Once a year, on the night of Setsubun, the people of Ohara used to shut themselves inside this shrine and sleep on the floor of the worship hall, men and women side by side in the dark. The custom had a name, ohara zakone, which means something close to sleeping jumbled together like small fish. By the old account they were hiding. A great serpent was said to live in a pond called Obuchi, down the valley at Ide, coming out from time to time to take people. Gathering in the shrine to wait out the dark together is remembered as how the custom began.

None of that is on the sign at the shrine, and there is nothing left to see of it. The vigil is long gone, the pond is only a name now. On the afternoon I rode up I was the only visitor there.

Ohara is farming country in the north of Kyoto, better known for its temples, Sanzen-in and Jakko-in, and for the red shiso that turns the pickles here bright purple. Ebumi Shrine is not in the visited part. It sits off on the road up to the Ebumi Pass, the old crossing over to Shizuhara, a few hundred meters up a lane that follows a small river into the forest. I rode up from the valley floor, and the trees soon close in on both sides. The sound of Ohara drops away behind you until there is only the water and the birds.

It’s an odd place for a shrine. This is the head shrine of the eight villages of Ohara, the birthplace guardian for all of them, and it sits apart from all of them, up on the pass. Village guardian shrines usually sit among the houses they protect, but this one is out in the forest at the foot of the mountain, nowhere near the houses it watches over.

The first thing you’ll notice is that there are no railings. A bare plank walkway, 356 meters of it, laid low over a wide, shallow river, with nothing to hold on to. It carries no signs, no lights, nothing that would place it in the present century. It looks less like a bridge than a film set nobody bothered to take down, and a few weeks a year that’s pretty much what it is. It has the look of the Edo period for a practical reason: it is built to fall apart. When the Kizu rises past a certain point, the deck lifts off its piers and floats off downstream. That isn’t the bridge failing. That’s the bridge working. Locals call it Nagarebashi, the flowing bridge, and the nickname has stuck better than its official name ever did.

When the deck floats off, it doesn’t wash away. You’d think loose planks in a flooded river would be gone for good, but these don’t go anywhere. The deck is built in separate sections, and each one is cabled to the piers. So when the water lifts a section free, it just rides there in the current like a boat on a mooring, pulling at its line but going nowhere.

Tanuki figurines, those little (and sometimes quite big) plump raccoon dogs that turn up all over Japan, are dotted along the path. You can find them in ones and twos, tucked against steps and railings, said to number more than 300 across the grounds. Visitors have been leaving them here since about 1970, for no better reason than the name of the place: Tanukidani, “raccoon-dog valley”. So you climb the steps assuming that’s what the temple is named after. But it isn’t. The deity at the top of the 250 steps is written as 咤怒鬼, three characters meaning something closer to “the one who scolds the demons”. He is a Fudō Myō-ō, a fierce Buddhist guardian, with a sword in one hand and flames at his back. The exact opposite of gentle. By legend, one was placed here to guard the northeast corner of Kyoto, the direction bad luck was thought to come from. Those three characters his name is written in read the same as tanuki, but they mean nothing like a raccoon dog: scold, rage, demon. The one who snarls at whatever comes through the gate.

The climb begins at the cluster of figurines, where the steps start. The last of the lane up to it is steep enough that I pushed the bike the final stretch. The forest here is dense, and on a hot day it holds the cold. After the effort of getting up, the chill comes as a kind of reward. Bamboo runs through the trees. Partway up, the steps pass under a short tunnel of red torii, a compressed echo of Fushimi Inari – a few dozen rather than its thousands.

It has a name, Hachiman-bori, and the town that grew along it is Omihachiman, out on the flat eastern shore of Lake Biwa. It outlasted the castle for a plain reason: it stopped being a moat and turned into a canal. In 1585, Toyotomi Hidetsugu had it cut all the way down to Lake Biwa, then required every boat crossing the water to turn into the canal and stop in the town before going on – a checkpoint dressed as a harbor. Within a generation the moat was a trade route, and the families along its banks got rich.

Hidetsugu didn’t live to see much of it. He was the nephew and, for a while, the chosen heir of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the warlord who would finish unifying the country a few years later, and at eighteen he was handed this corner of Ōmi to govern. The arrangement didn’t last. When Hideyoshi had a son of his own, the nephew went from heir to liability, and in 1595 he was accused of plotting treason and ordered to take his own life. The canal he’d dug barely noticed.

