So we’re up to August 14 now, as I struggle to catch up on my travel writings. That Tuesday was a day in the middle of Obon, the holiday to venerate the returned dead, towards the end of my all-too-short holidays. It was – quelle surprise! – blazingly hot, even in the morning, and I threw myself into Seiji’s air-conditioned air with delight, frantically waving my fan in a feeble attempt to cool us both. In lieu of the long trip to the Oki Islands that we had abandoned, we were travelling to the Iwami Ginzan silver mine in Oda, two hours west of Matsue along the coast. First we stopped at a gas station. The experience of going to most gas stations in Japan is kind of like being a Formula One racecar driver. One attendant waves you in, then two to five people work on your car, pumping gas, cleaning windshields, checking oil and what-have-you, and finally an attendant guides you back out into traffic again to continue your journey. It’s kind of overkill, but people take customer service very seriously in Japan.

 

We passed Hirata, a sleepy farming town, and Izumo, home of Izumo Taisha, one of the oldest and most famous shrines in all of Japan. Izumo Taisha and its environs may be preserved as part of historic Japan, but downtown Izumo is an all-too-familiar landscape of fast food joints, car dealerships, and businesses with English names and signs; I could have been in some parts of Canada and not known the difference. I was glad to leave the city and once more find us passing through rice fields, with glimpses of the blue sea on our right. We passed a small, reedy lake on our left; Seiji called it Jinzai-Ko, or “Gods in the Lake”. I wanted to ask more questions, but Seiji didn’t know the history. This was a very windy coast, and huge modern windmills, like gleaming white propellers, spun lazily above us high on the hills.

 

We stopped for a break at one of the famous beaches, named (I think) Kirura. A very modern brick building with a large deck overlooked the beach far below at the bottom of a cliff. The beach was bright with swimmers in colourful bathing suits, snorkellers, beach balls, umbrellas and all manner of beachy paraphernalia. As we crossed the parking lot, I stopped to look at the moulted skin of a sizable snake. (I’ve been told not to worry; the big ones aren’t poisonous…). The long tube of dry patterned skin was quite pretty, but reminded me uncomfortably of the dangers of Japan’s wilder areas. Leaving it, we went inside; Seiji got takoyaki (a popular snack; fried dumplings with pieces of octopus in them) and I got fig ice cream. Delicious.

 

We continued our trip and soon were passing through Oda and turning up, up, up into the mountains to reach the silver mine. This looks like a good spot for a little history lesson (with assistance from Wikipedia and the UNESCO website…). Iwami Ginzan was once a silver mine located in the central region of Shimane Prefecture. This mine was the most important source of silver from the Middle Ages (1526, to be precise…) to the modern age in Japanese history. In the early 17^th century, this single mine produced most of the Japanese silver output, comprising one third of the world's silver production at that time.  The UNESCO World Heritage Site-- composed of the remains of a gigantic silver mine, a mining town which developed along with the mine, the remains of mountain castles used for guarding the site, a port which contributed significantly to the mine's prosperity, and old roads that linked the mine and the port -- remains in a good state of conservation and serves as outstandingly eloquent evidence of the mining industry of Japan from the 16th to the 19th century. Here endeth the lesson.

 

 Seiji said he had visited the mine years before, when it wasn’t a World Heritage Site (it actually just got its designation this year; most local people are puzzled as to why, since it’s “just an old mine”; there is much speculation as to how much money was paid to UNESCO for the designation…) It was much quieter back then. No so today. As we made our way towards the parking lot, it was clear that many others had also decided to come to Iwami Ginzan. A parking attendant told us we would have to wait an hour in a queue of cars, just to park, then walk down the long road to the mining town for about forty minutes. We didn’t have to wait quite so long, but it took a while. The parking lot was brand-new and not yet paved; it seemed the UNESCO nod had caught the area a little flat-footed. There were long, long line-ups at the bus stops, so we decided to walk.

 

This was the hottest recorded day of summer (37 or 38 degrees in Matsue), but there was a strong wind tossing the bamboo about like seaweed in a current. Still the sensation of the air passing over my skin was like being a turkey in a convection oven. We waved our fans and drank from a bottle of water, and kept to the shade whenever possible.  The road down to the mining town was very pretty, with many old farmhouses. I took lots of pictures, of houses and long, low tiled sheds adjourning fields of rice. I particularly admired the houses with cracked, cream-coloured or reddish plaster walls, which wouldn’t have looked out of place in an old town in Europe. Many houses had woven mats hanging over the windows to shield the interior from the scorching afternoon sun. We passed a remarkable temple of caves built into a rocky cliff face. I can’t remember the name but it’s known as the temple of a thousand buddhas. As there were long line-ups, we just admired from a distance. Once in the little town, we took shelter in a soba restaurant and had a light lunch. Soba is one of my favorite summer treats: cold buckwheat noodles with different toppings, like green onions or grated daikon (a delicious kind of radish) and a dipping sauce. This place had excellent soba, and seemed very popular. Then we braced ourselves for the walk up the hills to the mine. We shunned the main road in favour of a tidy little path curling through the woods next to a stream. There were many little shrines and temples and mysterious stones carved with characters unreadable even to modern Japanese. We also passed some of the barred mining shafts and I began to realize the gigantic scope of the mine. The hills were riddled with these shafts like winding wormholes. I also noticed the snake warning signs. I didn’t have to read Japanese to recognize the image of a coiled snake and the exclamation marks!

