🦪 Matsushima 松島

18th April 2025年4月18日

Be prepared for the unexpected. This is one of my mottos when in Japan. Is it the unexpected convenience of power sockets at a café table.....?

予期せぬ事態に備えよ。これは私が日本にいるときのモットーの一つです。

Or the civic pride in a manhole?

Or the discovery of a cassette player in the local department store?

Or a box to carry sake up a mountain to offer to the gods?

Or the discovery of a museum 5 minutes walk from your hotel?.....devoted solely to butterflies and Kokeshi?

Mr. Bunzo Kamei was the third president of the Kamei Organisation. But he had a passion: butterflies. He travelled all over the world in search of specimens. And they are all here in Sendai, all 14.000 of them.......

I am not going to try and name them.......

Kokeshi? They are wooden dolls turned on a lathe. Originating from this region: Tohoku

Or how about these guys? They are about 2,500 years old and were found in graves from the Jomon period

Almost every day I am surprised by things here. I am walking through a residential area and suddenly come across a cement works. What next.

ここではほぼ毎日、驚くような出来事に遭遇します。住宅街を歩いていると、突然セメント工場に遭遇するんです。次は一体何が起こるのでしょう。

Or I am walking in the forest and see this sign - it is so old. Is it a warning of some sort? I start decifering the Kanji: Security Forest?.....Protected Forest maybe? What about Forest Reserve. That sounds more plausible.

And then there is the sheer accuracy of the train carriage plans on the station platform......am I standing in the right place? (yes)....

The pride in the railways......Indeed, I think this pride is part of the story behind Japan's extraordinarily efficient transport system. They seem to love trains. At some point in the 19thc. somebody must have said > "This is it. If we are going to modernize this country it's got to be trains". And trains it was. Not cars. Ever been on a Japanese motorway? It's boring. Trains are much more fun. And you can rely on them.

Hoshikawa history.....

But for some inexplicable reason, there is no pride in getting English right. My hotel in Sendai has friendly staff, is efficient, modern, clean...in short everything you need.....except this... surely it is not that difficult to get a good English translation these days??????

I'm now sitting an a rather squeaky clean train heading north out of Sendai. It's the Sensecki local service to Ishinomaki.

仙石線宮城県

I'm alighting at one of Japan's beauty spots - Mitsushima Kaigan. I want to see the sea. The beautiful but destructive sea. The sea which removed sections of this line in 2011. And here it is, looking deep and calm. A few cruise boats are lined up. Not for me. I find the loud commentaries on these sight-seeing ships maddening.

This tranquil bay, dotted with little islands, was spared the worst of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and Tsunami, being protected by Miyato Island/peninsular to the east (the red dot on the map is where I am).....

One of the first things I saw after leaving the station was one of those helpful signboards with all the sight-seeing spots marked. At least two islands connected to the land by bridges, with woodland walks and temples. But my map showed another small island which was not mentioned in the tourist blurb. Ojima. Some instinct in me (which rebels against being told what to see) led me to walk in this direction. I passed through a boat yard, and followed a trail cut out of the rock.......

........and was astonished to come across these caves along the way....also cut out of the rock

Crossing the small red bridge- the Togetsukyō Bridge (a replacement for the one destroyed 14 years ago) I soon found myself on what can only be described as a sacred island......There is even a strange word attached to it - Utamakura (歌枕, "poem pillow") - a rhetorical concept in Japanese poetry.

I had not done my homework (sometimes a good thing) and didn't really know what I was looking at. The island had apparently been a retreat for monks, and is littered with manifestations of Buddha, the caves being for meditation. There are also Shinto shrines, and inscriptions from the famous poet Bashou.

Many statues have been eroded by the elements, but still receive offerings.......(I have often wondered what the point of those 1 yen coins are, now I know)

I followed the path around the island...

...with the sea lapping under the cliffs....

Now why was this island not on the tourist maps? I wonder........I will let you come to your own conclusions.

では、なぜこの島は観光地図に載っていないのでしょうか？不思議ですね……。結論はご自身で考えてください。

Sightseeing is hungry work. The wind was cold, and all I needed was a warm soup. All the restaurants on the sea front were offering either oysters or beef tongue (ぎゅう a local speciality). I felt like neither. Then I noticed it, having walked passed it once and dismissed it as off the scale regarding grubbiness and a general shabby air. There was just a glass door with words pasted onto it ラーメン (Ramen) カレー (Curry). I stepped inside. A little old man stood up from his television and gave me a broad smile of greeting...."Yes, of course I have Ramen...just take a seat...."