By The Rivers of Kobe Part 3
From Hiyodorigoe to Myohoji around the outskirts of Kobe
The aim for today was to battle my way from Hiyodorigoe (of cat decapitation fame — see previous story in series) to Myohoji, the idea being to get from the Minato River across to the Myohoji River — the next major river that connects the mountains to the sea in Kobe. I expected a battle, because the route wasn’t exactly clear. Would I even be able to cross some of the forest-covered tentacles of mountain that snaked out onto the coastal plain?
The sky was filled with rippled static cloud. No threat of rain, but now I could really feel the approach of autumn. Later in the day, I felt the first hint of pre-dusk winter gloom. The train squeaked its way up to Hiyodorigoe and set me back down in the quiet suburb. From there I cut across the late-Showa era housing estates, aiming for the school I could see on the ridge opposite.
Below the school, the road twisted around old-people’s homes and little parks, then up past domed water tanks and finally over the ridge. This very fringe of the city seems a fitting place for old-people’s homes — start your life in the city, move to the fringe in the sunset of your life, then end it buried on the hillside overlooking the city. Always moving up, just that little bit closer to the heavens.
Beyond chainlink fencing, tiny streams trickled down the mountainside, moving nothing except water today, but the detritus from days of heavy rain was there in mini-dams of sticks and litter and even electric fans.
The margin of the city doesn’t just provide cheap land for old-people’s homes and workshops, but also quirky yet unfashionable cafés that would quickly get their throats cut in the cut-throat city centre:
A case in point being this moped-loving, clothes-drying fetish café with a slightly Mediterranean air. These suburbs really are moped territory: the roads are too steep for bicycles, the train lines are few, and the bus routes too widely spread.
There was a park on the next hill, with paths that led to the bypass intersection I was aiming for. So I climbed, through the empty park. Once again, having been the tallest person to walk down this path recently, possibly ever, my sweat-sheened forehead snagged every wasp spider’s web support I came across, leaving me shouting and cursing and frantically plucking my web-covered head like a madman. Skeins of web clung and tickled long after I left the park behind.
This time, I wasn’t followed by a mosquito, but instead led by a late swallowtail butterfly, which floated ahead of me like something from a fairytale, until it finally floated up through the leaves of a momiji maple tree, in their final burst of green before the red of autumn.
I’d made it to the road, which if I followed it, would take me all the way back to Nagata and the Minato River. But, with one final push, I hoped to break through to the Myohoji River and the little village of Kuruma 車 (car), a village I dearly hoped to walk through due to its unusual name.
Was there a park that I could walk through like the one I had just emerged from? It didn’t look too promising, until I saw an open gate and a small road leading down the hillside towards Kuruma. But a sign on the open gate said it was dangerous and not to enter. Then, I saw the maintenance workers peering down from a concrete wall into an unseen reservoir. There was no way I was getting through here, but it did provide good views over the west of Kobe towards the Akashi Bridge:
So, I had to go down the main road, over a towering bridge, and through a roaring tunnel. I would never walk through Kuruma, although I could see it from the bridge. I had time to ponder over the shortness of Japanese rivers, and their effects on Japanese society. I had just read an article by Thomas Pueyo (who writes the Uncharted Territories Substack, link here), in which he explains how the length of rivers and the size of river deltas affects the type of government for the area that surrounds the river. Here he is telling us how the Red River’s shorter and steeper length in Vietnam originally leads to a completely different kind of regional government from that of the Mekong River in the south of the country:
You can guess from the map that it’s nothing like what happens in the Red River up north. The Red River has a much shorter run to the sea, thus a steeper gradient, with few meandering floodplains upstream. That has resulted in relatively unpredictable and violent flooding, which requires extensive diking, and hence coordination: taxes to finance the works, and mandatory contributions of work by everyone.
But the dikes sometimes ruptured, causing not only the immediate death of the few submerged, but even worse: food crises that could kill orders of magnitude more. In this type of situation, you want insurance so that if your field is destroyed, maybe your neighbors can share their harvest with you this time, and you’ll get their back next time. So there were insular, hierarchical villages holding some land communally for risk reduction.
The source for the Myohoji River was probably right on the slope where I was walking, somewhere under the road, and yet, I could see the coast where the Myohoji River exits the land right there in front of me, a distance of no more than 6 kilometres. Compare this to a river from near my hometown in England, like the Wye, which rises in the bleak moorland of the Pennines, meanders through the spa town of Buxton, twists through the limestone gorges of the White Peak, before emptying into the Derwent River, which itself empties into the Trent, which hooks round to the north to finally empty into the Humber estuary, a distance of a good 250 kilometres.
Even though I wouldn’t be passing through Kuruma, I still wanted to know why it was called that. The village already had the name by the time it became a coal-mining area in the mid-1800s, so it wasn’t connected to the mining. I had thought that maybe carts for the coal mine were built here. Kuruma 車 can be “car” or “vehicle”, but it can also just refer to a wheel. It’s obvious really. As it’s right on a river, the wheel is a water wheel, and the village was named after that, and was known as Kuruma from at least the 1650s.
The steepness of the slope was perfect for waterwheels, and I descended the same slope through a world of cash-in-hand car repair shops, rental boxes, truck parks, water supply facilities and second-hand car dealers into Myohoji, so the kuruma felt as relevant now as it did four hundred years ago. The road was narrow, the sidewalks being merely the bit that was left of the road behind a crash barrier. As I mutteringly consulted Google Maps, assuming no-one else would be stupid or desperate enough to be walking down this road, a man squeezed behind me without so much as a sumimasen and nearly gave me a heart attack.
The road finally deposited me by the Myohoji River. Too far down. I was below Myohoji station, and I had to follow the river back up, against the flow, which felt all wrong.
Next time, I will follow the Myohoji River down to the sea. Have a good week!
I loved your description of frantically plucking at your (spider) web covered head like a madman! SO funny... I can imagine exactly what that was like as I think we have all done this after walking into a web. You write very well and I cannot get to Japan at the moment or walk terribly far so i will enjoy your walking instead.
The kuruma explanation was interesting. As always I loved the way you write as well. Forest tentacles!