Roving Japan

Day 5 Photoset

The rental car place picked us up at 8am sharp, and by 8:30 we were on the road and heading to our first destination of the day, Udo Jinja.

Udo Jinja is built inside a shallow cave on the coast, and like most shrines in Japan, is famous for having some kind of specific blessing. In this case, it is the power to bless women with easy child birth. The old folk story of this shrine is that the rocks represent the breasts of Emperor Jimmu’s mother. The water that gets collected from the cave is called Ochichi-mizu or “Breast Water.” Drinking it will bestow upon you the blessings of the shrine.

If drinking rock boob water isn’t your thing, there are other options. You can pay a dollar to get 5 little clay balls which you throw off a cliff and into a small pool of water. If you can get all 5 into the pool, your wish will come true. I tried, and I only managed 2.5 out of 5.

When we were done at Udo Jinja we decided to go check out the castle ruins in the town of Obi. On paper this was supposed to be a simple case of, “there used to be a castle here, now its a small museum and some old walls. Spend 30minutes and continue on your way.” We didn’t get out of there for 4 hours. Obi is a wonderful little city!

Like Chiran, Obi has a well preserved Samurai neighborhood. Several of the houses are open for viewing, but unlike in Chiran, you can actually go inside these houses. It was really fun wandering the old traditional Japanese houses and trying to picture what each room might have looked like when people lived there. It’s a little hard to guess what a room was used for, since in many cases the rooms are almost all the same size. Was this room a living room or a bedroom? Where did the master sleep? What’s the bathroom like?!

Obi is particularly proud of their most famous resident, Jutaro Komura. I had never heard of him before today, but he was a major player in the rise of Japan on the world stage of politics. He successfully negotiated an end to the Russia-Japanese war, and helped increase ties with America and Great Britain in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. We learned about all of this while wandering around the Komura Memorial Hall. The lady who worked there thought that Risa and I were an interesting couple, so she came over and asked if she could take our picture to put on the Memorial Hall’s website. So without further adieu, I give you our first taste of celebrity! It’s not quite a newspaper article, but its getting closer!

Walking around Obi was a lot of fun, and we were seeing lots of cool Japanese history, but we eventually had to leave. That is, until Risa found out that for $3 we could shoot a traditional Japanese bow and arrow. We couldn’t leave without trying THAT!

We each paid our $3, and the helpful man showed us how to fire this particular bow. The bow we were going to shoot required us to be sitting, and the target was going to be about 30ft away. It sounded easy, but it was actually pretty hard!

The arrows are super long, and when you first load them, the front point bounces around everywhere. You have to be very still, and then just sort of aim with the tip of the arrow and hope you have the right angle. We also weren’t given any arm guards, so the first couple of shots resulted in some nice bruises on the inside of our left forearms as the bow string snapped forward. But once we learned the proper wrist rotation to get the arm out of harms way, the target practice was really fun and much less painful.

In case you are wondering, more of my arrows hit the target, but Risa was the only one to get a bull’s-eye!

Aoshima Jinja was our next stop. Not too much to talk about with this one. Its a pretty shrine that is built on an island next to the town of Aoshima. I guess the Tokyo Giants baseball team visits this shrine before every baseball season to pray for victory.

We are now back in the hotel and doing our laundry. We want to start walking up the coastline tomorrow, but we might end up staying one more day here. I guess we will figure it out in the morning.