Mt. Hie and Beyond

It was a climb of importance to me. I wanted to reach the top of Mt. Hie for the last three years. In my thoughts and in my daily life this mountain literally loomed over me wherever I went. I knew that one day I would each its summit and see Lake Biwa and all of Shiga Prefecture before.

I had made an attempt to climb it once during January of 2008. It was the day after New Year’s Day and I was desperate to do something different with myself now that a new year had begun. I decided to climb a mountain but unfortunately I was unable to make it more than a fraction of the way top before my injured kneed refused to go any further.

Even in defeat, I promised myself that I would get another crack at the mountain and reach its famous mountain top temples and monastery. Two years went by before I had this chance but on October 8, 2010 I finally made the decision that I would climb up it no matter what. The rain threatened to fall all day, but I climbed anyways. The weather held up, and even improved making the final arrival at the summit all the more enjoyable.

The climb began in the town of Sakamoto, a small sleepy old town wedged in between the slopes of Mt. Hie and the shore of Lake Biwa. Following the old main road through town from the train station, I passed along old stone sidewalks lined with tiled walls and temples. From the 1500s onwards Abbots of Mt. Hie were given small temple houses at the base of the mountain after they retired from administration duties up in the monastery of Enryakuji on top of Mt. Hie.

After a 5 minute walk I finally reached the base of the mountain. In front of me was a staircase of stone which led through an ominous dark arch of trees up the side of the mountain. 10 minutes later I reached the top of the stairs to only be confronted by a set of one more set of steps, this time more steep and perilous than the rather gentle stairs I had previously come up. There was a dirt path that went to the left and skirted the stairs in front of me, but it was here that I remembered how three years earlier I had taken this path which turned out to be extremely steep. It was also on this very path that my knee had given up so I did not hesitate in taking the steep staircase in front of me. The stair went up a slope which had a number of small temple shrines connected by small footpaths to the stairs. A small graveyard with the iconic beautiful and mysterious stone grave markers rested along the slop at a seemingly impossible steep angle.

At the top I reached a trail which connected with the main hiking trail to the top of the mountain. I soon encountered a man walking down the trail to the base of the mountain. He was to be only one of two people I saw for the next two hours on the trail.


The trail was not in particularly good shape. A deep rain cut gully divided the trail in most places for the entire climb. A lot of trail maintenance was needed, but other than the obvious signs of recent grass cutting along the trail’s edge, there seemed to be little evidence of any real current trail preservation work being carried out.
Along most of the trail there were only a few locations where I could catch glimpses of how far I had progressed up the mountain. Often there were just a few rare peeks through the foliage at the ever increasingly smaller lake valley below me. Trusting I would have better views from the top I didn’t bother to take many photos along the way.



Along the trail there were some paths heading off in different directions. On one occasion, I took one of the paths which had sign that said it led to the ruins of an old temple. After almost 10 minutes of walking I finally arrived at the site, though I practically walked right by it because there was nothing but a sign marking the former temple’s site. In fact, there were no foundation stones, imprints on the ground, signs of former structural foundations of any sort to suggest that what was a pretty perilous location on the side of a ravine could have even been home to a temple. But the sign said that apparently the wife of a Heian nobleman came to reside in this temple which she had specially built for herself.


One thing that I always wondered about these places was how anyone living here got there very easily in the first place and how on Earth someone could have had enough food and other supplies to live. The location was especially remote, and had absolutely no easy access to major road or path. Well, in any case, I guess who ever had the very unenviable task of supplying this temple made more trips up this mountain than I am sure they ever bargained for!

Not wanting to lose time, I ate my lunch as I walked up the trail. After another hour of walking I finally reached an area which was absolutely serene and pretty. Along the embankments of the side of the trail were large ancient like stone staircases. The stairs led up to a flat meadow covered in small boulders and moss. Sprinkled among them were beautiful red barked Japanese pine trees. There was also another trail which seemed to lead down the mountain to somewhere else. I was not sure where it went but I still would like to go back there one day and see where it leads to.
The main trail finally took a disappointing turn. It became a concrete road, a sign that I was near the top. I suppose that monks too don’t mind having modern infrastructure too if they can afford it!

At the top was a large dormitory building for the monks. I can understand the need for a good building, but it was large, ugly, and cheap looking. It was really an unbelievable eyesore. Architecturally it did not fit in any way with the almost 2,000 year history of incredible Buddhist architectural heritage found all across Japan. Luckily, the rest of the structures I was to find on the mountain’s top, including Enryakuji Temple itself, were all very beautiful buildings!
I will let the pictures speak for themselves.


