a place no chart nor ship can show

This is my second and last day in Onomichi in Hiroshima Prefecture. I'm writing about it now even though my last entry was so recent, because I don't know when I last visited a town I liked so well. (Sorry if a bit of Regency diction creeps in from time to time - I'm also transcribing some letters from that period in my spare moments, a subject for a later occasion.)

Onomichi (尾道 = "tail road") is not devoid of tourists, but most of the Western ones pass straight through. They get out at the station and immediately transfer to the little ferry that takes them over to the island of Mukaishima (a five-minute hop), and thence to the Shimanami Kaido cycle route across the Seto Inland Sea, a justly celebrated journey (though the only time I did it was on a rainy day and in a bus). I don't think many explore the town, which remains a bit of a hidden gem (or 穴場 - "hole place", in Japanese, as Mami informed me the other day). They should though, because it's really wonderful, at least if you share my tastes. Allow me to expatiate upon its charms under three broad heads.

First, physical geography. Onomichi is a town with a thin strip of flat land along the coast, where most of the shops are, then behind that a steeply rising hinterland. In this it resembles (on a much smaller scale) Kobe, where I'm going tomorrow, but the effect is more like that of a West country town - I was reminded oddly of Dartmouth. Mukaishima, though actually an island, feels like the far side of a river channel with a ferry connecting the two banks. Meanwhile, the narrow lanes and alleys above the town have more of a Cornish feel, with steps faced with granite in a more St Ives-ey manner. I got to know those steep lanes very well, because my hotel was at the very top of them, and it was not an easy climb on any of the three occasions I made it. (Luckily I'd forwarded my suitcase using the takkyubin, or it would have been impossible.) On the other hand, the view from my room is pretty damned good.


Yep, that's my hotel right at the top.

When I arrived yesterday I was told that, because it was the winter solstice, the public bath would have yuzu floating in it - something I've long wanted to experience, though I didn't have the body confidence to do so, sadly.

On the other hand, I did have the confidence to order the celebrated Onomichi ramen at an establishment in the town. An amazing meal at 900 Yen, which is (I'm almost embarrassed to write) about £4.50 at current exchange rates:


The second thing is cats. Onomichi is town of cats (which is presumably where the tails come from). Many of the cats are real, feral ones, lovingly fostered by the human population, but many are the inhabitants of stocks and stones, shrines and signs, and the twisty paths in the hills lead to many cat-haunted nooks, as you can see...




Clearly a lot of these displays are old and/or in relative disrepair, but that is far from detracting from their charm, at least to me. Rather, it helps create what one of the signs I saw described as "cat Ihatov" - a word borrowed from Kenji Miyazawa, who made his home of Iwate into a kind of palimpsestic enchantment, Ihatov, overlaying the quotidian. Onomichi is that, too, for those with eyes to see - which are, needless to say, cat's eyes. I ate lunch in a rather hidden restaurant called 'Owl's House' on one of these little paths, naturally choosing the 'Meow Pizza' with its sardines and bonito flakes. Two of the local feral cats sat inside watching me as I ate.

All of which brings me to the third charm of Onomichi - and actually my initial reason for wanting to visit - which is that it was the setting for the 2005 anime series, Kamichu! - a truly charming story of a middle-school girl, Yurie, who awakes one morning to discover that she has become a Shinto kami. This is not, however, a chunibyou story - i.e. the tale of a middle-schooler with delusions of divine power. Yurie, a shy and unassertive girl, doesn't really know what to do with her new status, or even what she might represent as a divine being.

Anyway, I learned from various web sources that not only was Onomichi the setting, but that its geography was adhered to particularly closely - which indeed I found to be the case, from the ferry that takes Yurie between home and school, to the shrine where her friend Matsuri lives and the many other places featured in the series.



By far the most moving thing to me, though, was seeing the school Yurie and her friends attended. I first saw it from above, coming down one of the steep slopes, so I had a good view of the roof:



It was all there! The roof where Yurie first exercised her powers as a god! The raised part where Kenji held his solo calligraphy club! Even the ladder connecting the two!

Now, because I write about the motivations for literary and anime pilgrimages in my academic work you mustn't imagine that I'm immune to such things myself. On the contrary, I found the sight profoundly moving, and all the more so when, as I got closer, I realised that Yurie's school was no longer a school. The building had clearly not been used in some years. The gate to the playground was open, so I was able to look around.



Not the least affecting was the set of swings, now consisting of the frame only, the swings themselves having been removed. ("What's their history?" "A　鞦韆". That's a free pun for fans of Shakespeare, playground equipment and ephemerality.)



I don't know why the school closed, but as we are all aware, Japan's birthrate has been declining steadily and Onomichi's own population has begun to shrink. It's all a long way from 2005, still more from the 1980s, when the anime is actually set. (I did not find anybody in the town who remembered the anime, for that matter - not that I asked everyone. Just a couple of Ema at Misode Tenman-gu shrine - Matsuri's shrine - commemorating the 20th anniversary of the series, among many others praying to enter, or graduate successfully from, Hiroshima University.) I hope that Yurie can tame the poverty god, as she did in the series, in which she helped him become a cat.



Having visited Onomichi, I also now understand why they made an episode based on Fight Club, but with cats. Or at least, I understand the cats bit.

Anyway, Onomichi is great, and you should visit it - tomorrow if possible, but at any rate very soon.