The chain of islands is connected by a recently-completed road called the Shimanami Kaidō (島波海道) "Island-Wave Sea Route", which makes it possible to drive (or bicycle) from Shikoku to Hiroshima through a network of roads and bridges. My host and his wife took me and Erma on an overnight road trip to this area.
As with any road trip, this one started off with a stop at the gas station to fill the car tank. I was amazed to see that there were no gas tanks on the ground; all the pumps were dangling from the ceiling.
As soon as we pulled in, a whole team of gas station attendants sprung into action, shouting their welcomes and taking up positions to guide us into the correct location under the hanging pumps.
Japanese has perfectly good, commonly used words for "left" and "right", but the gas station attendent used the English words: "refuto, refuto, raito, raito, sutoppu!".
The attendant then pulled down a pump, and inserted it, with lots of towels around it to make sure that no drips got on the car or the ground:
Meanwhile, a small army of attendants, all shouting and gesticulating, checked the oil, cleaned the windshield, polished the side-view mirrors, and generally lavished attention on us and the car. When the bill was paid, the owner of the garage came out and offered us a free gift (which I didn't see clearly -- it was something like Kleenex or paper towels). When we pulled out, there was much shouting and bowing and general over-excitement about our visit.
My host saw that I was a bit overwhelmed with excitement myself, and taking as many pictures as I could, and said with some confusion, "American gas stations must be exactly the same, right?" I couldn't really explain much to him about the difference other than the fact that most Americans pump their own gas these days.
Before heading north to the islands, we traveled east, to visit the small countryside village where my host's wife grew up. We took a twenty-minute walk from her old house across the train tracks, out past the cultivated fields, to visit the old shrine up in the hills.
Some of the fields were still in use:
But many had been allowed to grow wild. There are no longer enough farmers in the villages to sustain them.
There were a lot of little frogs in the marshy water. Can you see this little guy, right in the center?
As we walked, each step set up a little cascade of shivering movement as frogs leapt out of the way. I tried to film them, but they are so small that they didn't show up well; all you can see clearly are the telltale ripples in the water as the fleeing frogs dive to safety.
The old stone steps up to the shrine were in disrepair, so we had to climb up a switch-backing path running alongside it. Near the top we found a frighteningly long snakeskin.
We were told that the shrine is used only a few times a year; the god has an interest in children and education, so the villagers visit in order to ask for academic success for their children. The view from the shrine looking back down at the village:
A commuter train, heading to Matsuyama, rumbled by:
After we were back on the road, we stopped at a restaurant for lunch. I order the "ladies' lunch special", which proved to have the only sushi I ate the entire time in Japan:
We could not stop remarking on the quantity of food that was provided for the ladies.
After lunch, we began the road trip proper, driving up off the northern edge of Shikoku and across the islands of the Seto Inland Sea. The islands were green, mountainous, and sparsely inhabited. It was absolutely gorgeous.
We went as far as the first island in Hiroshima Prefecture, then stopped at a rest stop and walked back to the bridge we had just crossed.
This is the magnificent Tatara Bridge. Each steel tower creates an echo chamber, and along the walkway beneath each one is a set of wooden clappers. Traffic is light enough that there are periods of silence when no cars are going by; at that time you can yell, or clap, or whack the clappers together, and hear metallic echoes shuddering up and down around you.
This part of the bridge is whimsically named the "Tatara Roaring Dragon".
We then drove back across into Ehime Prefecture, and made our way to Hakata Island 伯方島, where we had reserved a room for the night at a minshuku 民宿. Literally a "homestay", the nearest equivalent to this place in the US would be a bed-and-breakfast. It was called "Farm Inn Portulaca".
It was located in a tiny town, perhaps fairly characterized as the middle of nowhere, but the woman running it seemed to be quite wealthy. The inside of her house was gorgeous; the main downstairs bedroom, where we slept, was very typically Japanese, with tatami flooring and sliding paper doors. But it was made from the very highest-quality wood. Hanging on the wall was an imperial award from 1906 commemorating the services of one of the family ancestors in the Russo-Japanese War.
The hostess took us into her kitchen to show us how she was preparing a traditional dish called tokoroten ところてん, made from agar. It's a clear, jelly-like dish with no calories and no flavor. She had already made the jelly, which you can see in the white square in the center of this picture. The raw ingredient is the brown stuff in the plastic bags.
She cut the jelly into strips. She then fed each strip into a wooden tool that we used to press through a sieve to break it into smaller pieces.
The tokoroten is flavored with sesame seeds and soy sauce. It's cool, refreshing, and slippery--delightful on a hot summer day.
We were served an elaborate and delicious country meal:
That fish is called a hogo. I don't know what it is in English. In the center is igisu dofu. There's a also a sashimi salad, some pickled vegetables, eggplant, and a sweet braised beef dish.
While we were enjoying this meal, our rice was cooking in individual pots in the center of the table, over open flames.
Octopus rice, in fact.
After the meal we all bathed, moved the table out of the way, set our futons and pillows and blankets out on the tatami, and slept. In the morning we were served breakfast:
From top left: potato salad, umeboshi (sour plum), egg, anchovies with walnuts, soup, multigrain rice, and hijiki (a kind of seaweed).
My Japanese host was amazed when we were served coffee this way:
It was the imperial chrysanthemum seal on the saucer that amazed him. The dishes had come, indirectly, from the imperial household.
After breakfast the hostess took us out to her family's fields to pick lemons.
The last major event of our trip, and perhaps the most exciting, was an hour-long boat excursion through some of the narrow channels between the islands. The company running the boat excursion also has a seafood restaurant. While we waited for our boat to leave, I wandered over to the octopus tank. The tank was divided into two sections. In one section, live octopuses were individually packed in mesh bags. An employee was opening up each bag, putting in a small piece of styrofoam (presumably for flotation, closing the bag back up, and then dropping into the other section of the tank.
The main point of the boat excursion was to get a close-up view of the strange tides and flows of the water in the area. There are many narrow straits running between the islands, and this combined with the complexity of the contours of the seabed leads to all kinds of bizarre tidal effects. In some areas the water is glassy smooth, almost motionless, while right next to it whirlpools form and break up, and sudden mini-storms of waves and eddies appear. All of this is happening in a gorgeous natural setting.
Boarding our boat:
Erma with my Japanese host's wife:
When you look out over the water, you see areas of smoothness broken by areas of strange currents:
The captain would drive the boat out to these areas, then cut the engine; we would drift and turn, while whirlpools and eddies formed and broke up around us.
This is a very brief film of a whirlpool taken while the boat drifted past:
Our last stop on the trip was at the reservoir that provides water to Matsuyama. The reservoir was high because of all the rain in recent months; this is the spill from the lower side of the dam.
It seems that the rainy season ended on this second day of our road trip, just in time for the end of our trip to Japan.
Beautiful tour, water, bridge, food, boat and sea.
ReplyDeletethank you!