I really do want to finish this Japan trip, because I’m saving it in my blog, too. Just using emails to you as an excuse to write and hold myself accountable.
So, on Tuesday, I went to Kyoto, and ended the night by being chased by boars off the mountain. Wednesday I was finally moving on to my final stop in Japan, the big one: Tokyo itself. However, I had all day to get there, and I had all day Thursday and Friday to explore the city before my flight Friday evening.
I woke up in my hostel Wednesday morning and packed up to go. I guess I’d like to pause and talk about what Japanese hostels are like. The one in Osaka was especially unusual. Like I mentioned before, you entered through a small coffee shop/restaurant on the ground floor. The shop was tucked away in a narrow alleyway, with lots of private homes crowding all around. People had their laundry out on lines to dry, stray dogs and cats, the works. Once inside, you removed your shoes and left them in a cubby in a small waiting area before heading upstairs. This is normal everywhere I went – shoes just aren’t worn indoors at all. Upstairs, there were several big dorm rooms – lots of places have mixed gender and female-only rooms, very rarely are there male-only rooms.
Inside the dorm, there’s typically some lockers and hangars for things like coats and bags, then lots of beds. The beds are stacked two high with only the ends facing the main area, and come with curtains to give privacy. Inside, you have your bed, a small shelf or cubby to house some things, and typically a lamp or an outlet. Space is small, but as long as you don’t expect too much they’re quite cozy and comfy. Bathroom facilities are communal, with a bunch of sinks and mirrors in a common space and then a few shower stalls with an attached changing room. The showers are small and the heads honestly a little low for me. It’s hard to be tall in Asia. On the whole, they’re not luxurious, but they’re very comfortable if you’re travelling light and alone, like I was.
So before I left Osaka, I had one last destination: Osaka Castle. Yes, my third castle, but this one had the most historical significance! See, during Japan’s warring states period, Osaka was the capital of one of the last great lords of the period, Toyotomi. Whoever held Osaka could dominate Kyoto (just 40 miles away, remember), and whoever dominates Kyoto dominates the Emperor (the Emperor was/is widely respected as the “ruler” of Japan, but he didn’t make any actual decisions and entire wars were fought in the country with each side claiming to be the true servants of the emperor). In the final days of the wars, 1615, the head of the Emperor’s military forces, the shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa, led a siege of Osaka castle to overthrow Toyotomi and remove the last obstacle to his rule. In those days, the shogun was the true ruler of the country. Osaka was besieged, there was a massive battle fought just outside the castle, and in the end Toyotomi committed suicide. The shogun Tokugawa united the country and moved the capital to his home in the city of Edo, far to the east. His descendents ruled Japan from 1615 all the way to 1870, when the Emperor reclaimed authority and moved to Edo, renaming the city Toyko (the Tom Cruise movie The Last Samurai is a highly fictionalized version of those events).
I took the subway from near my hostel a mile or two and emerged near another one of those massive glass-and-steel office towers that dominates modern architecture. Everyone around me was a businessman hurrying to work, it seemed. It was still early, not even 9:00, and the day was clear and cool. Just to the south of me I could see the castle sitting in its park.
I had to wind around several moats and walls to approach the main keep. There weren’t many people around, ebcause I was coming in the back way, from the north. The museum was piping martial Japanese music over some hidden speakers, lots of war drums pounding steadily. I passed various old gates and walls, looked out over Osaka, and came to the site where Lord Toyotomi committed suicide after losing the battle of Osaka. That was neat.
Once I got up to the castle itself, there were hundreds of people around – tons of tour groups, including children on field trips. I bought my tickets and headed in. The castle interior has been filled with a museum on the Warring States period, the life of Lord Hideyori Toyotomi, and the final siege of Osaka. Each floor has a theme and dozens of exhibits, artifacts from the time, historical documents, some pretty cool dioramas, videos (entirely in Japanese, sadly), and on to the usual observation deck to look out at the city. I spent a few hours poking around.
Now, my plan had been to head straight from Osaka to Tokyo, maybe pausing at Fuji town on the way or something. But then I realized…this might be the only time I’m in Japan, and it’ll certainly be the only time I’m in Japan by myself. If there was ever a time to have my own independent adventures, this was it. So as I made my way back down the 5 stories of the castle, I pulled up my maps and started looking for a specific town, one I’d read about years ago but never dreamed I’d visit. And sure enough, it was a few hours away by train…but not totally out of my way. I could visit and still be in Tokyo this evening.
So I decided to go to Sekigahara.
I had to wind back out of the park, again, heading south this time, over the old battlefield. I got stopped by one Japanese man on my way out, who was very eager to practice his English. He used to work on an American military base, and had very good English. He was a very friendly guy. For some reason I remember his teeth clearly, even now, more than two months later – he had two gold teeth. Funny, the things that stick out about people.
Anyway, it took me damn near 40 minutes to walk back to the train station from the castle, but from there I started hopping on regional trains and headed north, past Kyoto, and into the Japanese countryside. We chugged along the shore of Lake Biwa, passing increasingly small country towns as I went. A few hours later, about 1 in the afternoon, my train chugged into a tiny platform in a sleepy country town called Sekigahara. I mean, tiny – Hakata, Hiroshima, and Osaka stations all had more than 25 train platforms each. This one had 2, and a tiny station building with a single ticket gate. There was absolutely no one around – for the first time since coming to Japan, there were no crowds.
