The Otherworldly Coast

Our train to Matsue was painted jaunty yellow and had exactly two cars. After we’d trundled along for a few miles, it stopped at a rural station. The driver got out. He strolled to the opposite end of the train, sat down at the second control panel there, checked his watch and drove us back toward the previous station.

Several passengers dashed for the exit, while the schoolgirls next to me sat giggling. “Don’t worry, we’re just going to Matsue on a different track,” one told me. “Tourists don’t know that this train goes backward.”

Backward trains are hardly the only surprising thing on the San-in coast. This is a different side of Japan, literally and figuratively. Most of the country’s 125 million people crowd into the cities of the Pacific coast. The Japanese call that region San-yo, “the sunny side of the mountains.” There, futuristic cities, such as Osaka, Kobe and Hiroshima, form an unbroken urban mass stretching hundreds of miles.

Not so the San-in, “the shadow of the mountains,” on the west side of Honshu, Japan’s largest island. This rugged coast, the landfall for storms surging across the Sea of Japan, is sparsely populated and looks to the past.

A treasure house of Japanese tradition and history, the San-in nonetheless receives few foreign visitors. My husband, Kevin, and I had nearly finished our three-year stay as teachers of English in ultra-modern Osaka when we discovered this timeless region.

Our exploration of offbeat Japan last November began with a bus trip. Travel on the renowned bullet train is nearly as expensive as flying in Japan, so we took the budget-friendly overnight bus from Osaka to Hagi, 240 miles south. The coach was almost ludicrously comfortable, with huge seats reclining nearly flat. Amenities included video movies and free drinks, but I was blissfully asleep before we even escaped the blinding neon of Osaka, and I didn’t awaken until we were winding between pine-covered mountains near our destination.

Hagi, at the tip of Honshu, is one of the country’s most historic cities. The seat of powerful samurai lords in the 17th to 19th centuries, it also gave birth to the Meiji Restoration, the 19th century revolutionary movement that hurled Japan into the modern age. Japanese tourists flock to its streets of perfectly preserved samurai houses, and Hagi still produces some of the finest handmade pottery in Japan.

Hagi’s far-flung attractions finally enticed me to do something I’d avoided for years: get on a bicycle. From the rental stand near the ruins of Hagi castle, we wobbled off through Horiuchi, the inner-moat district, once home to the highest-ranking samurai. The area is a wonderful maze of old earthen whitewashed walls. The last of the local summer oranges called natsumikan spilled over the walls’ gray-tiled tops.

The nearby Jokamachi district is lined with the former houses of poor samurai who had to struggle. “A samurai uses a toothpick even on an empty stomach,” an old saying holds. The proud wooden gates sometimes conceal modest residences. Shizuko Matsumoto, out walking her dog, saw us trying to peek past a gate and kindly invited us in for a look at her home. The small rooms, with family photos hung on the uneven, ocher-tinted walls, opened onto a simple garden.

Back on our bikes, we pedaled past the port, where fishing boats dozed, to the pottery kilns north of town. Noted for its subtle, sunset-colored glazes, Hagi ware is in much demand by tea-ceremony enthusiasts. In one workshop we watched two potters at their wheels, making sake flasks with fierce concentration. After finishing each piece, they carved a small notch into its base. This custom harks back to the time when Hagi pottery was reserved for nobles, but damaged pots could be bought and enjoyed by commoners.

Hagi has several quaint traditional inns, charging not-so-quaint prices. We chose instead to spend the night in the Hagi Youth Hostel, with a Canadian geologist and a group of students from Tokyo for company. The hostel’s cooks, obviously accustomed to famished bicyclists, served tempura, croquettes, salad, pickles, gobo (a stick-like vegetable) and fruit for dessert, all for $8.

Our next destination was, alas, a disappointment. The town of Tsuwano, a favorite with Japanese sightseers, is known for the 50,000 ornamental carp swimming in its canals. The fish were originally stocked as an emergency food supply in case of siege, and tourism posters depict them fatly crimson and white, gliding past beds of purple irises at the foot of sun-dappled stone walls.

