There must be some good reason that our club’s president has selected it for a mid-week Wanderung in a neighbouring prefecture – I mean, surely we have mountains enough of our own back home.
Walking through a large torii, we start up a steep set of stone steps. These lead up to a rocky platform surmounted by a granite tor and, tucked into a recess beside it, a small pavilion dedicated to the Eleven-Headed Kannon. The fog has started to clear, so that we can look down onto the surrounding rice fields and factories. This part of Shiga Prefecture feels crowded compared with our own inaka.
We continue along a wooded ridge – although the preposition “along” seems to embrace a prodigious amount of “up” and “down” as well. Lunch is taken on a col after surmounting one of these interim peaklets.
Exquisitely carved as they may be, these effigies don’t seem to be a Sehenswürdigkeit worthy of our three-hour drive this morning. What could our president be thinking of when he chose this destination?
As we happen to be walking side by side, I think of asking him but we are distracted by the discovery of a cricket’s moulted husk lying on the trail – as if to recall Bashō’s haiku about the cricket chirping from under the fallen warrior’s helmet.
It’s curious to find such a relic of summer on “Daikan”, the Great Cold of January, which happens to fall today. The sun comes out, and jackets come off, as we walk out onto a south-facing terrace. Behind us, surmounting a natural cliff, are the remains of a huge wall, built of irregularly shaped blocks.
A distant rumbling reaches our ears. On the plain below, two bullet trains are passing each other. This must be the Tokaidō Shinkansen: so we have traversed the whole of Kinugasa-yama from north to south. I see that we are strolling through the ruins of what must once have been a puissant castle. Whoever commanded these heights would have controlled the main route between east and west Japan.
Passing through the remains of a postern gate back into the forest, we walk up into a grove of flowering sazanka trees. Admiring how the blooms of this “winter camellia” glow crimson in the warm sunlight, it takes me a moment to appreciate that the trees are hemmed around by the walls of a great hall or courtyard. Whoever built this castle evidently found themselves on the wrong side of history.
A placard enlightens us. It was apparently one Niwa Nagahide (1535–85) who reduced this fortress for the last time, bringing to an end the rule of a local warlord. Local traditions still point out the ravine into which fled the garrison’s women and children. Were the sazanka trees planted as a memorial to them?
I’m still lacking the big picture – who attacked whom, when and why. But January days are short, even if Daikan lacks its traditional bite, and we need to get down before dark. A long flight of steps takes us down to an old temple, whose gate-keeper mulcts us of a few trumpery coins for the privilege of using the stone-flagged path.
The walk to the nearest station takes half an hour, during which a few raindrops spot down from the late-afternoon cumulus build-up. While waiting for the 15.56 local train back to our starting point, I notice we’re on the platform of the JR Azuchi station.
“Is this the same Azuchi that figures in the Azuchi-Momoyama period?” I ask. That’s right, confirms K-san, Azuchi stands for Nobunaga, and Momoyama for Hideyoshi: Niwa Nagahide stormed the castle because it got in Nobunaga’s way on his march to Kyoto. The country could not be unified until Nobunaga could walk in triumph through its gates...
There’s standing room only on the train, as schoolchildren have occupied all the seats. After all, this is a weekday and the country has been at peace for eight decades.
