Because it is there: a journey around northern Japan

    ‘In English it’s called Moon Mountain’, she says, as we drive along the flank of the huge peak. ‘I always feel strange when I drive here at night. There’s an old cemetery – I don’t know who’s buried there, maybe samurai. Every time I pass it I have a strange feeling. I’m glad you’re with me.’ 

     We pass the cemetery, which is in a small lay-by just off the road. In the encroaching darkness, it’s barely visible: a torii gate and a short row of ancient-looking tombstones. Truly, it does look an eerie place. 

    In Japanese the mountain is known as Gas-san, one of three sacred peaks that split Yamagata Prefecture in two. At the top, 1,984 metres above sea level, there’s a shrine. You can hike to the summit, although the thought of doing so at night on a mountain that symbolises death is not appealing. 

Gas-san, hidden behind clouds

    My Japanese driver is in her sixties. Her conversation is a little unusual. She asks if I love my country and whether I believe in reincarnation. She thinks our meeting was ‘fate’. Truly, it was improbable. I had spent the morning in a pair of isolated hillside temples viewing two hundred year old mummies. My plan was to take a return bus from the nearby village of Oami, but a female monk took pity on me and drove me down to the valley. 90 minutes later I was standing across the road from a ‘drive-in’, waiting for a bus in the intense July heat, when this English-speaking woman pulled over and offered me a lift. 

    With enthusiasm I tell her about the mummies. They are known as sokushinbutsu or 'living Buddhas'. They were ascetics who fasted for years on a plant food diet which, at its most extreme, consisted of nothing more than bark and roots. Burial alive in a wooden box with a breathing tube and a bell marked the final step. Now they sit in glass cabinets, tiny figures clad in bright robes, their heads lolling forward. I describe how the one in Churen-ji looks like it was carved from a piece of very fine dark wood, with its knobbly, black and brown fingers and shiny face.  

Churen-ji. Inside sits a mummy

    She seems fascinated by my determination to travel to this out of the way place (the bus had taken 45 minutes, followed by a thirty minute walk on the hottest day of the year). ‘Why didn’t you go to Sakata?’ she asks, referring to a small town thirty minutes up the coast from Tsuruoka. ‘There’s another mummy there’. I tell her the truth: I’d never heard of Sakata until the day before, and I had no idea it housed a sokushinbutsu. Otherwise I would have gone.

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    This exploration of the north was my final journey in Japan. It began in a startlingly bright waiting room in Shinjuku, in the heart of Tokyo. On the sidewalk outside the building four tramps were dossing down for the night on cardboard beds. One was an old woman, her grey hair visible above the blanket that covered her body. A small paper fan featuring colourful cartoon characters lay beside her head. My heart almost broke at the sight.  

    I boarded the bus shortly after midnight, and arrived in Sendai, the largest city in Tohoku (the northernmost region of Honshu, Japan’s principal island), six hours later. It didn’t take long to discover why travellers generally don’t bother with this part of Japan. The suburbs of Sendai were depressing, the usual assortment of ugly modern buildings and rivers with concrete banks. 

    It took 3 local trains and several hours to reach Morioka, just over a hundred miles further north (I had a purchased a seishun 18 kippu, which entitled me to 5 days of unlimited train travel, but only on local trains). The route went through an agricultural region, full of large and lush green fields in which farmers grew rice and who knew what else. The small towns and villages I saw through the window looked poor, as if they’d somehow been forgotten by the folk in the capital. Further north the train tracked the shinkansen line, an elevated eyesore blighting the landscape.  

    Morioka is a city of about 300,000 souls, which feels much smaller. In my guidebook it was described as ‘beautiful’. I suspected this could be hyperbole even before arriving, and so it proved. Although an improvement on the average Japanese city, Morioka has little to attract the visitor except for its trinity of rivers. It also boasts a fine view of massive Iwate-san, which rises to a height of more than 2,000 metres; sadly, it was hidden behind clouds throughout my stay. 

