"a tour in Kamiyama"

We visited the mayor at the beginning of the tour, another round of bowing, smiling, and having little idea of what was going on.

While the mountains around here are largely uninhabited, there are some temples scattered around in them. Three of the 88 temples on the Shikoku pilgrimage route are in Kamiyama area. The hillsides are very steep, but all the land around here has been logged- it was all planted in cedar as a forest plantation, but apparently now the Japanese get all their wood from imports since the cost of labor is too high here to continue the logging industry. The hills are covered with stands of these cedars, maybe 30 years old, all the same. Around some of the temples and shrines a few old, massive trees still stand.

Other trees include a stand of ancient Ginkgo, which I have not visited yet, tsugi (red pine) and hinoki cypress.

Leaving the lower hillsides the steep forests are very rugged, yet filled with roads, all about one car wide. They are paved for the most part but also liable to covered with brush and fallen rock. On our tour of Kamiyama on my birthday, we road a small van all over these hillsides. Sugimoto-san, who speaks no English, was the driver, curving around these tiny, rough, very steep roads. We first climbed way up to a view point and went to the “Salt-wish” temple, a very old temple with a lighthouse built in 1022. The lighthouse was moved to this location in the 19th century, butI had a hard time figuring out why. On it on three sides are the calligraphy:
SKY ENDLESS LIGHT NOTHING

Curving around the roads again after this stop, we wound down back to the valley and ate lunch in the one restaurant in Kamiyama. There was a big crowd of us- Hisako-san, who is a translator, Sugimoto-san, driver and member of KAIR board, Nakahara-san, tour guide and also KAIR board member, a photographer, an art consultant from Yokohama who knows Selma, the artist from Turkey, Satoshi- Japanese painter, and a couple others who work for KAIR. Nakahara-san is a chain smoker, and smoked throughout lunch as well (I forgot how people can smoke anywhere in Japan). He has a little personal portable ashtray to carry with him everywhere so he does not ash on the ground. While eating udon and a greasy mackeral with the local sudochi lime as flavoring, Ichiro was on TV.

After lunch we visited the “KAIR museum” which is a former elementary school now full of art. Some artists have done some very impressive works here previously, and quite large in scope as well. We also visited several outdoor installations created by former residents.


We zoomed back up the mountains along a switchback road to Shozanji, one of the shikoku pilgrimage temples. While we looked around, some groups of pilgrims with white with straw hats and walking sticks arrived, sweaty and exhausted. They got drinks and cigarettes from the vending machines at the temple gate. One of them we talked to said she was doing all 88 temples, it would take her two months.