Things Seen Between Kannabiji and Chokoji

 

Late April, 2014, and I am on day 6 of my walk along the Iwami Kannon Pilgrimage. Visiting two temples today and I started from my home and headed upriver. First pilgrimage temple was Kannabiji, and the next is Chokoji. These photos are from things I noticed between the two temples.

Not far from Kannabiji is/was Mizunokuni, the top photo. A  museum specializing in water, I have visited often and most vistors I took rated it very highly. It closed down in 2018. Some shots from a last visit....

The second photo is a kura, storehouse, that has been beautifully restored. This third shot is one of the many roadside statues found everywhere. This one looks to have not been tended in quite a while.

From the water museum I head away from the Gonokawa River and up a side valley. I am pretty certain that on most days there is absolutely no traffic as it is a forest road that doesnt have any habitation along it.

A little further and you catch a glimpse of Sakamoto Falls. Climbing over the roadside crash barriet and edge along a rock outcropping and it becomes more clearly visible.

I can find no details about, height etc. I seem to remember that twenty years ago is was marked on maps as "Big waterfall".

A little further up the valley and I reach the side road that climbs out of it and over to Mihara. Right there at the junction is the skeleton of a wild boar.

A pretty big one, and it has been picked clean. Hard to believe it would have been a road kill as any traffic would be moving pretty slowly.

The road climbs through the forest and emerges in the farming settlement of Mihara. Nearby is Maruyama, a conical mountain on top of which once stood Maruyama Castle. The lord of that castle was a big supporter of both Kannabiji and Chokoji temples.

The rice paddies are all being flooded in preparation for planting in a week or two.

I head east across Mihara and then start to descend another empty, rural road towards Yudani where I will find Chokoji. No matter where you go in Japan you are never far from an expanse of concrete, whether it is on a mountainside or a coastline.

This badger was out and about in the middle of the day. Usually active at dusk and in the night, I have seen them occasionally during the day. here are a couple of post with short videos of badgers around my house. The previous post was on Kannabiji Temple.

Defending the garden

Before moving to the Japanese countryside, my experiences of gardening were all in the desert, so learning to grow food in Japan has been a long learning period. One of the main differences between gardening in Arizona and in Japan is that there are few animals and bugs in the desert. Here in Japan it is a constant battle defending the garden against critters. I don't mind sharing,.... I expect to lose a certain percentage of a crop to other critters, but there are some greedy critters.

Caterpillars of the white butterfly (called Cabbage White in England) will consume all the brassica family, cabbages, cauliflower, brussel sprouts etc. Most Japanese gardeners will use pesticide, but for me growing brassicas under net works perfectly.

The only other bug that is a real problem is a little orange bugger that feeds on the leaves of squash plants. Pumpkins will usually recover, but every year my Zuccini plants have been completely eaten and killed by the orange bugs. Every version of organic pesticide I've tried has been completely useless, so I now grow zuccini under net also.

My village garden now has a metal fence around it. The village put it up recently around the rice paddies, and my garden is in the same piece of land as the paddies. The purpose of the fence is to keep wild boars out. Not sure how much damage boars do to rice paddies, but if they get into a garden they will dig up and eat all the sweet potatoes and as many pumpkins they can find.

Down in the riverside garden the ripening corn needs a net to protect it from the crows. They will sometimes eat tomatoes, peas, and other veggies, but they really love newly ripened corn.
The blue fence is to protect against a creature I never knew existed in Japan, the Coypu, or Nutria, sometimes known as Beaver Rat. It is originally from South America, but has spread around the world as people raised them for their fur. It likes to eat cornstalk.

In the bamboo grove next to the garden is a foxes den, and people say the foxes damage the gaedens when they dig around for food, but they have never given me any trouble.

Both gardens have moles, but again they have not caused enough trouble to worry about.

Both my gardens are too far from the edge of the forest for the monkeys to raid, but my neighbors are constantly losing food to them. They particularly like daikons and onions.

Mountain Whale

Looking into the eye of a whale..... a Mountain Whale,..... which is also known as inoshishi,.... a wild boar. It was called mountain whale as a way to circumvent the proscription against eating meat. A whale is a fish and therefore exempt. Rabbits are classified as birds for the same reason.
Monks and buddhist priests, and devout buddhists, ate no meat, but most Japanese ate any meat they could get,... frog, snake, badger,.... dog was popular in Edo.

Inoshishi are classified as a pest as they destroy many gardens. My own gardens have been raided several times. Last autumn my neighbor set a trap next to one of the tracks that the boar were coming out of the forest on. In 3 months he caught 3 full-size boar.

We no longer have a hunter in our village, so a friend from another village was called and he dispatched the beast with one shot.

The tail is cut off so a small bounty can be gotten from the town council.

I have read that in parts of Japan many boars are killed as pests but the carcasses just burnt.

Round here inoshishi meat is prized, and from each one caught I got a leg and the ribs. Fresh boar meat is tender and very tasty.

I caught these little guys on the road a few years ago. They were just standing, waiting for their mom who was down in the rice paddy. Maybe one of these little cuties, a few years older, was what we ate :)