That wasn’t quite what we saw. It was pouring rain, the canals were dirty, and the fish were barely visible in the muck.

But lunch redeemed the day. To sample local specialties, we stopped at Furusato, a small restaurant in a traditional white plaster house. We decided from a guidebook description to order uzume-meishi, a subtle mixture of rice, seaweed, tofu, shiitake mushrooms and wild mountain vegetables all served in broth. The side dishes included a white vegetable jelly in sharp lemon sauce, washed down with tubs of hot tea.

All this gave us the strength to struggle up a rainy hillside and savor the view from a scenic though soggy Buddhist temple.

In the morning we set off for Matsue, 100 miles up the coast, with a stop first at Izumo Taisha, an important Shinto shrine. We would be taking the San-in Main Line, an imposing thick blue line on our railway map. It turned out to be a single narrow track, where even the crack Limited Express must wait interminably at sidings for trains dawdling past in the opposite direction. Fortunately, we were in no hurry. The day was stormy and dark, and all along the jagged coast the world was in furious motion--the sea, the clouds, the trees all tumbling and boiling. Under the mottled gray sky, a few autumn maples flared scarlet on the black-green hillsides.

Nature’s turbulence made a fitting atmosphere for a visit to Izumo shrine, one of the three holiest in Japan’s Shinto faith. Shinto involves the worship of nature gods, and its adherents believe that all 8 million of them come together in Izumo every October to arrange all human marriages in the coming year. Above the entrance to the Oracle Hall hung an immense braid of sacred straw rope, weighing more than 3,000 pounds. I’ve read that a twist of straw on a tree shows the presence of a god, so this massive construction indicated gods aplenty.

Worshipers of all ages thronged the deep wooden building, bowing, whispering prayers and clapping their hands gently four times--twice for themselves, as is customary, and twice more for their spouses, actual or hoped for.

From Izumo, that little yellow toy train brought us (after just a bit of backtracking) the few miles to Matsue, the largest city of the San-in coast, on the shore of a misty tidal lake. Our hotel was another San-in surprise. We had reserved a room at the Business Ishida because of its reasonable rates, and were delighted to find tatami-mat floors and luxuriously puffy futons instead of the cramped, Western-style cubicles preferred by Japanese business travelers.

Matsue is relaxed and welcoming, and is famous for its seduction of a prominent American to Japanese ways. The story is a fairly common scenario today: A young American goes to Japan to write about it and decides to stay. He falls in love with a Japanese woman, settles down with her, raises a family and launches a successful career explaining Japan to the rest of the world.

What’s remarkable is that Lafcadio Hearn, formerly of Cincinnati and New Orleans, did this a century ago, when few Westerners lived in Japan. Hearn was a writer specializing in the exotic and macabre. He went to Japan on assignment for a magazine in 1890 and never left. Revered by the Japanese as the only foreign writer to truly understand their culture, he published essays and folk tales that are still studied in Japanese English classes. (Many are still in print; “Lafcadio Hearn’s Japan: An Anthology of His Writings on the Country and Its People” was reissued in paperback in 1997.)

Traces of Hearn are everywhere in Matsue. His home is lovingly preserved in one wing of a rambling old samurai house, set in the garden where he loved to work.

At the Hearn Museum next door, we picked up a unique city guidebook compiled in 1993 from his 100-year-old writings. Happily, many of his descriptions still hold true. It led us across the bustling Great Bridge to the statues of the fox god that the author passed every morning on his way to work teaching English, and finally up to the heights of Matsue castle, one of only 12 wooden samurai castles remaining in Japan, to savor the view over the city and its hazy pastel lake.

