I didn’t really plan the visit; it was more of a spur-of-the-moment thing. A typhoon had been crawling over Tokyo for most of the day, and by the evening it was finally moving off, leaving behind a light drizzle that doesn’t really bother anyone but keeps the streets wet and shiny. That’s actually the ideal condition for photographing a place like Golden Gai, so I headed out to Shinjuku before the pavement had a chance to dry.

If you don’t know it, Golden Gai is a small block of tiny wooden bars on the eastern edge of Kabukicho, a few minutes on foot from the east exit of Shinjuku Station. Small is the key word here. The whole area covers roughly 7,000 square meters, and inside that you’ll find six narrow alleys running east to west, one lane crossing them, and somewhere around 280 bars, most of them with a single counter and maybe five to eight stools. The buildings are two stories, sometimes three, wooden, and packed together so tightly that in most places two people can barely pass each other in the lane. Shinjuku is already one of the densest places in the country, and Golden Gai is pretty much at the top of that density chart. It really is its own little world in there.

I expected the rain to keep people away, but no. There were quite a lot of visitors wandering the lanes, and I’d say about ninety percent of them were tourists from overseas, which is more or less how it’s been for the past decade or so. Golden Gai was showcased in the Michelin Green Guide back in 2009, and the number of Western visitors apparently went up sharply after that, to the point where the alleys now fill up with foreign visitors night after night. The bar owners have adapted, for the most part, but they have also put up a lot of signs. Signs asking you not to shout. Signs asking you not to drink in the street. Signs asking you not to photograph the inside of the bars, which many of the owners are fairly firm about, and you can understand why when the entire bar is the size of a walk-in closet and everyone inside is about a meter from the lens. I kept my camera pointed at the alleys and left the interiors alone.

The Meiji Tunnel at Utsunoya is usually described as Japan’s first toll tunnel. That holds for the tunnel that opened here in 1876. It is not quite the tunnel you walk through today. The first one was built mostly of wood and lit by open oil lamps. After about twenty years a lamp set it alight and the whole thing burned and collapsed. The brick tunnel standing now is its replacement, finished in 1904.

I approached from the west, riding Route 1 back toward Tokyo on the Beast (my e-bike, if you two haven’t met yet). There is a turn off the highway that drops you into Utsunoya. The transition is quick: one minute you are on a national road with loud traffic, the next you are in a narrow, quiet hamlet with no sign of the road you were just on, and it feels like you accidentally slipped back in time.

Utsunoya sits on the old Tokaido, on the difficult stretch of pass road between the post towns of Mariko and Okabe. It was never a full post station itself, more a rest point on the climb, with teahouses for people crossing the pass. What is left is one main paved lane of old wooden houses running up the slope, with steep stairs cutting off between them. The city lists it as a protected townscape, and the pass road is a national historic site. People still live here, so it is a village first and a sight second.

For most of its history, the way past this mountain was to run.

Satta-yama drops straight into Suruga Bay. There was no dry ground at the bottom, nowhere to put a road. For centuries the road was whatever wet rock the sea left uncovered. If you had time, you waited for low tide. If you didn’t, you waited for a wave to pull back. Then you ran. Time it wrong and the sea took you. They called that stretch oyashirazu koshirazu: “parent doesn’t know child, child doesn’t know parent.” Everyone was on their own.

That same strip of shore is still the only flat ground here, and these days it is full. National Route 1, the Tokaido Main Line, and the Tomei Expressway all run through it side by side, crossing over each other in a gap barely wide enough to hold them. The pass above looks down on all of it, with Mount Fuji standing behind. That is the picture.

Hiroshige drew this around 1834, for the Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido. It is called Satta Peak at Yui. A crag rising on the left. Two wind-bent pines. Three small figures at the top of the cliff, one of them leaning out over the drop. Sails on the water, Fuji across the bay. Most of his series is busy with porters and teahouses and weather. But this one is rock and air, and you have to look carefully to find people in it.

The scene still lines up, more or less. The sails have gone. The pines have gone. The bald hill Hiroshige drew is under fruit trees and scrub. But the shape of the land is the same, and so is the angle on Fuji.

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.