Yamanobe-no-michi - The Oldest Road In Japan or How I Wound Up With Three Holes In My Socks

The oldest road in Japan? Not the longest or the widest, these are the tales of modern technological advancements you will not find on Yamanobe-no-michi. What you will find is dirt, lots of dirt, and with the dirt you dig up history. The oldest road in Japan? Yes, it was time. Seeing as how I have spent more of this rainy month inside then out when the sun broke through the clouds this morning at the early hour of 7am I figured it was time for a little more self-torture once again. You really can’t get enough personal flogging in the Springtime. I am such a masochist. My feet and legs have had some repose and all five of us have come to an understanding in our relationship. I will continue their upkeep of washing, shoeing and toenail clipping in exchange for their cooperation in my lengthy wandering periods. They really had no choice but to agree as they have no way of obtaining any implements that could facilitate their removal from the rest of me unless they can somehow talk the arms and hands into a mutiny. Right now those limbs and digits are on my side! I promise the arms they will be wrapped around a woman again and the hands that they will one day once again fondle breasts. Sure, this may be a lie, but the limbs and digits don’t know that. So the body and the protesting limbs geared up for another eight-hour hike and unlike Asuka at the end of last month –or any other of my hikes and mountain/hill climbs these last few months—I was going into it prepared. With me this time I carried my small travel bag and inside was a large bottle of water. Megs had given me the idea to put slices of lime and lemon in with your travel water for a little taste but I didn’t have any limes or lemons so I put in some Chocolate Pillows (no…no but it would have certainly added some taste!). I also tossed in some vegetable crackers. Healthy! I am always consciousness of my health. Alright, truth is I couldn’t find any Chocolate Pillows. When I arrived in Tenri, home of the Eliminator and the start of this hike, I first walked over to the 100 Yen shop but it was closed. During Golden Week stores are keeping some strange hours. The 7-11 up the road would have to do and there I picked up an apple Danish, some snack rings I thought would taste like onion but wound up being cheese and a carton of cold coffee. I am starting to enjoy the cold coffee in a carton much more than the hot coffee in a can. The cool taste of coffee mingling with the taste of chocolate milk is a nice eye opener in the morning. On my way out I spied an interesting popsicle and thinking how refreshing this would be at the outset, although it was more of a curiosity on how it would taste, I added it to the mix opening it the moment I was outside. It was watermelon and shaped to look like a wedge complete with chocolate chips as seeds. It was very tasty until about mid-way through when you no longer tasted watermelon anymore as it was more like just plain water. I thought to myself munching down on this halfway tasty treat and smiled thinking of how my younger kids in class say this word when I hold up the flashcard: Ottermelon. The ottermelon popsicle was devoured by the time I hit the next block.




The arcade walk to the Tenrikyo Church Headquarters was a crowded affair with everybody heading in the same direction. It looked like I would have some company on my walk today, a nice deviation from past walks where I spent my wandering alone. More people to follow meant more instances where I might have aid if I were to get lost, a common occurrence. Although at times I would have rather have the entire roads or pathways or hills to myself there are times when having a group to follow makes the going at little easier especially if you get lost as much as I do. Passing the church headquarters I found some more interesting angels from which to photograph but I didn’t linger around long. I have way too many shots of this place and, besides, I wanted to start the hike.








Yamanobe-no-Mici runs between the town of Tenri and the town of Sakurai and is a roughly 16-kilometer hike that begins at the Isonokami Shrine near the church headquarters. You might remember this place from an earlier post as being the chicken shrine. Hens and roosters with beautiful plumage strut their stuff on the grounds as people scurry like mice around them worried about getting their calves pecked. I was such a mouse. This shrine also is home to the sacred sword of two blades (Nanatsusaya-no-Tachi) but us unenlightened travelers never get to see such wonders as they are reserved for the monks only. I have to wonder the draw of touting something that people cannot see. Is this not like telling people to come to Vegas but saying they can’t gamble? Of course, there is much to see outside this sword that makes a stop at this shrine worthwhile. The building is a brilliant red and stretches many feet into the cedar forest that surrounds it. There are a few nice pools in the garden where the trees reflect on the glassy surface although this place is not as well tended to as others I have been to. The glassy surface was one that needed a few buckets of Windex. The novelty here, though, are the wild chickens crowing and clucking and beating their wings as you pass them by. One rooster, perched on the steps, did not want to budge and both him and I engaged in an intense stare down. It was the Good, The Bad and the Chicken. I was Eastwood. He was Eli Wallach. Morricone plays in my head. The chicken looks at me. I look at the chicken. My gaze said McNugget. The rooster eventually strutted off and saved itself from becoming a 12-pack of pieces nestled next to some BBQ sauce. Another day won for this gunslinger’s battle against angry poultry.
