Sekigahara is small, with a population of only 7,000 – tiny by Japanese standards. It’s a handful of houses and shops clustered around the crossroads and the train station. You can walk from one end of town to the other in 20 minutes. Otherwise it’s surrounded by fields and farms, woods and mountains. Overall, it reminds me a lot of Pierce City. So imagine a random Japanese tourist showing up in the middle of downtown Pierce City – that’s about what I was doing here.
So why come?
Well, Sekigahara is basically the Gettysburg of Japan. I mentioned earlier Ieyasu Tokugawa, the shogun or military dictator of Japan, in 1615. Tokugawa became Shogun because in the year 1600 he won the Battle of Sekigahara, here in this sleepy crossroads town.
See, Tokugawa was clashing with a fellow by the name of Mitsunari Ishida. Ishida served the emperor and was resisting Tokugawa’s ambition to become shogun. The two jostled and sparred politically in Kyoto for years, until eventually things came to a head and Tokugawa withdrew to his lands in Edo, to the east. Ishida declared Tokugawa an outlaw and began gathering an army to overthrow him, while Tokugawa gathered his own supporters to march on Kyoto.
Sekigahara sits in the middle of one of the best passes between Kyoto and Edo (today Tokyo), so Ishida prepared to meet Tokugawa here. He drew up his Western armies in an ambush on the hills that surround the town, and Tokugawa’s Eastern army marched right into the trap. Unfortunately for Ishida, Tokugawa had been in secret contact with many of the Western nobles, and had promised great rewards in land and wealth if they switched sides and helped make him shogun. So half of the Western army either refused to fight or outright joined hte East. Ishida and his most loyal generals were surrounded and killed. Tokugawa marched on to Kyoto and had the emperor declare him shogun, executing a lot of the surviving Western nobles in the river bed I had crossed over the day before when I was in Kyoto. (There’s a Japanese drama made in 2017, called Sekigahara,n about the battle, that I thought was pretty well done, but I think it might be confusing to people who don’t already know the story).
So today, Sekigahara is filled with memories of the battle. There are huge painted murals on the walls outside the train station of most of the major players, and lots of maps and signs pointing you to key locations from the battle. I walked around for hours in the mostly-empty fields, going to this skirmish or that camp, and mostly just being amazed that I was actually standing in Sekigahara – it’s so far from anything that I never dreamed I’d make it here one day! There’s no tours and I couldn’t find a convenient museum, but there’s lots of good signs, including English ones. I seemed to be the only visitor that day – indeed, I was almost the only living soul in the town, it felt like.
Finally, I headed back to the tiny train station and tried to decide which of the two platforms was the right one to wait for the next train. It wasn’t due for another hour – trains not as frequent out here as in Osaka or Hiroshima. I eventually found a kindly Japanese woman (ultimately there were 4 of us waiting for the train) and she assured me I was in the right spot. I hopped on the train, which took me the rest of hte way through the mountains and into Nayoga (another huge city sprawling over most of central Japan), where I transferred to shinkansen bullet train one last time.
The bullet train raced along the southern Japanese coast for Tokyo. It was filled with people – I remember a particularly lively group of 5 students across the aisle from me who were all playing a card game together in the middle of their cluster of seats. The best part of the trip, though, was at sunset, as we came around into Fuji town. There, looming across the valley, I could see Mt. Fuji itself, its upper slopes all snowy and golden in the late evening light. Fuji town, in the valley between the train tracks and the mountain, was already starting to settle in for the night and there were lights twinkling there. The train was so fast that the whole panorama was in view for only about three minutes, but I was able to snap a single picture before it vanished forever.
We rolled into Tokyo Station about 7:00 that evening. It was full dark by now, but in Tokyo that doesn’t matter. I think it’s the largest metro area in the world and I was right in the heart of downtown. Forget thousands of people, it felt like there were tens of thousands of people hurrying aroudn the train station and the surrounding plaza. The station was smaller than I expected, but built in a beautiful classic brick style – it dates back to 1870 and fronts directly on the Imperial Palace. When the Emperor moved here he had it built so he could easily travel his country. It was destroyed in the war, of course, but has been rebuilt and restored to its former glory.
All around the station were massive skyscrapers, their lights glittering in the nighttime air. I had another good walk through the city ahead of me, and everywhere I went there was light and people. Dozens of people were walking or jogging around the moats that surround the palace complex, every crosswalk had hundreds of people waiting to go, and traffic was unceasing. I walked through big business districts with massive boulevards, along shopping areas with tons of streetside restaurants and cafes, up and down hills, through narrow alleyways (crowded with people), and gradually worked my way to my last hostel.
This one was bigger than any I’d stayed in yet, with a large ground floor and a hip, modern style of architecture with lots of exposed brick and concrete. By the time I checked in and had had dinner, it was past 9:00, so I decided to settle in for the night. I uploaded my pictures for the day in my cozy little bed, and then downloaded Sekigahara so I could watch a movie about the battle.
The next day was my last full day in Japan.
Gwangju Dreaming 