Shimosuwa - Walking the Nakasendo

Last year I spent Christmas day staying in the small lakeside town of Shimosuwa on the Nakasendo – the “Middle Mountain Road” in Japan. The Nakasendo was one of five old highways linking Edo (now Tokyo) and Kyoto established in the sixteenth century by the Shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu. Shimosuwa is the only hot spring town on the Nakasendo and so was once a welcome stopping place for merchants and officials travelling between the two principal cities of Edo era Japan. There are still many ryokan, traditional inns, in Shimosuwa, each with their own onsen or hot spring bath houses.

These ryokan are the perfect place for a short stay to relax and unwind – as a guest it is easy to imagine yourself living as an old world prince or princess as you are treated to beautifully prepared meals, all sumptuously set-out, looking like works of art in terms of presentation and tasting just as exquisite. The mineral salts which saturate the natural onsen water, along with the fresh mountain air and the scent of the traditional-styled tatami mat floors of the rooms are a real escape from the everyday. The ryokan are often family run businesses which have been owned and operated by the same families for many generations.

Kameya, the ryokan in which we stayed has a suite of rooms preserved in its centre which were used by Princess Kazunomiya (1846-1877). Overlooking a stylised garden resembling a mountainscape in miniature, the suite still retains its old blue and white porcelain toilets which look rather quaint in an elegant although uncomfortable way when compared to the modern almost robotic marvels with which the current rooms are now equipped. A small historical display in the ryokan’s lobby had examples of the inn’s old sign boards, a music box, and guest registers – one of which was signed by the husband of the noted tanka poet, Yosano Akiko (1878-1942), who had stayed here too.

Each ryokan has a public bathhouse divided into two – one for men and one for women. These each consist of a large indoor communal bath, with numerous individual shower points for bathing, and an outdoor rotemburo bath, which in the winter provide a bracingly invigorating way to experience the naturally hot water. The indoor bath has large glass windows which allow for picturesque views of the wooded hills surrounding the ryokan, yet each has been contrived in such a way to ensure privacy for even though these baths are communal it is the Japanese custom to use them whilst completely nude, carrying only a small hand towel for the sake of modesty if needed. As a lone foreigner in such places it takes a bit of getting used to, but once you do get used to it it’s not so odd. Most bathers tend to keep to themselves, but occasionally you may find yourself engaged in some interested conversations with fellow bathers whilst soaking together in the big bath, often beginning with polite questions such as – where are you from; why are you visiting Japan; how do you like the onsen, and Japanese food? – That said though, it is nice to have the place entirely to yourself. I was lucky on this occasion, as Christmas fell during the working week and not many Japanese celebrate Christmas, so our ryokan was comparatively empty and on each of the occasions I used the public bath (twice a day) I had it all to myself.

It was wonderful to go early and see the sunrise from the rotemburo, with the steam rising all around you in the chilly early morning air, and also again to see the sunset at the end of the day, relaxing aching muscles having been out and about wandering round the town all day under the crisp, clear blue sky. Each morning though, I realised I wasn’t the earliest riser as, rather like Robinson Crusoe, I found a single dark wet footprint still etched onto the light grey stone paving by the outdoor bath. Each ryokan also has a private bath which can be reserved for exclusive use, usually for an hour at a time, by couples or families. This is often a nice way to end the day, having first let your dinner go down, relaxing with one last soak before going to bed. There’s something indescribable about the natural, volcanically heated water of an onsen – it is hot in a way which seems impossible for conventional baths to achieve, and, augmented by the natural salts and minerals, it is the most effective way to relax and rejuvenate both body and soul that I know of.

Asides from the many scenic views of the lake and Mount Fuji in the far distance, the town of Shimosuwa itself is studded with numerous sites of local interest. Forming a kind of triangle between the three main points of two Shinto shrines and a stone lantern, the Sankaku Batcho (literally, the “8-chō triangle” – a chō being an old unit of measurement, approximately 119 yards) forms a neat circuit for a day’s gentle stroll. We started at the Akimiya – the autumn shrine – close to our ryokan and also the junction of the Nakasendo and Koshu-dochu roads, where the nearby Honjin, run by the Iwanami family, was the official inn where feudal lords and court nobles stayed when passing through this post town in the old Edo era. The Akimiya is an imposing building flanked by two bronze Komainu, statues of guardian dogs – the largest of their kind made of bronze in Japan. There is also a large tree, known as the Neiri no sugi, or the “Sleeping Cedar” – it is said that if you put your ear against its trunk at midnight you may hear the tree snoring!