The families along it became the Hachiman merchants, a branch of the Ōmi shōnin. Over the next two centuries, they grew into some of the shrewdest traders Japan ever produced. By the 1700s they were peddling mosquito nets and tatami and hemp cloth from one end of Japan to the other. With them they carried a rule, one that’s still quoted in business schools today: sanpō yoshi – good for the seller, good for the buyer, good for society. Their reputation for fair dealing brought the business in, and the money came home to this canal.

During my recent bicycle trip to Kyoto, I visited Oiwa Shrine, which sits near the peak of Mount Oiwa in the south of the city. This was actually my third time there, the previous visit three years ago, and I’ve posted the photos from this one here.

Oiwa Shrine (Oiwa means ‘big rock’) has been abandoned since 2015, pretty much hidden in the forest, and most of the time it’s quiet with nobody around. It’s accessible two ways: a long bamboo path that leads up to the lower grounds, from where you climb the hill to reach the main shrine higher up, or the asphalt road that runs past those upper grounds and brings you close to the mountaintop.

The shrine sits just below the summit of Mt. Oiwa, a modest hill of about 180 meters. The mountain was once called Mikusa, “Honorable Grass,” after the grass that was cut here to feed the horses of the first Tokugawa shogun, Ieyasu, on his trips to the capital in the early Edo period. The shrine itself is known for a pair of ancient deities, one male and one female, said to live in two boulders near the peak, one large and one small.

Day 7. The last one. The leg that would finally put me in Kyoto. From Omihachiman it was about 55km, around three hours, mostly flat terrain except for a few short but steep climbs in Otsu.

I left the hotel around nine, rode down to the shore, and picked up the cycling road. Not far along, I stopped at Fujigasakiryu Shrine, a place I’d visited once a few years back and had wanted to see again. It’s a small shrine, built onto the rocks at the water’s edge, just a red torii and a narrow cave with the lake spreading out behind it. This time, though, the path leading in was closed off after a landslide in early 2025. It didn’t matter much. The wind had stirred up a light chop, which gave better photos than a flat calm would have. And then there were the hawks, a good number of them wheeling overhead. I made a point of keeping any food well out of sight, because these bandits notice the moment it appears, and come down like an arrow to snatch it before you know it. Don’t mess with the hawks!

Day 6 felt different, for two reasons. I’d passed Nagoya the day before, and Nagoya sits about halfway, so Kyoto was no longer some abstract point on the far end of the map. And I’d be spending much of the day on the shore of Lake Biwa. Both of those put me on the other side of something. Closer to the end than the start.

I left Tarui early. About 65 km to cover that day. Not far out of town the road tilted up and I started climbing into the pass. Partway up I passed Sekigahara.

Day 5 started in central Nagoya. The forecast looked suspect, and I might have to put in some work later, so I kept the ride short, planning to stop just before the hilly pass at Sekigahara. About 47km. A welcome distance after the long days behind me, and my thighs agreed. I carried on along the previous day’s diagonal line, heading northwest.

Day 4 was a shorter ride than the days before: just over 70km from Toyohashi to central Nagoya, in a more or less straight diagonal to the northwest. Mostly urban, but with rice fields turning up anyway. Anywhere you go in Japan, you can’t really dodge the rice fields.

I left the hotel early and rode out through the suburbs of Toyohashi and Toyokawa, where I started crossing paths with the Shinkansen again, the line running overhead on its viaduct while I ducked under it.

If Day 2 was all hills, Day 3 was flat. Flat, but long. I rode about 150km that day, and the bike handled it without breaking a sweat.

I started from Shizuoka city early in the morning. Just past the outskirts, the road took me through a few kilometers of hills, climbing up to Utsunoya Pass, the old crossing between Shizuoka and Fujieda. This was a hard stretch of the Tokaido for centuries, the kind of place travelers dreaded on foot. These days it’s just a busy National Route 1. What’s strange about Utsunoya is that it has four tunnels side by side, one each from the Meiji, Taisho, Showa, and Heisei eras, including a brick one from 1876 that was Japan’s first toll tunnel. Once the hills ended I dropped into Fujieda, and from there the road leveled out.