Back down in town, we ducked into a neighborhood restaurant, easily old enough to have served Hearn, for a taste of warigo-soba, a local specialty. The buckwheat noodles are served in a stack of red lacquer mini-bowls, with a pitcher of salty, fishy broth on the side for seasoning. We were still slurping happily (good Japanese manners) when we heard the gathering thunder of drums outside.

It turned out that our visit coincided with Dogyoretsu, one of Japan’s most popular matsuri, or local festivals. Dozens of huge floats bearing drums 5 feet in diameter were pulled through the streets by neighborhood teams of up to 80 people. Women and teenagers played haunting tunes on flutes and cymbals, while men marched alongside the drums, pounding out a hypnotic rhythm. Even babies were decked out in the colors of their neighborhood teams.

With drumbeats still reverberating in our ears, we reluctantly set off to the train station to return to Osaka. “Wouldn’t you rather take a night bus?” the clerk in the information office asked sympathetically. “Our train service isn’t so good here in San-in.” We soon saw her point. Our “rapid,” an ancient chugging diesel, pulled over at almost every siding.

At Kinosaki, where the rail line leaves the San-in coast, everything changed. We transferred to something resembling a rocket ship, with video screens in each car displaying the view from the engineer’s cab. The train hurtled through the mountain tunnels so fast that the pressure changes hurt my ears.

Two hours later we emerged from the mountains blinking into the neon lights of a thousand convenience stores and pachinko parlors, the night constellations of urban Japan, half-convinced that we’d dreamed the whole thing, that other side of Japan.

*

Kristin Johannsen is a freelance writer who lives in Berea, Ky.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

GUIDEBOOK

Coasting Along Japan’s Far Side

Getting there: Northwest and Japan Air Lines have nonstop service from Los Angeles to Osaka, with restricted round-trip fares starting at $750.

Getting around: Bus tickets should be bought a day or two ahead. Use the main city offices of JTB or TIS travel agencies, which usually have an English speaker on hand. We paid $90 each for the overnight bus to Hagi. Japan Rail West connects the towns along the San-In coast; it’s covered by the Japan Rail Pass. Prices start at $270 for seven days.

Tourist Information Offices (kanko-annai-jo in Japanese) are in or near every town’s main railway station, open roughly 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily. Most staff speak some English, and even if they don’t, they understand what you need. They can direct you to local accommodations; hostels seldom take reservations, and even business hotels often lack English signage.

We understand little Japanese yet had no trouble getting around the coast.

Where to stay: In Hagi, the Youth Hostel, 109-22 Horiuchi, telephone 011-81-838-22-0733, has simple accommodation in private rooms for roughly $32 per person. The helpful manager speaks a bit of English.

If a hostel is too spartan, Hokumon Yashiki, 210 Horiuchi, tel. 011-81-838-22-7521, fax 011-81-838-25-8144, is a traditional inn in Hagi. Rooms start at $200.

In Tsuwano, the Youth Hostel, tel. 011-81-856-72-0373, is on the grounds of a Buddhist temple on the main road south of town. Rates are similar to those at the hostel in Hagi.

In Matsue, Hotel Business Ishida, 205-11 Tera-machi, tel. 011-81-852-21-5931, is a find: comfortable Japanese-style rooms (shared bath), about $80.

Where to eat: In Hagi, Don-don, 177 Hijiwara 3-ku (near west end of Hagi bridge), serves huge portions of tasty noodle and rice dishes for about $7.

In Tsuwano, Furusato, in Gion-cho, across from the main post office, is a cozy little traditional restaurant, open for lunch only. Uzume-meishi (rice with wild vegetables) is about $12.

In Matsue, Yagumo-an, in Shiomi Nawate, just down the street from the Lafcadio Hearn Museum, is known for its warigo soba, the local noodle dish, $8. It’s open only for lunch; go early or be prepared to stroll the garden during a long wait.

For more information: Japan National Tourist Organization, 515 S. Figueroa St., Suite 1470, Los Angeles, CA 90071; tel. (213) 623-1952, fax (213) 623-6301, Internet https://www.jnto.go.jp.