So imagine my delight when, browsing through my Japan travel guide one night, looking for a short trip for Silver Week, I discovered the existence of a small town famous for its folk tales! I generally find folk tales to be somewhat inferior to fairy tales, partly because editors and compilers often feel the need to adopt what they feel to be an appropriately folksy voice -- but I figured the tales might be more real (despite the falsified voice) if I could actually see the rivers and woods that inspired them.
Tôno is located in Iwate Prefecture, north of Sendai and well off the beaten foreign-tourist track. It’s possible to take the shinkansen (bullet train), but much cheaper (and arguably more interesting) to take local trains. I left Sendai quite early, around six, and arrived just after ten. The city bus schedule coincides with the train arrivals, but I decided not to go out to the hostel yet but to stay downtown and explore.
Downtown Tôno consists of one main road, leading away from the station, and a few somewhat smaller roads that intersect it. By and large, it’s a typically Japanese place: clean and well-maintained streets lined with restaurants, hair salons, and small shops. Any neon in Tôno is subdued and comes mostly from banks and gas stations. And it is absolutely full of kappa.
The kappa is the most well-known character from the Tôno tales, a water monster who drags unsuspecting waders to their death by drowning. They will even venture to the banks of the river and try to charm you in (should this happen, you can get rid of them by bowing; when they return the bow, the water will run out of the hollow on their heads and they will run off to refill it). Tôno is full of rivers; the kappa was used as a protective device by parents to ensure that their children would be unlikely to venture too close to the water. Similar to the character in European folk tales who uses giant scissors to cut off the thumbs of children who suck them; not, overall, a particularly pleasant character. So why, you (sensibly) ask, is it so famous?
The answer is that you can turn them from this…
into these:
Aren’t they cute? This style of kappa are absolutely everywhere in Tôno. The real ones are, folklorically, there too; you can even fish for them using cucumber (their favorite food) as bait. At one pond housing a famous kappa that saved a nearby shrine from a fire, I saw two boys doing so while their parents took photographs. Quite a ways from kappa-as-parental-discipline-through-terror-device…
I eventually made it out to the hostel, getting lost in the rice fields only once along the way, where they let me check in two hours early (I’m glad I didn’t get there at 11…) and rented me a bright red bicycle to take out to a folk village called Furusato, which means hometown. The village is still operational as a farm, although no one lives there anymore and they make most of their living through selling handicrafts to tourists. Elderly people are hired to sit on the porches of the magariya (famously L-shaped) farmhouses and create various traditional crafts.
You can also go into the houses and admire the sunken fire pit and antique handcrafted furniture -- as well as some things which I really wish had been explained in English:
That night, the hostel had an apparently mandatory meeting for all their guests, mostly to announce the next day’s breakfast time and menu. I wasn’t paying for meals, but they provided tea and cake for the meeting. Afterwards, I attempted to speak Japanese with an art teacher from Gunma prefecture and two young guys from Kyoto for probably twenty minutes before one of them took pity on me and agreed that he could speak English “a little.” (As per usual with the Japanese, this meant he was pretty well fluent.) I far prefer bilingual conversations, especially when I’m tired.
I took the bus (it was late! An event thus far unheard of in Japan) back to town the next morning and set off on foot for a sight about 3 kilometers outside town. Along the way, a car pulled over and a man rolled down the window. We had the following conversation:
Man: Do you speak Japanese?
Jenn: A little.
Man: Oh, your Japanese is so good! Do you have an umbrella?
Jenn: No…
Man gets out of car, pulls umbrella out of the trunk and proffers it.
Jenn: But that’s your umbrella… and also, it’s not raining…
Man: It’s going to rain this afternoon.
Jenn: It’s 9 in the morning.
Man: Please. It’s going to rain this afternoon.
Jenn: Um, okay. Thank you. *bowing party* Oh, listen, can you tell me: is this the right road to the Five Hundred Disciples?
Man: Get in the car. I will take you.