Passing along the Nakasendo we took a quick look at the Raiko-ji, a Buddhist temple housing an image of Kanayaki Jizoson – which I think is a bronze statue, but the temple buildings were closed that day so we weren’t able to see it for ourselves. We also visited the nearby Aozuka Kofun, a very ancient burial mound of a kind unique to Japan, which when viewed aerially in plan view from above seem to have a ‘keyhole’ shape. They are thought to be the ancestral burial sites of nobles long since passed away during Japan’s prehistoric phase. Some, such as Daisen Kofun in Osaka, thought to be the tomb of the Emperor Nintoku, can be vast in size and surrounded by deep water-filled moats. The larger Kofuns are thought to be the burial sites of Japan’s earliest (possibly mythical) emperors. Others, such as this one in Shimosuwa, are much smaller in size and now much misshapen too. This one has several very ancient looking trees firmly established with wide-girthed trunks on its twin summits. These Kofun are still sites of deep religious significance, hence little is factually known about them as few have been investigated archaeologically. They are usually marked by small shrines at which offerings are still regularly left by local people.

Heading on up a long avenue lined by cherry trees, which must be quite a sight when in full bloom in the springtime sakura season, we reached another Buddhist temple, Jiun-ji. Originally under the protection of a local Daimyo, or feudal warlord, called Shingen Takeda (1521-1573), this is one of the most beautiful temples I have ever visited in Japan. It is entered by a small and unassuming gatehouse by the road. A long stone path flanked with green mossy carpeted beds and tall cedar trees leads up to the temple entrance gates, which house a pair of fierce looking protective deities. Beyond this gate there are a number of imposing temple buildings with dark timber frames, white stucco plaster walls, topped by beautifully curved bronze tiled roofs. Just inside the entrance in the first part of the courtyard stands a gorgeous pine tree planted in the sixteenth century by the Zen monk, Tenkei. It has since been trained into the most amazing shape spanning a vast expanse.

Back outside the temple, just across the road, a long stone stairway leads down to a second Dragon spout fountain, this one of cold water mirroring the hot water one at Akimiya.

Buddhist temples are often located near to the more ancient shrines of the native Shinto religion, and so it’s only a short distance from Jiun-ji to the second of the two principal Shinto shrines of Shimosuwa, the Harumiya – spring shrine. The Harumiya and Akimiya form the lower half of the Suwa-taisha, or Grand Shrine, with the upper half located on the south side of Lake Suwa – each is dedicated to the deity Takeminakata-no-kami and his consort, Yasakatome-no-kami. The two shrines of the Kamisha, or south side, are thought to be dedicated to the male deity and Shimosha to the female deity or consort, along with Takeminakata’s divine younger brother, Yaekotoshironushi, as well.

Every six years the shrines of Shimosuwa are rebuilt, with the occasion being marked by a large festival, known as Onbashira-sai, when the enormous onbashira (literally, ‘sacred pillars’) are dragged by hand from the nearby mountain forests to be erected in the four corners of the shrine. Reading about this I couldn’t help wondering about parallels with other Southeast Asian religions, even those of faraway Papua New Guinea (for instance, as with the Asmat people), where similar rituals of erecting sacred trees as special offerings to the local spirit deities occur. I’ve no idea as to whether or not these vastly differing cultures might have some long distant connection or common animist theological root, or if it would ever even be possible to know such a thing for sure, but it is an intriguing thought to wonder just how ancient the origins of such practices might actually be. One can imagine such a deeply ancient rite becoming ever more ritualised and refined, subtly morphing through the most ancient of aeons across huge distances and different peoples in diverse ways to the present day.

A little further on from the Harumiya we crossed two arched red footbridges to the sandbar shrine of Ukishima-sha, set in the midst of the Togawa River, to visit the Manji no sekibutsu. A stone sculpture, made in the Manji era (1658-1661), depicting Amitabha Buddha – but looking oddly reminiscent of one of the enormous moai statues of Rapa Nui or Easter Island. Here you are meant to say a silent prayer to Amitabha, and then walk in a short kora or circuit three times around the statue.

By this time we were more than ready for lunch, and so, close to the Gebabashi – a covered footbridge now marooned in the midst of the road, the oldest wooden structure in Shimosuwa – we stopped at a small restaurant, called Miya-no-mae Soba, for a delicious bowl of hot soba noodles with mountain vegetables and wild mushrooms. Afterwards following the road down to the Otoro, a stone lantern built in 1829, and then back along the main road into the town forming the right angle sides of the triangular walk. The town is filled with many craft shops of woodworkers, weavers and confectioners, which were sadly mostly closed by the time we got there. A couple of local museums look well worth a visit too, but by now we were very much ready to get back to our ryokan and have a soak in the onsen before dinner after our leisurely day of strolling around Shimosuwa’s Sankaku Batcho.

