(Technically in Shimane Prefecture)
The weather didn’t improve much the next day. It was still cloudy and cold. There was only one redeeming attribute. The fog. Not that fog was exactly pleasant to ride a rented bicycle through first thing in the morning—but it was beautiful. Breathtakingly beautiful. “The fog creeps in on little cat feet…” But in Japan it glided around the dark round mountains like a dragon. And in the valley below, the red tiles of the houses glistened.
Originally, I intended to go to the castle ruins, but I changed my mind. Fog is perfect weather to visit an Inari shrine. And Tsuwano had one of the larger Inari shrines in all of Japan.
Any proper Inari shrine has several red torii, or shrine gates, forming a kind of tunnel into the main shrine. In the case of Takodani, the Tsuwano Inari Shrine, it had torii going up the whole side of the hill, painting it red. I ascended and came to the main building, which was bright orange and white, with a huge straw rope handing in the front of it.
I heard flutes and drums. At first, I thought it was a recording, but it seemed too pure, too alive. I followed it to the main shrine. The building’s walls were open, so I could see inside. Musicians were playing, a priest was swinging a branch, and a few dedicated people were sitting inside watching. Then, the music stopped and the priest began talking in a normal voice. I thought I heard something about a meeting. I swear he must have been doing announcements. I felt a little embarrassed at gawking at them, as though I had busted into Sunday service at church.
Tsuwano is a small town, and although it has many attractions, you could probably see all of them in a day. I visited a few notable places, like Japanese Meiji-era author Mori Ogai’s house (which interested me only because I had read his book, “The Wild Geese,” previously) and a chapel dedicated to the Nagasaki martyrs, who stopped at Tsuwano, before being crucified. There were also a few non-notable places. The biggest disappointment was the Tonomachi District. The guidebook had promised me beautiful ditches and ten thousand carp. But the ditches only went on for a few blocks, and I saw more fish at a noodle restaurant in Ibusuki.
I circled around the town and came back to the mountains. My last attraction for the day was the ruins of Hagi castle. There was a lift mentioned in my guidebook and I had imagined a “ropeway,” one of those glass boxes suspended from steel cable which pulls you up the mountain. Well, the lift was sort of like that. But without the glass box.
Instead there were green chairs with a single armrest on the right side and not even a seatbelt to keep you from tumbling out of it. When I saw it, I thought it was scary, and told the man so. In fact, it was fun. The ground was only a couple of feet down and on it was soft-looking green grass. I was fairly certain that if I did fall I wouldn’t die. The rope pulled me slowly, and I was suspended in the air, my feet dangling just above the ground, feeling happy as a clam.
A short walk later, I was tramping through dried grass and staring up at enormous walls. I can’t quite convey what it was like. I was at the very top of a deserted mountain, with a wood in the back and a flat expanse of grass where I imagine the actual castle used to be. And the walls, the very stone foundations of the mountain. They were massive. And it made no sense to me, that such a small town like Tsuwano would ever need such a huge castle? One wall was embedded into the grass and when I walked to it, I found myself looking down the mountain at the valley of small houses below me. It was like I was standing at the edge of the world….
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