that devotion, for generations; a land whose elemental energies are still honored, but a land that is fast-changing.
At the end of the hamlet where the road dwindles and fades out into wilderness, there is a track that leads past an abandoned clubhouse down to the shore, where two huge stone images of Daikoku and Ebisu (gods of rice farming and fishing, respectively) stand on either side of a thin path that ends on a tiny, rocky promontory. On the promontory stands a single, small wind-bent pine, and at its foot there is a small Shintō shrine dedicated to the tutelary deity of sailors, Konpira. Ironically, and symptomatic of the changing tide of consciousness, the area around this shrine is littered with the debris of picnic meals and discarded equipment left by weekend fishermen. An area once considered sacred is now ignored and polluted—Daikoku and Ebisu, increasingly strangers in their own land.
Some miles to the other side of Sora between the villages of Kanami and Iwaguruma there is another larger settlement of "second homes." This one and the one at Zenzuka, though, present a stark contrast. Here, one emerges from the rough single-track road past rice fields and areas of scrub onto, or rather into, something that makes you feel you suddenly changed discs in a virtual reality visor or crossed an environmental/time Rubicon between two realities. You cruise into a world of macadamized and discretely lamped suburban politeness, between brown raised brows of shaved and dehydrated lawns fronting wooden kit houses that seem to have been birthed from between the sheets of a catalogue of the American Dream. This is a "second home" village with clout and image and gardens, where anything natural is crucified and a sofa and two armchairs would not look out of place on the lawn. It is situated just above and beyond a small marina, ironically called Tsubaki-ga-saki ("Camellia Headland"), since the camellias were served eviction notices, and where they have survived (perhaps brought in from a garden center) have been forced to conform with the plastic garden-furniture.
From this instant village to its adjacent marina with antiseptic gleams from hulls of fiberglass and alloy craft, resembling an uneasy hybrid of high-tech jewelry and kitchen gadgetry, all express a bleakness of spirit and make you feel you have somehow been teleported into a television commercial. It is a sudden impact of culture shock and lasts for three to five minutes, depending on the speed with which you pass through.
♦ Noto Roads
For the first few months after our arrival in Sora, we decided that we were going to walk wherever the distance was walkable (for example, to the railway station in the next village) and hire a taxi for any longer journeys. After a few months, however, we bought bicycles to try and save some money on taxi fares. Finally, after nearly a year, because of our precarious financial state and a request for me to hold English classes in the nearest town, Anamizu, we succumbed to buying a very cheap secondhand car.
The car was white and shaped like a shoe. Not only was it shaped like a shoe but it was about the size of a large shoe. It was almost necessary for me to shoehorn myself into it, and for the first few days I was convinced I would never be able to drive it, as my thighs were jammed up against the steering wheel! Slowly, over a period of weeks some kind of fusion occurred between my body length and the tiny car's interior, and we—car and I—drove. I felt like a cyborg.
Driving to and from my English class in Anamizu throughout the year, the roads and lanes provided a kind of seasonal calendar with the creatures that frequented their surfaces and made driving a hazardous business, not least of course for them. Winter was a fairly void period, except for the obvious dangers of snow, ice, and the occasional cat. Spring, however, sprung in with frogs. Tiny, green plastic-contents-of-a-Christmas-cracker-looking frogs, which leapt about all over the road like extras in an Old Testament epic. Frogs that played chicken as they crossed the road, causing you to swerve from one side to the other and appear around corners to oncoming tractors, on the wrong side.
On the disappearance of these kamikaze leapers, they were replaced by huge bloated bullfrogs, that while not frenetically suicidal were as static as bollards in their waiting game with karma. These amphibians were natural meditators and in no way disturbed by the approach of a motor vehicle.
As soon as the temperature rose and evenings lengthened, this became the cue for queues of snakes, some huge six-foot serpents, to lie like hoses or temporary traffic-light cables across the road, bringing your forehead sharply up against the warm glass of the windscreen as you jammed your foot down on the brake to make detours, gingerly at 3 kph, as though you feared your tires might get bitten. Most often, you sadly passed the poor creatures already gutted, dissected; their heads bruised by nothing more transcendental than a Bridgestone tire.
The snakes remained until early autumn, and although the car was furnished with the obligatory talisman from a Buddhist temple and a charm from a Shinto shrine, prayer was still a necessary adjunct. But no sooner was it on your lips than "it" appeared. Manifested in thousands of small praying forms on the asphalt before you were praying mantises, hunched like little monks on an autumnal pilgrimage.
♦ Helmet Mountain (Kabuto Yama)
Shortly after our arrival in Sora we walked to Helmet Mountain, a forested hill that juts out into the sea. It is shaped like a samurai helmet, hence its name, and is situated about equidistantly, two miles either way, between the villages of Sora and Kabuto, a village named after the hill. At the top of Helmet Mountain there is a Shintō shrine, the object of our visit.
The shrine is reached by a long flight of weathered and eroded steps, which stretch from the granite torii (shrine gateway) at the bottom of the hill to the shrine at the top. Just before you arrive at the top, there is a kind of landing or break in the flight of steps intersected by paths leading to the left and to the right. These are in fact one and the same path which forms a circle just beneath the summit of the hill where the shrine is located. I assumed that this path must have been used in some of the Shinto ceremonies, for circumambulating the shrine in a clockwise (sunwise) direction, and on a later inquiry found this to be so.
The shrine, typical of those in the area, consists of two attached buildings, one behind the other, with the larger one in front, the smaller (the inner sanctum) behind. The front part of the shrine contains the usual paraphernalia, including a large drum, the mikoshi (an elaborate palanquin-like portable shrine in which the kami, or something representing the kami, is temporarily housed while it is carried through the district over which it presides) mounted on two trestles, and a box for donations. In front of the donation box hangs a red-and-white rope at the top of which is a slit bell, like a large cow bell, which emits a dull metallic rattling sound when shaken by the rope in order to attract the attention of the kami and to concentrate and calm the mind of the worshiper before he or she prays to the kami. Above the donation box hangs a board on which are painted the names of the war dead, and to the left, a model of a fishing boat, presumably left there by the owner of the vessel for protection. Or perhaps by families of the fishermen who have already perished with the boat.
Beyond the donation box suspended between two pillars is a rope made of rice straw with strips of white paper cut in zigzags hanging from it at intervals. Called a shimenawa, it indicates that the area beyond the rope is the sacred dwelling place of the kami. At the back of this space and directly in front of the entrance to the inner sanctum, there is a large mounted mirror of polished metal, symbolizing both the numinous and pure nature of the kami as well as the fidelity of the worshiper. On either side of the mirror are ancient wooden images of two former priests.
The energy at the top of Helmet Mountain is very powerful, and it always affected my body in some way or other, at certain times more powerfully than at others. We were told by a local farmer that it had once been a nesting place of eagles. It was a place I would return to quite regularly.
A shrine like this has no resident priest living within its compound. It is only visited at certain festival or ceremonial occasions. The rest of the year it is a silent and solitary place, except for the occasional visit by a local on some personal business.
As