'Havel na Hrad' - Thirty Years On

Souvenir Series #12

Thirty years ago, on the 17^th November 1989, a series of political protests began in Czechoslovakia which culminated in the peaceful passing of totalitarian one-party state power from the Communist Party, who had ruled the country for 41 years, to an open democratic, multi-party system. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe had begun earlier that year with the rise of solidarity movements in Poland and Hungary, but really got going with the highly symbolic fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9^th. Watching these events unfolding as they were reported each evening on BBC TV News broadcasts in the UK, it seemed like a miracle was occurring. After so many years living with the threat of the Cold War, and having seen only very recently the brutal authoritarian state suppression of the student led democracy movement in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square just a few months before in the tragic summer of 1989, the magnitude of these events felt huge. The Eastern Bloc seemed to suddenly fall apart like a house of cards. The opening up of East Germany (GDR), Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, Hungary, and just two years later the actual collapse of the USSR itself truly signalled that the world was entering a genuinely new era, one which seemed to be characterised with unbounded hope and forward-looking optimism. I was entering my early teens at this time. I had always been fascinated and frightened in equal measure when watching the Soviet military parades on the TV News bulletins. The ranks of goose-stepping soldiers marching past the Kremlin followed by huge mobile rocket launchers laden with ominous-looking ballistic missiles motoring past the grey faced grandees of the Soviet Communist Party leaders seemed such a contrast to our own rather quaint and faintly ridiculous-looking Trooping of the Colour ceremony every year!

Sometime around Christmas that year at a family gathering I eagerly quizzed a relative who had been travelling in Europe at the time of these remarkable events. He’d managed to get to Berlin and then he’d travelled on to Prague in time to witness the Velvet Revolution as it happened. On 29^th December the former dissident playwright, Václav Havel, was elected as free Czechoslovakia’s new President. This was something which really fascinated me – how could a playwright become a President? – My relative was handing out chips of concrete smashed from the Berlin Wall to everyone as historic souvenirs when he ducked out of the room. Returning a moment later he placed a crumpled roll of papers into my hands telling me I could keep them. Intrigued I unrolled the large sheets to find they were a set of posters, each bearing the smiling face of the dissident playwright with bold red letters proclaiming “Havel na Hrad” – “Havel to the Castle.” The Hrad being Prague Castle, the official office of the President.

I knew even then that these were important, tangible pieces of history. Only a few years later I too travelled to Europe and the former Eastern Bloc. I went on two student exchanges to the newly reunified Germany – first staying with a West German family in Hannover, and then secondly staying with an East German family in Berlin. These two experiences had a profound effect upon me. They gave me a realistic grounding upon which to build a greater understanding of these events. The peaceful resistance movements which stood up to these totalitarian regimes fascinated me. My interests at school in literature and activism concerning human rights issues began to coalesce at this time, hence, following on from that initial question of how could a playwright become a President, I became very interested in samizdat (banned and unofficial literature circulated privately and secretly in typescript) as an underground phenomenon, as a means of resistance, and an expression of the irrepressible human urge towards freedom. Later on at university, as part of my undergraduate degree in anthropology, I researched and wrote a short dissertation on the subject of samizdat and civic resistance. On the wall of my bedroom in my student digs at the time, blu-tacked above my desk was one of the posters of Václav Havel which I’d been given that Christmas back in 1989.

I read a lot of Václav Havel’s plays and his political prose. I particularly liked the Vaněk Plays which managed to twist situations, suspicions and sympathies through clever word-play in the fine tradition of absurdist theatre. Essays such as ‘Power of the Powerless’ which expressed his concept of resistance through the everyday acts of choosing to ‘live in truth’ rather than buying into the little lies which make us all complicit in our own oppression seemed to resonate beyond the totalitarian constraints which he was fighting against, it seemed to me that they could equally well apply to the way we choose to live and organise our lives in the West and how much credence and legitimacy we afford to our own political leaders and the kind of powers they exercise over us in our collective name. It seems ironic that the Castle which Havel managed to enter after so many years of frustration and persecution was perhaps somewhat prophetically akin to the Castle which inspired the Prague born writer, Franz Kafka, to which his much beleaguered character, K, was never granted admittance. That idea of the everyman pitted against the overwhelming bureaucracy of the impenetrable machine which is trying to break him is a theme which has continued to intrigue me, and in many ways has evolved or transmuted even into the core question of my current PhD research – how the individual fits into and navigates the enormity of the systems of imperialism and global history, how we each strive to survive especially if we’re not fortunate enough to be in the upper echelons who seem to have all their advantages handed to them on a plate.