The road from the shrine begins more as a trail taking you around some nice countryside always with a mountain-view around you. The mountains just never leave your site and side. Now, I know I mentioned old dirt but it is not all old dirt. At times you are on winding pathways that date back to the 700s and then you are on modern roads. I found walking here to be very peaceful, especially on the more scenic parts of the path which meander through mandarin groves and ancient forests next to the mountains. This road was an inspiration to many old poets and some haikus dating back centuries have been written on the various pilgrimages taken while walking here. Some of the more popular of these poems can be found engraved onto rocks that dot the pathway. Again, I really wish I could read this poem rocks. Japan should rent out roadside translation services. At times it is hard to tell what road or path you should be taking as points diverge into separate directions. A fork in the road with no sign in any language leaves the choice up to me and if I am to take this choices unaided or unmapped I could very well make a wrong turn that takes me to Boise, Idaho. As interesting as visiting the World Center for Birds of Prey sounds, I really wasn’t in a Boise kinda’ mood today so I found myself asking for directions quite a bit. I targeted a Japanese family that was walking ahead of me for the first part of the walk with what looked to be a foreign exchange student (a pretty, blonde maybe Swedish foreign exchange student at that) I figured if they had an exchange student the would know some English and I was right. I was set back on course a few times by them as the head of the group often informed me on what I had missed by taking detours. There are many farms flanking both sides of the trail and the farmers were out in the heat tending to their fields, some of them so long (the fields…not the farms but in fairness I didn’t check) they need scooters to get from point A to point B. I would stop on the pathway and just sit down not because I was tired but because I wanted to just breath in all the beauty surrounding me and the most notable of these pauses for reflection was in an endless grove of mandarin trees. They had been planted in near perfect lines and grew up a hill where others formed a circle winding around the mound. No fruits today, though, they had been picked bare. There were many roadside fruit stands, however, and I purchased myself some strawberries to munch along the way as I continued on to see mountains reflected in ponds, fields of vegetables and flowers and beautiful shades of green in this tapestry of nature. Yes, it all sure beat a day in Boise.









Then there are the amazing views everywhere you look.


It wasn’t all just trees and fields. There were some ancient sites on the path to appease the historical wants of my hike. After passing through the Furu Forest you can find the only remaining piece of Uchiyamaeikyuji Temple. Built by orders of Emperor Toba in 1114, this once massive temple was torn down in the Meiji period leaving only the Main Hall pond. Located near the pond is the Yatogi Shrine, a thatched roof building where many took their first rest stop on the wooden logs in front of the shrine.



My map listed a moat from the middle ages that was supposed to wrap around a small village just a few steps off the main path. I spent a good fifteen minutes looking for this moat (Kango-Shuraku) and eventually had to bother the family with the exchange student again. The old man leading them pointed just behind me to a spot I had walked by three times. Wait, THAT was the moat that was supposed to show “the white walls of the houses reflected in the water” to “impart a feeling of tranquility to the scene.” Somebody oughta’ smack the writer of the this map upside the head with the white wall of a house to impart a feeling of tranquility. Talk about over embellishment on the part of the touring industry in the creation of this map. The water was putrid, muddy and littered with garbage. This was not tranquil. This was disgusting. In photographing this place I managed to crop out the vileness found in this old moat and I offer my photos to the Japanese Tourism Office…for a price. I say two blond exchange students should cover it. There is so much gorgeous scenery around you. My suggestion is to steer clear of what looks like a pool of quicksand and vomit and continue onwards.




Fusumadaryo, said to be the grave of Empress Tashiraka Himemiko, wife of the 26th Emperor of Japan, is a bit tricky to find as it is in a maze of persimmon and mandarin trees off the main road. Tombs in Japan are extremely uninteresting affairs unless they are those rock mound sorts like the one in Asuka. Mainly they are wooden gates that resemble the toriis at shrines and you cannot go any further then the front entrance. Behind this blockade was the tomb, a hill in the middle of the trees that you could not see it from this vantage point. I took a detour and climbed up the nearby hill using the mandarins as leverage until I was overlooking the tomb. The path near the tomb is a fairly somber one and you can envision the saddened Emperor carrying his dead wife to her final resting place, so sayth the over embellished map I carried.









