Golden Week in Kisakata

This year for Golden Week I didn't make any plans ahead of time, so I decided to just stay in town and visit a few nearby attractions that I hadn't been to yet. The first one I went to was Kanmanji.

If you know anything about haiku, the most famous haiku poet is Matsuo Basho. At one point he went on a long trek throughout Japan's north, which was even more uninhabited then than it is now, visiting natural wonders and their associated shrines and temples. The furthest north his travels took him was here, Kisakata, and its temple Kanmanji.

Back then (1689) this town was underwater and was a bay full of small islands, similar to Matsushima (which he also visited on the same journey). In 1804 though there was a big earthquake which raised the land and dried up the bay, where the current town is now built. By the way, these little islands originally were formed during one of the eruptions of the volcano, by a big landslide that sent all these big chunks of rock which became the islands down to the coast.

So I went over to Kanmanji to finally take a look. There's a little pine grove with a Japanese garden outside the gate, with some stone walkways and ponds and paths, and the paths actually lead out into the rice paddies and to some of the other nearby pine "islands" that Basho visited (by boat). Because all the islands are still there, popping up out from among the paddies, and when the paddies are full of water it looks similar to what they must have looked like back when the land was underwater to begin with.

A statue of Xi Shi. Not sure why.

Haiku master Matsuo Basho

Part of the path to one of the ex-islands

The pond in the garden

Not sure what it's for

So there was a payment booth with a little old lady staffing it and it was just a couple yen to get in, and there was also and old guy there who was a volunteer guide and had just finished guiding someone else. We talked a little bit before I went in, but eventually, now knowing that I spoke at least some Japanese, came in behind me and guided me around a bit and told me a couple things.

There's not too much to see besides the buildings and the grounds, it's not like a museum or anything, but there's a little sign by a rock where Basho launched his boat from, and the guide pointed out a Jizo statue up high in the crook of a tree which he explained a little about and I only half understood, but something like back in the day they just found it up there one day and maybe it was some trickster kids that did it. So anyway, nothing too exciting, just a historical place of interest, but I'm glad I finally got around to going. Some time I'll have to go back (maybe with my bike) and follow the paths among the islands.

The main gate

One of the temple halls

The roof over the hall entranceway. I guess in the past travelling samurai would put their personal stickers on shrines and temples they visited like this.

A camellia tree propped up with these sticks

I think the guide said these were for traffic accident victims?

The little thing sticking up in the crook of the tree is the Jizo statue.

A small Inari shrine

A magnolia tree

This plant is called "basho", same as the poet. Pagoda behind.

After that there were a couple of other little hills around town that I had passed a few times and wanted to go up and just see what was there. One was by the "road station" (michi no eki), which is what they call the rest stops here. They're just places with gas stations and some eateries and shops to buy souvenirs, but ours also has a five-storey tower with some hot baths and a foot bath and a lookout over the sea, which I've never been to yet, and didn't get around to going to on this trip, but I'll get to eventually. But there's sort of an informal network of these "road stations" and I think the ones in Akita have stamp cards you can get to collect a local stamp from each one and stuff like that, so they kind of function for local promotion as well. I've also seen a couple while driving around in other places, like one that was on a river and titled a "river station" (kawa no eki) and one on the shore called a "sea station" (umi no eki).

So I had passed the hill by this road station many times and seen the stairs up the side of it and the little pavilion at the top, so I finally got up there to see the view of the sea from the top of it, and even though it's not that high, there was a bit of a view of the town from above the roofs of most of the buildings. Then I followed the shore down to another random little hill just tucked in among some houses, and there were some steps to the top and another little pavilion up there, but where the other one right next to the road station is well-maintained and commonly visited, this one was more overgrown and unused, and so had an interesting feel to it.

Then the last one I went to was part of a shine in the middle of one of the neighborhoods in town. It's actually the shrine that hosts the annual town festival, so it's probably one of the richer and more popular shines in town. There are a couple of shrines I go by sometimes that are obviously not that well off, like the one which seems to have so little money that they have to rent the dirt lot in front of the building as a parking lot for a local business. And then the elementary school seems like it might be built entirely on the land of this one shrine, because the shrine is literally right in the middle of the school courtyard and it seems like there's not even a way to get to it without trespassing on school property. But this is really common among shrines these days I hear, with lots of the ones in big cities turning their grounds into paid parking lots or building apartment blocks on them as a way to make money during a period of what I guess must be falling donations. And the interesting thing is that with the falling rate of church attendance in the US, they may be facing the same future as well. There was a church in my old neighborhood that had redeveloped part of the church as apartments, and then had to tear down the little park and playground they had to turn it into a parking lot for the new apartments. I'll bet that decision didn't come lightly.