Jenn: Um, no. That’s okay. Just, is this the right road?
Man: I can drive you!
Jenn: I like walking.
Man: ... well, okay, yes. It’s just up the road.
Man drives away. Jenn walks another 20 yards, turns a corner, and finds herself at the place. Would have been a thirty-second car ride…
This makes me think that my experience of Japanese people would have been quite different if I were a rural JET.
Anyway. The Five Hundred Disciples are rock carvings done in the 1800s by a monk wishing to commemorate the victims of a famine. They are on boulders scattered up the side of a small mountain, which makes the place look like maybe some kind of large structure collapsed; but no, that’s how he carved them. They have long since been covered in moss, which makes them even ghostlier. It felt like a cemetery.
Back downtown, I visited three museums. The first was housed in the inn where the folktale compiler stayed when he came to visit and compile, and dedicated to the compiler and the tales.
The second was apparently dedicated to nothing in particular and housing a room with hundreds of twentieth-century toys crammed in with no attempt towards organization or labeling. Not that any but the most Herculean effort would succeed…
The third was dedicated to the brief period during which Tôno was a wealthy castle town, and had the typical city museum displays of lacquered flatware, highly-decorated household objects, and extremely fancy kimono.
In between, I found a small restaurant advertising the local specialty, hitsume soba. I explained to the waiter that I can’t eat chicken, the waiter went off to talk to the cook, and they presented me with a bowl of chickenless hitsume soba made just for me! Once I pulled out the flower-shaped fish paste cakes (I hate those things!), it was utterly delicious.
Tôno is about an hour, again by local trains, from Morioka, the largest city in Iwate Prefecture. I left Tono and arrived in Morioka around five. (I left the umbrella on the train when I got off; it never did rain.) I stopped in at the tourist information centre in the station, and they told me which bus to take to get to my hostel. I got off the bus at the right stop, referred to the directions in my guidebook… and realized it was talking about a completely different place. I didn’t even know where in Morioka I was. Good.
First I tried to call the hostel. The second time I failed, the kindly man at wherever I was calling reminded me that you have to put a 0 in front of numbers when you call them within Japan. So I did succeed in reaching the front desk, where the receptionist spoke no English. He gave me directions. I got lost and called back. He gave me more directions. Eventually he spent 18 solid minutes on the phone with me, until I managed to find the place.
The problem? Well, to start with it doesn’t look like a hostel; it looks like a convention centre. Secondly, it’s not called Youth Hostel (which I can read in Japanese), it’s called something-in-really-difficult-Japanese. And thirdly, the main landmark he was using to guide me (a Japanese-style gym) is one of two similar-looking structures on the same street.
Note to self: next time, get directions from the English-speakers before you leave the station.
The next day, I visited the grounds of what was Morioka Castle before it burned down. (Castles in Japan were built with wood. The neighboring lord would attack, or lightning would strike, and the castle would burn down. They’d rebuild it -- in wood. You’d think they’d’ve learned. There are only about six original castles left in Japan.)
Like most castle sites, it’s become a municipal park with various statues, trees and flowers, and a playground. There is a sculpture of Morioka’s favorite son, a poet, who used to jump out the window of his high school and come to the castle grounds to read. I enjoy the commemoration of the terrible study habits of the brilliant and famous.
The real magic of Morioka, in my opinion, lies in a small neighborhood of Meiji-era shops that somehow managed to survive World War II. There’s a very real sense that the people who own the shops now are selling the same things that have been sold in those shops for the past hundred and fifty years. It felt like walking back in time.
Much of the rest of Morioka was relatively unmemorable. Sadly, the temples and shrines were closed for the national holiday. The main shopping streets looked almost the same as Sendai’s. I saw the grave of Princess Centipede, but she was not named that because she was a centipede (her father killed a really big centipede, apparently, and it still haunts her grave. You’d think it would haunt his). It was a pleasant enough place, but what Lonely Planet might call “workaday.”