This area is particularly hilly and was the toughest climbing done during the day so shut up legs! Don’t say I don’t go easy on ya’. Near Himemiko’s tomb is a cemetery built on one of the hills looking down on the road. Hundreds of graves were placed around the hill while others climbed upwards to the peak. Walking around them was difficult due to the sheer amount of them and the lack of space for your feet. Most of the graves here did not look as though they dated back to the 700s so I imagine this cemetery is not as old as the road it passes through. Many small stones rest on a smaller hill as you exit and they reach upwards towards a small statue sitting there overlooking the dead. Closer inspection shows that some of the parts of this statue had to be reassembled so that it now looks like a Frankenstein’s monster version of it’s former self. There was a family here washing down one of the graves, the children racing around the stones, laughing and playing as though this were a playground. This removed my normal level on discomfort when I am photographing graves with people present. The cemetery and the mountain view made for some interesting compositions. As you exit you pass a line of five or six Buddha statues with faces lost to the passing of time given them a more eerie presence then intended.


























To me the best part outside of the scenic beauty you are enveloped by when walking Yamanobe-n-Michi are the statues you find on the path. What might seem to be a rock next to the road may very well be an ancient Buddha or other carvings made and placed on the road over time. Some are only small pieces of what they once were while others are still whole watching you walk by them. You will also walk by homes, presumably owned by the rich judging from their placement and lavishness, and more statues can be seen sitting on fence posts or walls around the houses. I am amassing quite the collection of photos of these house statues. Of course, the old stone carvings are more impressive and some of the better, more ancient looking can be missed if you are gazing skyward. Some of them are really hidden under plants or in wooded areas. I tripped over a few of them, which will account for both their clandestine appearance and my clumsiness. All of these statues are unique either by the nature of their carving or what has been lost from them over the years. Maybe this walk took me eight hours because I had to stop and study every one of these statues I walked by. Perhaps if I hadn’t I’d have been out of there in like three minutes (HA! I can over embellish too map text writing guy!).





I had been out here now for nearly six hours and maybe it was all the tombs and dead trees around me but I was starting to feel pretty exhausted and decided to take a lunch break at the next stop. Chogakui Temple would be that stop. Before walking into the temple grounds I sat in a small park and made short work of my 7-11 snacks. It was here on a stone bench where I first caught site of a few other foreigners taking this walk and as precedent dictates they walked by me without so much as an acknowledgement of our wandering similarity in lands not our own. Snotty bastards! Snacks eaten, I continued down the path to the temple. Chogakuji, encompassed by foliage, was founded sometime in the Heian Period (794-1192) by a Buddhist high priest. Most flock here to see the Honzon Amidasanzonzo, the oldest statue in Japan with crystal-eyes –yes, we are now reaching very far into the barrel of cultural significance—but the forest around the temple is what I adored. The large pool in front of the main building was a mirror of water (an actual clear mirror of water that was imparting a feeling of tranquility to the scene. Now how come map guy didn’t mention that!) and I think this place has to be so amazing in the middle of the reds and oranges of autumn.








The road now takes you around more tombs and graves which I didn’t spend much time investigating again because I find these to be uninteresting. The old, and even the new, Japanese graveyards are of interest but these places that are gated are just as trumped up tripe as what you have to be insane entrance fees to see in some of the temples. My aerial photograph on the map was great, splendid and spectacular as it should two such tombs, that of Emperor Sujin and Emperor Keiko, as large keyhole shaped mounds but unless you have a helicopter your view is going to be that wooden gate. The only mound I spent some real time at was the Tamakiyama burial grounds, a grouping of around six mounds. There really is nothing to see on these mounds as all that was once here has been cleaned out and moved into museums but each mounds landscape was what attracted my eye. The trees have just been murdered in this area with pieces of them scattered about like warning signs to the other foliage. Don’t mess with us and the chainsaws, man! While one mound is lush and green another looks like a desert scene, dead and desolate with earth looking very much like the famed red dirt of Prince Edward Island. I was unsure if I should be climbing around these mounds so I adhered to my philosophy: If you are unsure…do it anyway! I sat on a severed tree and took a swig from my water, now half empty and as warm as a hot coffee in a can. I really wished I had some lime slices in there.

