One step at a time

Koyasu no sato is a village--actually a scattering of very small farms among the hills behind us. I haven't done much exploring before today, but I stumbled upon this raised path through a marsh of wildflowers.

It's been two weeks since the operation, and though it hurts a bit at night when it's hard to find the right position, I feel pretty good. Good enough, in fact, to put my patched up lungs through some paces. The last week has been a weird one weather-wise: we had a typhoon that went right by, but unlike past typhoons the winds were from the north and the hills blocked them off. So we had a very calm sea instead, though with pouring rain and cold. We spent the weekend with the wood stove going all day for the first time this year. Then yesterday morning brought us a rainbow.

And today is a cloudless beauty. Fuji is snow-capped for the first time this year, and it is very warm though windy. m's class at school was going on a hike up Mt. Ogusu (the very large hill just behind us, which is the highest point on the Miura Peninsula, and thinking of that stimulated me to go on a short hike of my own.

They call Koyasu no Sato a village, but it's more a scattering of very small farms among the hills. For years, it was only accessible by a winding one-lane road until a huge housing development went up nearby, and tunnels were built, trees were downed, and convenience stores popped up. Amazingly enough, I found today, a lot of the farms have survived and have pretty much maintained their isolation, since you  have to get off the main road and take some of the twisting narrow turns before you get to them--and it seems that most people just zip by (including me, until today).

It was really like stepping back in time. The valleys are completely overgrown, and the small farms are mostly hidden away. I could almost believe they were Tennessee moonshiners hiding from the law. And when I say "small farms," I mean small. Some of the plots were three meters wide and five meters long, which is closer to a garden, but there would be a whole string of plots of this size, with autumn eggplants still to be harvested, while the winter crop of turnips, broccoli and other vegetables were just beginning to appear. They're all maintained by hand, and I have no idea how they make a living. There were a few unmanned vegetable stands where people are expected to take what they want and leave their money. (I could put together a pretty good map of 20 or so of these nearby that we regularly frequent. Only one claims to have a peeping camera.) But these stalls of Koyasu, I am sure, have never, ever been visited by a drive-by customer; only someone who knew where he was going would make it by here.

While I was climbing the last bit of road past the last farm, a car pulled up and parked, and presuming that he knew where he was, I asked him if he knew the mountain path to Akiya, which I've heard of but never been able to find from the Akiya side. He didn't know. He was a Tokyoite who was renting one of the plots to grow stuff ("Difficult," he said, "for a beginner.") and he passed me on to the old farmer lady who was bringing him straw mulch for his field. I walked with her back to her own vegetable stall, where she explained the route, but insisted that no one has walked it in years, so it was too overgrown to get through. Of course, I was much too stubborn to believe her and ended in the forest 20 minutes later with no discernible path in any direction.

Reluctantly, I stumbled back out of there, and found another route home. It was funky in some part, with the little creek bordered by a fence so massive it could keep wild boars at bay, and steel bridges that went nowhere. But it later turned into the very nicely done walkway through a marsh that led back down to the main road and the cars zipping by.  It had started out as a short hike, but ended up as a three-hour hike to another century and back to the beach. I'm thinking of going back tomorrow, even though I'm feeling a little sore.