I had originally set out to walk up the mountain two years ago with a very different set of goals and emotions than I had this time. Two years ago I was still reeling from what was luckily the end of a very negative time of loneliness and frustration brought on by cultural dislocation, language problems, and the lack of friends. But perhaps what really shone more than anything else was how different I felt coming up the mountain in 2010. I did not have any of those deeply unhappy feelings inside me, and neither did I have any desire to make the ascent for any other reason than that of a great desire to see what was on top of the mountain. Perhaps I could only make this hike with a clear mind and heart. In the end, the climb was well worth it. The view of the land I had left below was gorgeous, and the weather played nice the entire time.

A Trip Back Home!

On Saturday I set out to visit my host family at their home in Ritto, Shiga prefecture. My host sister Hitomi, who now is a freshman studying at college in Tokyo, was also going to be back home for the first time since leaving home in April. I had gone to Ritto two weeks earlier but this time it was different, this time the entire family would be reunited.

The weather was pretty dismal. The rain fell in torrential sheets all morning long, making sure that I was drenched by the time I reached my local train station after the 10 minute walk down the hill that I live on. The train was crowded, full of people wet and sodden looking, but inside I was excited despite the rather liquefied state that my clothes were in. There were no seats, just standing room inside the train car. With each station more and more people piled in. By the time we arrived at Kyoto Station (end of the line), the windows were completely fogged up and the air was laden with the musty sogginess that is often encountered during a hot wet day in the height of summer rather than during the middle of an autumn October afternoon!



I pushed my way through the masses to reach the Biwako-sen (Biwa Lake Line), the train line which would take me from Kyoto across the Eastern Mountains, through the valley of Yamashina, across one more mountain range, and into the Biwa lake valley of Shiga prefecture where Ritto is. There is no place like Kyoto Station I have ever encountered anywhere in the US, so the word “masses” is truly a most appropriate term in describing the crowds one encounters. In fact one would find that a machete would be most welcomed when fighting Kyoto Station’s incredible flood of humans going off in every direction in a desperate race against the clock to catch their train. I ultimately had no problem in getting to my platform on time, and had an uneventful train ride to Ritto. At Ritto station my host mother picked me up and to my surprise Hitomi was in the car! But Hitomi was on her way to Ballet practice and was there to get off as I was there to get into the car. I greeted her with konnichiwa, and she with sayonara! It was a brief greeting for a long absence of not seeing each other!

We got home and headed into the house as quickly as possible and headed towards the kitchen where we ate lunch. Grandma was there, and still to my great amazement, her old Showa era kansai dialect drawl was more comprehensible than it had ever been to me for the entire year I lived with them! After feast on a teriyaki chicken sandwich and an incredible French pastry, we somehow found ourselves speaking about the War. She told me of drills at college for takeyari- bamboo spears; these were the weapons that normal Japanese citizens were to use to repel the Yankee invaders as they landed on Japan’s beaches and advanced up its narrow river valleys. Victory, my grandma and many other Japanese citizens were told, rested in the fervor of their martial spirit. This fighting spirit as she recalled, was just a bunch of BS, just as were the countless silly drills with bamboo spears with sharpened tips were to the young girls like her. What could spears do? Grandma had been in the rice paddies (now almost completely built over in modern Japanese suburbia) near our house many a times when a loud humming filled the air as hundreds of shiny silver American B-29 bombers flew over. Sometimes they were going for Osaka, but other times they were dropping bombs next to where she was. Yasu, the town next door, had its station obliterated along with its adjoining neighborhoods. Up high shining and full of the sun’s brilliant soft glint, those bombers looked too pretty to be instruments of war. Yet there was the blood soaked station platform she saw, and the bodies of neighbors. This after all was war, and in war there was always death.

Grandma appeared to hold absolutely zero resentment towards the Americans for the war, or for the destruction caused to the area or for that matter, for the friends who never returned from the battlefield. It was life, and for her life rapidly move onwards to better times when the war finally came to its awful dramatic finale.
By this time Yuki, my younger host brother had come home and had settled down to start helping out for preparations for dinner that night.

Yes, dinner! This night was going to be special! Not only would father, mother, grandma, Yuki, Hitomi be there, but so would Hitomi’s friend Abe-san, her mother, and two young fellow school teachers from my mother’s elementary school where she taught at. The only one who was absent would be Hiroki, the eldest child of my host family. Hiroki had the night shift at his super market, so he would be working from 6pm until midnight. Of what little I saw of him before he departed for work led me to think that he was his still usual grumpy and emotional self as ever, and no less disheveled than when I saw him two years earlier. Apparently that haircut I had heard so much about had expired by the time I had returned to Japan!

