Day 7 - Half A Day’s Rest And Walking From Jingu Mae Nagoya To Arimatsu, Walking The Tokaido Road In Japan
Day 7 - Half A Day’s Rest And Walking From Jingu Mae Nagoya To Arimatsu, Walking The Tokaido Road In Japan
Up until now, the Tokaido Road Pilgrimage has not been very challenging.
In fact, it you are new to walking pilgrimages and are considering walking one in Japan, the Tokaido Road is a great entry-level pilgrimage to consider walking.
It is fairly flat with only a few hills and mountain passes, and it is loaded with history, small historic post towns and old castles, which make the walking days more interesting.
There are hot springs hotels to stay at along the route, so you don’t need to stay only in grimy business hotels.
It is a good idea when walking a long pilgrimage to take one rest day every week, or a sightseeing day when you visit a place you have never been to before.
Joseph and Wendy have never been to Nagoya, but this was my third visit to the city.
In past visits, I have been to the impressive castle, the scenic Tokugawa Japanese gardens, the museum district and other sights, so this time, I just wanted to spend my rest time in Starbucks, catching up on my writing and working on our walking route, because we are way behind what I have planned for us.
We left home in late August, and we have been travelling, walking and diving for more than seven months, and I am tired of being a tourist.
Going to see the same ancient castle and the same gardens again, don’t appeal to me now. I need some rest and re-centering.
But because we are behind, we planned to meet at the Starbucks in Nagoya after Joseph and Wendy visited the castle and started walking.
The Tokaido Road does not enter Nagoya.
It runs south of the city from the west to the east.
We didn’t have much time to return to Idagawa, where we stopped walking yesterday, because the local train takes 75 minutes from Nagoya, which will leave us very little time to walk before sunset.
Instead, I chose a section of the Tokaido that is closer to Nagoya to walk on today, and we will return to Idagawa tomorrow, to continue our walk from there.
It will take us two and a half days of walking to get to Nagoya anyway.
The plan was to walk about 12 km of the Tokaido today.
We started at the Jingu Mae station.
It was another cold day but as the day went on, the sun warmed us up and we began to strip off some of the layers of clothes we had worn.
This part of the Tokaido, between Route 1 and route 59, did not really have many of the old buildings or scenery left.
It was an unattractive section, with blocks of styleless buildings and chain stores, dealerships and no small shops or even convenience stores to use for toilets.
In fact, there were almost no toilets to be found, and we had to go into a Pachinko parlor to pee.
A pachinko parlor is a Japanese version of a casino, only it is more juvenile, extremely loud and smoking is encouraged.
The idea is that the more desperate the customers feel, the more likely they are to stay longer and gamble their money away, with the hope that making money will improve their desperate lives.
We reached the post town of Narumi.
Narumi-juku was a Tokaido Post Station Town connecting Edo (present-day Tokyo) to Kyoto, and it was built in 1601 by orders of Iyasu Tokugawa.
Nine post stations in present-day Aichi Prefecture were established on the Tokaido by decree.
The Narumi-juku post town prospered as it stretched across 1.8 km.
It was a place where people would rest and replenish supplies for themselves and their horses.
These are the scenes that have been recorded in travel diaries and in Ukiyo-e woodblock prints.
Since ancient times, festivals with wooden floats (dashi) have taken place here.
The residents of this area continue to celebrate their festivals and pass down their traditions and these beautiful festival floats to this day.
In the last four kilometers of our walk, the scenery improved.
Finally we reached the old town of Arimatsu, with its beautifully restored wooden buildings.
The old town feel is still noticeable everywhere and many of the houses displayed fully costumed Hina dolls, depicting life during the Edo period.
Hina dolls are a beautiful old tradition in Japan, and they are visually stunning.
The faces, legs and arms were usually made from porcelain, and they were dressed in kimonos with beautiful patterns.
The houses that lined the narrow Tokaido main street in Arimatsu had Hina dolls displayed on their exteriors, which was lovely but very surprising.
This is because Hina dolls are not considered toys for girls, they are precious family heirlooms and are usually displayed on an altar once a year on Hina matsuri, or the Doll Festival.
Hina matsuri is celebrated on March 3rd, when families display elaborate sets of "Hina" dolls, representing the Imperial Court, to pray for the health and happiness of their daughters.
As we walked through Arimatsu, I thought about why they displayed such precious heirlooms on the exterior of houses, where the sun and the rain can destroy them.
The first thought that came to me was that so many elderly people in Japan die and leave behind tens of thousands of Hina dolls, that attaching a few hundred dolls to beautify their town is not such a sacrifice.
By the late afternoon, most of the stores and the local museum were already closed for the day.
But the beauty of the town made us want to go backwards when we return to Arimatsu, to continue our walk, to have another look.
That night, Wendy and Joseph joined us and we all ate a dinner of grilled Okonomiyaki together.
Usually we eat dinner separately, because Jules and I prefer to eat at vegetarian restaurants when they are available, and Wendy and Joseph like to eat meat after their long days of walking.
It was a cold day and a cold night, but the forecast is for warmer days ahead, and we are all adjusting to walking all day and to walking together, because usually Jules and I are loners, walking pilgrimages alone.
It is nice to walk together with friends, but each one of us has a different level of fitness and therefore a different adjustment to the difficulties of the journey.
Living an outdoors life in the high mountains of Colorado, Jules and I are downhill skiers, cross country skiers, long distance swimmers, cyclists, runners and hikers, and we have adjusted to doing most of those sports at high altitude, where the oxygen levels are very low.
Joseph and Wendy love walking, and they walked the Nakasendo Road from Tokyo to Kyoto by themselves.
They are both healthy and fit and Joseph is a good golfer and a tennis player.
They walk often and they love it, but I don’t think that they ever walked for forty days in a row.
When they usually sign up for group hiking, they choose the easy level, while we would choose the advanced, that is if we ever wanted to walk with people we never met before.
We have been friends for over eight years with Joseph and Wendy, and we met while studying at a Japanese language school in Sapporo, Hokkaido.
We have stayed in touch over the years, and they joined us on sections of our pilgrimage through Kyushu, and we walked together in Taiwan twice.
Wendy is planning to hike the Annapurna in Nepal in a few months, and she is hoping to get stronger and in better shape before her hike.
With love and grace,
Tali
Today’s Stats:
23,671 steps
16 km
Total walked: 131.5 km
Old Post Towns Visited:
Miya Juku Station #41
Narumi Juku Station #40
