypasses Oda it is a quiet unimposing village. Towards the end of the village we find the road up the mountain and start on up through the forest. I like these mountain roads, winding their way up through the forest following a stream. There is hardly any traffic on them makinmg them ideal for hiking. A couple of miles up I see a track leading off and follow it a hundred meters or so to a derelict farmhouse. Set in its own little valley it is the kind of place I would love to live myself. A few more K , passing a few more derelict houses, and we reach the community on top of the mountain. The temple marked on the map no longer exists, a half dozen empty houses, a modern community center, and across the road one house that is actually lived in. According to the map there was about 20 households up here, but now just one remains. Where are all the people? Over the past 50 years the Japanese countryside has emptied. Most Japanese now live in cities, with over half Japans population in Tokyo and Osaka alone. Some of the houses up here are not yet derelict. The kids of the family are most probably in a city and the old people most probably in hospital. Japan warehouses its elderly in hospitals. There is a well known joke about a group of hospitalized old people who get together every morning to chat. One morning one of the group failed to turn up, and it was suggested that maybe he was sick!
We head down the mountain on the road to Ichiyama, passing more empty houses. I find it stange and sad that people do not want to live here... its a beautiful location, in the forest, quiet, and only a few K by asphalt road to gas stations, banks, stores, train station etc, yet people tell me its too "inconvenient". Halfway down the mountain we pass a Jizo that is unusual in that the statue is carved from wood and not stone. Coming into Ichiyama at the bottom of the mountain, ahead of us is a small rise covered in large trees, a sure sign that there is where the shrine is. Whether in a city or in the country, a group of larger than usual trees will be where the shrine is, for the shrine trees are sacred and not cut down. Up a flight of stone steps and through a couple of torii, Ichiyama shrine is quite large. The gatehouse has a couple of wooden shinto sculptures, the first I have actually seen, and a large shimenawa (sacred rope). The shrine complex also includes several secondary shrines. After the shrine we walk through Ichiyama, taking a moment to visit the large temple. There are 5 or 6 temples in Ichiyama, but this is the largest and grandest. At the end of the village we hit the main road and pass through the modern tunnel that cuts through the hill. Just on the other side is Oda shrine, and like Ichiyama shrine, this is my first visit. Up a long flight of steps, and through an impressive wooden tori, the shrine has a somewhat somber feel to it. We walk now back through Oda to my truck parked at Kawado station, and my memories of this walk will focus on the abandoned houses and the depopulation of the countryside. Japan is known as an overcrowded country, but like many of the "facts" about Japan, it is simply not true. Sure, the pacific coast of Japan from Tokyo down to Hiroshima is very crowded,... that is the new "front of Japan" facing the pacific, but for a long time the Japan Sea coast, facing Korea and China, was the place where the action was. To visit Manhattan, and then to presume that Montana or Wyoming doesnt exist, is the same as to presume that Japan is crowded because of the overpopulation of one coast.