While everyone was preparing dinner, I went over to the Jacksons’ house next door. Mr. Jackson is an Australian professor at Ritsumeikan University, and a lecturer at Gaidai University, both Kyoto schools. Mr. Jackson greeted me at the door with his usual Australian “come in Sam!” He was still giant as ever, and as I was to find out in a minute or two, just as foul mouthed too! Mr. Jackson always was kind of a funny guy. I could never figure out if he liked living in Japan with his Japanese wife and kids or wished they were with him in Australia instead. All I knew was that they were stuck in Ritto until their mortgage was paid off. We went up to his study and I was soon regaled as I often was by him, with numerous complaints about Japanese college students, the poor cruddy state of Japanese higher education, the lazyness of his graduate students, and the general problems he found with academia in Japan. His wrath was impartial, soon I heard of the incompetent foreign professors underneath him who were poor examples of academics. But he could go no further you see, for he had diarrhea. Mr. Jackson always had a way with words, and so too did his massive body funny enough. In mid sentence he suddenly said, “hold on there Sam, you see I had some McDonalds for the first time in a year and I have diarrhea.” Japanese homes like Japanese apartments are notorious for thin walls. Japanese architects seem to have preserved the literal paper thin attributes of old Japanese houses in the absolute lack of sound proofing and insulation of walls found in Japanese homes and apartment buildings of 21st century Japan. Not long later I was regaled by sounds one shouldn’t ever have to endure without nowhere to find refuge from. In the meantime I attempted to distract myself by reading about a random Australian PM’s speech writer, a book which seemed to read just horridly as the sounds that regaled ears.

Potty trouble brought an end to our meeting, and I was none the more happy to be heading back to my family’s home. Not too long after dinner was ready and guests began to arrive. We sat around two long tables set on tatami floor mats. I hadn’t sat on my butt for a considerable amount of time in two years so my legs were finding the experience of sitting down on the floor for hours on end quite traumatic.

The two teachers who were my mother’s colleagues were incredibly funny people. One was 25 and the other 31. They insisted on calling my mother “princess” in English. They were some of the only Japanese people I had met who treated me from the outset like a normal person. I found I warmed up to them very quickly!

My father came to the head of the table and said a few words. Yes a few words, he after all was never a man of many words, and on this occasion I heard him keep his mouth open longer than most times for the whole year I lived with him!

Soon after we began eating. The eating did not stop for 4 hours. There was so much food that even at 10;30 pm when we finally finished there was a mountain of leftovers still on the table. I had not had such a fun time speaking with people as I did that night’s dinner in ages. In the midst of eating and talking, I was overcome by a feeling of accomplishment. Sitting in my old house in Japan, I found that this dinner, and my ability to fully participate in the conversation was a vindication of all of the hardships I had gone through as a Japanese high school student. I did not feel any of the sorrow and any of the frustration that had always seemed to be present within me for so much of the time when I had lived at this house. This time the rules of life for me in Japan were different. The reason was simple, I had grown up and was no longer the high schools student that I was two years earlier. I felt more confident and about myself and I felt a sense of being in control of my life in way which I had never during my time as a high school student.

At the end of dinner, I remember looking up on the wall and seeing something which I had never noticed before. Hanging up near the area where the wall met the ceiling was a framed certificate. It was issued to the deceased husband of grandma who had died back in the 1960s when they were both still very young. I quickly realized after reading over it that it was issued by the Japanese Emperor (Hirohito)of all people! Next to it was an ornate medal along with its accompanying clasp. It was given to grandma’s husband for his outstanding service as a diplomat. I had never heard anything about him before, and this was the first evidence I had seen of who he was. It was too late to ask questions, and I could not think of any way of framing a question without sounding like a busybody, so I let the matter rest.

My host mother drove me back, but before we left, she gave an extremely valuable gift: a toaster! It sounds trite, but this object has made eating bread bearable after eating untoasted bread for breakfast for 10 days. Hitomi came in the car for the 30 minute ride to Ohbaku where I live. She told me about the difficulties of college life- loud neighbors, work, stress, and being in a new community. I found that we were closer than before and could see she had grown up considerably since I last saw her. So much had changed since I was gone. But for all of the change, I regretted not one thing. Life in Japan had not ever been better!