So anyway, the shrine is next to this wooded hill with a path with a torii wrapping around the side of it, and a steep staircase going straight up the side of the hill with a sign next to it about tsunami evacuation. Actually, the side path was just an overgrown back way into the shrine, the main entrance of which was on the street next door and I don't think I had ever passed, and the path up the hill didn't go to the shrine at all, but just to a little shaded clearing at the top. There was nothing up there, until I saw this rock with some worn carvings in it that was really hard to read, but it turns out it was the commemoration of when this "park" was opened, in June of the year Meiji 42, or 1910!

The park commemoration

The Kumano shrine

After this the last place I had left to go was the town's document museum. I had no idea what was really there, but they occasionally put fliers in the town newsletter, and there was some little Ikeda Shuzo exhibit going on (and had been all year), so I always meant to get over to it sometime just to see what was up (and to see the art). Mostly it's just documents relating to the history of the town, haiku and poetry written about the town and various maps and historical records. I couldn't get too much out of it though since it was all in hard to understand Japanese. But the other section had stuff about the geological history of the volcano and the land the town is on and displays about all the buried seashells from the numerous landslides, and big chunks of preserved tree trunks that had been dug up during the construction of the highway recently, so all that stuff was pretty interesting. And then the last section had a little display about the lifestyle of the people that used to live here before standard Japanese culture arrived, the Emishi.

After all this, a couple days later, I executed my plan to drive around the entire mountain and visit the surrounding sights, like various waterfalls and things, on my way. First off I went back to my now-closed elementary school to take some pictures for the Akita JET Wiki, and to see the monument they put up for it. Then I continued on up the road until I got to a road block. It looked like the road was still closed for snow (this was back at the beginning of May remember, I'm just very late in writing this). So I had to just turn around and go back to my apartment.

The school-closing monument for my elementary school

The school gate (school behind the trees)

View of Chokai over the sports field

There was one waterfall on about the opposite side of the mountain that I wanted to visit and would be too far to drive all the way around the south side to get to and then retrace my steps back, but the other spots were all mostly southwest of it and not really too far out of the way to just go there and back instead of my original loop, so I decided to just do that instead. First I stopped at the other closed elementary school to get pictures of it too, and then went down around the south to get to the first waterfall, Tamasudare. This was a nice big tall one, just a short walk along a nice path from the parking lot. Of course there was an associated shrine right next to it, and if you stood at the right spot right up near the waterfall you could see the rainbow in the mist. There were a lot of people out today too, here and at all the other places I went, since it was the big national week off for most people, and about the first nice day of spring too.

Chokai "backwards", from the south

The shrine at Tamasudare

Tamasudare Falls

The rainbow in the mist

The second waterfall, Fudou, was the smallest, and just behind this little shrine in this little space on the shoulder of this little mountain road where there wasn't even room for me to park at first because there were already three other cars there. But after I accidentally passed it the first time and found somewhere to turn around there was a space open by the time I got back.

Fudou Falls and its shrine. I'm standing in the road to take this picture.

The third waterfall, Dohara, was just a bit less popular than the first, and a bit more of a hike into the woods to get to. Actually, it was a little confusing because along the way were all these other signs for another waterfall or two, but with a different name than the one I saw on Google Maps, so I didn't know if they were just a different name for the same waterfall, or different waterfalls, or what. But once I got there it's apparently well-known for its water (there were signs about it, but I didn't take the time to read them all while I was there, figuring I would just look it up online later), and there were a few wheelbarrows by the entrance to the path for people to carry their giant jugs of water out with after filling them up. I didn't come prepared, so I didn't get any. Later when I looked up the names of those other waterfalls I saw signs for, it turns out that they were just up the road a little further. Oh well, something to save for another time.

Dohara Falls

The sign is warning of pit vipers

On the way to the last destination, Google Maps took me through the middle of one town that was apparently having some kind of festival that day, because even though this road wasn't closed, the streets were crowded with people and it took some time to get through. I couldn't see anything around from the route I took though, so I'm not sure exactly what it was about.

The last place was a little pond in the woods called Maruike-sama. One of the women in my English conversation class had gone last year and posted about it on Facebook, which is how I found out about it. At first I couldn't even figure out how to get to it, because there didn't really seem to be a parking lot or anything for it and it was just sitting behind a fish hatchery or something. But after googling about it it turns out you just park at the fish hatchery (which I guess they're officially okay with) and there's some signs from there to the path to the pond. The parking lot was actually pretty crowded and the path also ran along the little concrete embanked stream used by the fishery. The thing the pond is known for is being completely smooth and clear with really vivid green and blue colors, and since it was a nice sunny day it was perfect for it.

Maruike-sama

A little shrine next to it

So that was my Golden Week this year. I had also planned to use the time to make plans for the trips I would do this summer, but never did get around to that, so that's what I have to do pretty soon, since summer vacation starts in just a couple weeks now.