Nearing five o’clock I found myself at the point where I was at my most lost and I know longer had the family and cute exchange student to help me. A half hour after leaving the burial ground I was far off the road and in a place that wasn’t even on the map. I may have noticed this sooner if the path didn’t look so similar any way you took it. Dirt, dirt and more dirt. No, wait, that rock is not the same on all the paths. How could I have been so foolish? I really should have been studying those rocks more! I only realized I was going in the wrong direction when I walked face first into a slew of spider webs. Not very tasty. They stuck to me like cotton candy. I figured if these were unbroken nobody had been here in some time. Oh, why didn’t I just follow the Australians! On the road after the burial mounds I caught up to those other foreigners on the path that had passed me on the bench near the temple. I decided if they weren’t going to talk to me I would engage them. They were teachers in Nara as well and had been in Japan for over a year. They pointed me towards an old man on a hill (I believe in an effort to distance themselves from me. Again, snotty bastards!) behind us who was serving tea and giving foreigners a nice discount: free. You can’t get any better then that. Well Free and a blond exchange student would be better then that. I bid them good day and climbed the hill where the man grinned. His aged face was a display of dozens of wrinkles, winding and criss-crossing looking like lines on a map. The tea, cold green tea, I believe, was pumped out of a red container. He had set up some stools and tables under a canopy on the hill and I sat down for another rest. The tea was refreshing and tasty although I wouldn’t recommend studying the contents of your cup for too long. The Australians were heading towards the station for home and had I followed them I may not have been in this predicament, spider webs dangling from my beard and a confused expression on my face. There were many English markers on the path to help guide me but now that I was off it I really had to remember how I got here to retrace my steps. In the double backing I found another shrine but seeing as how it was not on my map I have no idea what it was called. It as pushed fairly far back into the woods, however, and somehow I got the feeling that I just shouldn’t be there.

I would find the path after a half hour of searching and it would lead me the final big shrine stop on the road and a Russian Girl. I had seen the Russian Girl on the road since Chogakui Temple. Often times it was just the two of us walking (where did all those people from earlier in the day vanish to?) and I believe she was uncomfortable with me following her as she would often stop to let me pass. When I caught site of her again now near the end of the road I thought I would ease her a bit and offer a hello as she seemed just as lost as I was. At first I thought the Russian Girl was not going to return my good-natured greeting and, in fact, she looked as though she might dart off into the woods like a scared deer. She did speak in a soft voice after a few seconds. I thought she was French and tossed her a few lines. She only looked confused. Maybe some Swahili would work? During our walk back to the station I found that she had been studying here since September and was from a small village in Russia. She had been studying Japanese for over three years and this made her an excellent asset when it came to sign reading. Of course it was the end of the day and the end of the path so this asset was about as much use to me as a condom machine in the Vatican.




I approached her first when we were both walking around the Omiwa-jinja shrine trying to find the way back to the path. This is one of the oldest shrines in Japan and is actually an entire area, including Mt. Miwa. It is believed that deities descend from the mountain and so it has in itself become an object of worship. Because of this the Omiwa Shrine is a bit unlike some of the other ones. It does not have a main sanctuary housing the object of worship because the object of worship stands above it. The God of sake resides here, a very important God for alcoholics. I think Robert Downey Jr. comes here weekly. Nearing the end of the tourist day, the girls who work at the shrine were dimming candles and cleaning up. The sun was setting. The crowds were gone.





The final stop on the road was a temple. I have no idea what it was called but my map seems to indicate that it might be Byodoji. An online search as well as scanning my travel guide gave no information. There were some interesting statues on the site, of course some shrine cats and a small pagoda.

My map and some of the English signs told of some Kanaya stone images of Buddha but we must have missed them. I am sure I missed a lot of things. There was way too much to see on that walk. It now six and near dark…time to head back home. Russian Girl lived in Kyoto and I thanked her for her help in translation when we parted ways at Yagi. She looked happy to be rid of me. Maybe I need stronger deodorant and less lecherous eyes. At home I looked down and saw that I had been bronzed by the sun and my face was a mess of road dust, the remnants of the man well traveled. My bed was welcoming. I crashed into it and lay there for about an hour feeling my legs starting their painful complaints. It is predicting rain tomorrow so they will get a chance to rest but not for long. Today’s walk down the oldest road in Japan marked the end of the month but the start of a week of vacation time. Where will I go next? Stay tuned!