Lake Tazawa

    From Morioka I headed west to Lake Tazawa, a renowned beauty spot of the north. Again, the reality was underwhelming. The lake is surrounded by thickly forested hills and is celebrated for a gold statue of a woman called Tatsuko on the western shore, but the scenery is unlikely to impress anyone (like me) from Scotland. Or, indeed, anyone who has been to Scotland. 

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    In the north, local trains are infrequent and therefore inconvenient. My plan to take the slow (and cheap) route from Morioka to the port of Aomori was, in consequence, blown out of the water. Having discovered that I would have to leave at 5.41 in the morning to catch my ferry, I had no choice but to buy a shinkansen ticket, which I did through clenched teeth. I then endured an hour-long journey through invisible countryside beside a sweaty man. 

    Tsugaru Kaikyo ferries ply the waters between Aomori and Hakodate several times a day. Despite the cheap cost of a ticket (about 60 dollars for a return), they don’t seem to be especially popular, and staffing is kept to a minimum. Most travllers prefer to take the train or fly to Sapporo. I, on the other hand, like ships very much. To me, they conjure up images of a distant, more romantic era of travel, captured in the stories of W. Somerset Maugham. I therefore purchased a can of Asahi beer (from a vending machine, naturally), sat on a bench in the fierce sun on the open stern deck, and watched the receding skyline of Aomori as we eased up the bay. 

Aomori

    The journey takes three and a half hours, and is very calm, at least on the two occasions I was a passenger. The long peninsulas to the north of Aomori protect the ship from rough seas, and it’s only as you enter the narrow strait separating the two islands that the ship rocks even a little, and the wind begins to pick up. Mount Hakodate comes into view from some distance away. 

   Hakodate was somewhere I had long wanted to visit. In the nineteenth century the port opened to foreign trade and distant nations established consulates on this northern shore of Japan. Nineteenth and early twentieth century European and American-style buildings remain in the Motomachi district, serving as a wonderful counterpoint to the awful post-war architecture found with such depressing frequency in other Japanese cities. (In truth, the modern parts of Hakodate itself suffer from the same problem.) 

Old British Consulate, Hakodate

    At night, the atmosphere in Motomachi is tremendous. The steep streets are devoid of people, the Victorian-style street lamps are illuminated and the city’s trams, with their wooden floorboards, clunk slowly over cracked roads between the train station and the mountain. Hundred year old buildings like the former British Consulate are lit up on the hills. It feels like a miniature San Francisco, but without the homeless problem and with the added appeal of a ropeway that travels through the night sky to the top of the peak.  

     After returning to Aomori I took three local trains south to Tsuruoka, near the west coast. This seven hour marathon took me first through bucolic Aomori Prefecture, where the landscape was both strange and familiar: wild vegetation, apple orchards, vines bearing bunches of green grapes, rice fields bordered by red, white, pink and yellow flags, narrow rivers of clear water and hills giving way to mountains. 

   The train continued into Akita Prefecture, where rice fields stretched endlessly across wide plains to distant uplands and the sea. South of the unsightly city of Akita, the train flirted with the coast, and skirted awe-inspiring Mount Chokai, 2,236 metres high, whose gullies were still streaked with snow, even though it was July. It was easily the most memorable train journey of my trip, although my destination proved something of a ghost town. 

    

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    My driver drops me near Yamagata Station. Despite fate having brought us together, our parting is brief. As always, I’m glad to arrive at night, when the darkness shields the awfulness of the urban environment. This marks my final night in Tohoku, for tomorrow I will take six local trains to Nikko. I will pass Yamadera, a temple complex on the side of a hill, meet an American motorcyclist, stop briefly in Fukushima Prefecture, where the air stinks, and then wander the wonderful dark avenues of Nikko.

    A famous mountaineer was once asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest. ‘Because it is there’, he replied. These four words explain, more or less, why I went travelling in northern Japan. I wanted to take the ferry to Hakodate and see the ‘living Buddhas’ of Yamagata, but mainly I just felt the pull of an unknown region. It was there on the map, a great swathe of land notable for being badly hit by the tsunami in 2011 and not much else. I had been almost everywhere else in Japan, and before I left I was determined to see the north. Now I can move on.