 

We finally reached the main mining shaft and bought tickets to enter the mine. It was a modest entrance, just a few stone steps dropping down to an entranceway of wooden beams. A square stone post with kanji on it marked the place. I got my first nasty shock when I stepped in and promptly knocked my head on the first low beam. I kept going, with Seiji behind me, and I felt my first lick of fear. Now I’m not known to suffer much from claustrophobia, and I have in fact been in mines before, during the Two Planks and a Passion tour of Westray: The Long Way Home, but this was different. First, this is a very old mine, with narrow, rough walls not much wider than a person so we had to walk one by one, and a low ceiling forcing me – me! - to stoop a little. Then, there were maybe fifty people in front of me in the tunnel, and fifty people behind as we got further in. The walls were wet and dripping, almost like they were perspiring. I thought, “What if something happens? What if someone freaks out?” Then I realized that person was likely to be me, so I calmed myself down a little. Then – worst thought ever – I thought, “What if there’s an earthquake?” I recommend not thinking about earthquakes when you’re in a mine. I tried to stay interested and curious, looking down the little side tunnels and talking to Seiji, but I’m sure he could hear the nervous tension in my voice. On the bright side, I suppose, it was much cooler in the mine. After walking for what seemed like an eternity, we came to a brightly lit room with a map of the mine and nearby areas and – praise be! – a long neat ramp going up! As we followed it, I looked at illustrations of workers in the mine; men carrying little flickering oil lamps, using steep ladders or ropes to lower themselves into deep shafts and devising intricate ways to drain water from those shafts. I felt a kind of admiration mixed with horror for the men who did this work over centuries. It’s hard to imagine.

 

When we climbed out into the forest again, it was about 4:00 and the trees were tinted with gold sunlight. I would have liked to take the bus, but the lineups were too long, so we walked down the hill again. Despite my fatigue, it was a beautiful walk along a country road. The houses all had beautiful gardens, and in one of them the gardener had had the great idea of keeping away the crows and other scavengers by hanging shiny old CDs above his plants. The discs twisted and glinted in the sun. We stopped at a cool little café and admired the garden and shops there, then walked down to the museum, but it had just closed at 5. We wandered about the sleepy little town. Seiji said he thought the locals here had been taken by surprise by the sudden influx of tourists, and didn’t know what to think about it all. Certainly at five o’clock, as the businesses closed and the last buses pulled away from the souvenir shops, the town seemed to be going to sleep again. We took one of the last buses and returned to Seiji’s car, now lonely in the huge empty parking lot.

 

Driving home, Seiji said I could sleep, but I couldn’t. I watched the molten sunset pouring over the hazy purple hills to the west. It grew dark. Approaching Matsue, we turned right and headed up into the hills to Daito, where a summer festival was being held at the elementary school. Seiji’s friend Jiro, who performs Japanese folk songs with a group, was performing and had invited us. By this time, it was full dark and as we climbed up into the hills, we began to suspect we were lost. Further into the hills, I began to wonder what the theme from “Deliverance” would sound like on a shamisen. Seiji finally pulled over and called Jiro who guided us to the school. We walked up to find a tent with food, soft drinks and beer outside the school, and inside, after we had taken our shoes off, entered the gymnasium hung with softly lit, round red lanterns. There was a small crowd, and a young woman who was a teacher chatted with me. The stage was bright, and the backdrop was a bright, fanciful image of Lake Shinji and Yomegashima Island at sunset. We went to a room adjacent to the gym to say hello to Jiro, who introduced us a gracious, kimono-clad old man sitting in a chair who apparently is one of the great experts in singing the ‘yasugi-bushi’ song. There were some other singers and musicians, including the shamisen player and the drummer I recognized from Stephen’s yukata party, and some young women and children in kimonos. After meeting them, Seiji and I grabbed drinks and found a place to sit on the floor to wait.

 

We were treated to a concert of traditional song and dance, lasting probably about thirty or forty minutes. The elderly man, and another woman in a traditional pink kimono, took turns singing folk songs. Jiro and two others performed a zeni-taiko dance, twirling and swinging batons in unison. And finally, while the old man sang, I saw the yasugi-bushi dance I had heard so much about. This is a very old local dance, or mime, where the dancer goes through the actions of catching dogo, a kind of eel. He is dressed in knee-length breeches and wears a loose blue and white tunic. There is a white towel or kerchief tied under his chin, and he has a lucky five-yen coin tied under his nose, where from a distance it looks like a very small moustache. He has a rounded straw jug tied at his waist and carries a wide, shallow basket, used for scooping up the eels. (There is a popular game at summer festivals where they fill a tank with eels and people go in with these baskets to catch them; the person who catches the most wins). So, beaming and mugging to the audience, he goes through the motions of scooping for eels, sifting out water, and pouring the eels into the mouth of the jug. It was pretty funny, and very popular.

 

After the concert, we were getting ready to go when a man, the uncle of the teacher I met earlier, beckoned us over, pressed a beer into my hand and started asking me questions in rudimentary English. A few people came over to talk, and the girl looked a little apologetic, but I didn’t mind. They roared appreciatively when I said I was from Canada. A drunk and garrulous old man gave me some small containers of sake, and I took a few little sips. Finally Seiji and I pried ourselves away with some bowing and ‘arigato gozaimashita’s, and said good-bye to Jiro on our way out. It had been an exhausting day!