I πŸ’œ Wasting Ink β†’ Diaries β†’ These Walking Dreams β†’ Day 17 (April 29, 2017)

Shiiba, Miyazaki

Map of Miyazaki with author’s route across the valleys of Shiiba highlighted. πŸ—Ί Open map in GaiaGPS β†’

The blossoms of a flowering cherry tree whose trunk is covered thickly with lichen.

A red bridge in the forest catches the morning light.

An abandoned porn magazine in the bushes.

A closer view of the same bridge, implying that the author is about to cross it.

The spillway of an enormous black concrete dam in a thickly forested, very steep valley. πŸ“ Upper Shiiba Dam, Miyazaki

A bench for doing bench presses made of a slab of wood and two beer crates.

Motorcycles cross a bridge in the mountains.

A tiny yellow excavator in a parking lot.

Looking out over tea bushes in the back yard of a house at a village and the hills beyond it. πŸ“ Shiiba, Miyazaki

A grove a very tall cedars.

A red Shinto shrine is dwarfed by the trunk of an enormous cedar.

The author stands by the trunk of the same cedar, and is also dwarfed by it. πŸ“ Yamura Cedar, Shiiba, Miyazaki

In the inner valleys of Shiiba, where some of the Heike are said to have scattered, is a small grove of cedars, and towering above them is Yamura Cedar. It is of such a vastly different size and timescale than a human that it’s hard to think of it as a creature with a finite lifespan. It is a gentle god, its bark smooth and soft, its canopy scatters the harsh Kyushu sun, and it will probably stand there forever.

A manhole cover with the crest of the Taira clan, a butterfly, famous from early medieval Japanese history.

Looking out on a forested hillside in the late afternoon light. πŸ“ Shiiba, Miyazaki

Branches of a huge Japanese cypress tree.

A vertical panorama of the same tree.

The middle section of the tree, which is impossible to fit into the frame of the camera. πŸ“ Ōkubo Cypress, Shiiba, Miyazaki

Two Japanese men sit in camping chairs by a truck and enjoy large glasses of beer.

A man holds a handful of freshly picked mountain herbs into the camera.

The author holds one of the plants.

A basket of mountain herbs and wild shiitake mushrooms.

Two men by a cabin, one of them relaxing with a cigarette, the other frying vegetables on a gas burner.

A man in a flight jacket and glasses turns small fish wrapped in aluminium foil on a grill.

One of the fish, a Japanese trout, unwrapped on a paper plate.

The author with a large group of men sitting around a huge grill with a lot of food, all of them clearly enjoying themselves. πŸ“ Shiiba, Miyazaki

For two days, as I walked between towering cliffsides, along clear mountain streams, and among kaleidoscopes of wildflowers, I had a powerful feeling of being back in Kurdistan, where I had walked the year before. And when I met a group of tenkara fishermen from Ōita β€” who invited me for a four-hour picnic of tempura-fried mountain herbs, grilled shiitake mushrooms, freshly caught trout, and wild boar belly β€” and went to bed in their log cabin, the feeling was complete.

A box of tiny flies used for tenkara, Japanese-style fly-fishing, fits in a single hand.

One of the flies in the palm of the author’s left hand, looking very small.

The author holds a painted landing net in his left hand. πŸ“ Shiiba, Miyazaki

The landing nets used by the tenkara fishermen are objects of stunning beauty.

These Walking Dreams is a visual field diary of a 4,300-kilometer walk from one end of Japan to the other, in the spring and summer of 2017.

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