A subversive birthday greeting to 'Ferdinand Vanek', a character in one of Havel's plays, published in an official Communist Party-run Newspaper on Vaclav Havel's birthday in 1989

It’s no wonder then that one particular essay of Havel’s painted a vivid picture which has never faded from my mind. It’s a short piece of prose, playfully titled ‘Meeting Gorbachev,’ originally published in 1987 only two years before the events of the Velvet Revolution and Havel’s election as President, in which he describes how one evening, whilst he is out walking his dog he happened to pass a theatre, outside which a small gathering of people are waiting to get a glimpse of a great man. The great man is Mikhail Gorbachev, then the leader of the USSR, who was on a State visit to Prague and was being entertained at a gala performance that evening. Havel stops to watch the ‘Glasnost Czar’ and finds himself (despite his opposing convictions) gradually being seduced by the man’s charisma, sucked into the collective spirit of anticipation he unconsciously finds himself waving at Gorbachev and Gorbachev waving back in that strange disconnected sense of intimate connection which arises between a celebrity and their fan, fused together by the unreal intoxication of close proximity. Havel was by no means a wholly obscure, nor unknown character at this time, but even still, despite the thawing of authoritarianism which Gorbachev’s policies of Glasnost (Openness) and Perestroika (Restructuring) were beginning to initiate, that leap which propelled Havel to the Castle still seemed almost unimaginable at that time. Yet only two years later in his first Presidential New Year’s Address he was able to speak candidly to the Czechoslovakian people, opening with the following words: “For forty years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations of the same theme: how our country flourished, how many million tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us. – I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.” – No longer a playwright leading a dissident movement, he was now leading a nation in transition, a world leader – like Gorbachev, standing on a world stage.

In the summers of 1992 and 1993 London seemed to be full of second-hand market stalls selling off old Soviet memorabilia. I used to rummage through these – mostly army surplus: old uniforms, enamel badges, fabric patches, peaked caps and the like. I never bought anything, though I knew acutely that these things were the material remnants of an era which had now ended – these were tangible pieces of history which were slowly being dispersed and lost, merging into the blank space of the future, dissolving memory into the stuff of history books and dusty museum displays. The few tangible pieces of this history which I had in my possession – two tiny fragments of the Berlin Wall, four posters of Václav Havel, and a small, blue toy Trabant – were more than enough for me, because they were part of a lived experience, my lived experience, something which was greater than the sum of its parts. The experience of seeing real Trabants beetling about the streets of Berlin, of talking to German friends from both sides of that former dividing Wall, the Iron Curtain itself, hearing what life had really been like for them and how it had all so suddenly fallen apart and what they felt about it. Seeing and touching and breathing-in the last days of that moment in history for myself, and the fact that it was all suffused with that genuine sense of hope and optimism was something which had entered too deep into my soul to ever be forgotten or subsumed even by the passing of time. I can still picture it all so clearly in my mind.

It’s amazing now to talk to younger friends and colleagues who have no or next-to-no knowledge of these things. The Cold War is just a murky blank, merely the backdrop to old James Bond movies and redundant spy novels. It’s a defunct era. This seems almost incomprehensible to me, but that is simply the way of the world. Time does move on. And the world has changed so much in just the last two decades. We’ve accelerated at light speed, our fingers firmly pressed to the fast-forward button. The recent past has been all too swiftly eclipsed. But such memories and experiences are the important things which we really need to pass on. I realise now that it must have felt very much the same for my grandparents’ generation in the decades that followed on from the Second World War; they understood how vital it was that their life stories and experiences should be passed on. Some say that history is cyclical – that it has a tendency to repeat itself if we’re not careful. The current rise of nationalism and its discontents are proof enough, should we care to notice it.

The main set of posters I was given were designed by Joska Skalnik, using a photograph taken by Miloš Fikejz, and show Havel very much as a man of the people with the call to send ‘Havel na Hrad.’ The second poster is a version which depicts Havel in a much more statesman-like manner, dressed in a smart suit and with the tag line promising a ‘guarantee of free elections.’ Both posters are notably in the national colours of white, red and blue. Thirty years is a long time ago now in many respects. Even though there are still many people alive who remember those events – the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution, the collapse of the USSR – people who  remember it all far more intimately than I do. I feel it’s important that these remembrances on each major anniversary shouldn’t be allowed to fade quietly from our collective memory. And so perhaps my small part in keeping those memories preserved and accessible for the future has been partly fulfilled in a small way this year by my donating those election posters – as tangible pieces of history – to the British Library to mark this thirtieth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution; where I hope they will be used by curators and visitors in the study rooms and in future exhibitions seeking to understand and interpret the past, and to remember those days in Czechoslovakia in the last two months of 1989, when anything seemed possible and all possibilities seemed so positive; when the future was still to be found and was still something to be looked forward to.

Also on 'Waymarks'

"The Wind of Change" - Germany 1991 & 1993 

Rest In Peace - Vaclav Havel (1936-2011)