Takayama musings

Walking shoulder to shoulder with the milling crowd, I saw a middle-aged woman drawing faces on her miniature green and yellow pumpkins for sale at her vegetable stall. The narrow street bordering the Miyagawa river in downtown Takayama was crammed with shoppers that sunny morning in September and had transformed into a morning market selling everything from senbei (rice crackers) to miniature vegetables to homemade organic pomegranate scones. Pedalling my way around the tiny city bordering the mountains, I had arrived at the market. The calls of vendors in sweet and rhythmic Japanese rang through the air.

With a couple of days left hanging loose in my two weeks in Japan, I picked Takayama. Though I could never get enough of stand-up sushi bars in the teeming alleyways of Tokyo’s Shinjuku or circumnavigating Kyoto by foot under cloudy skies, I craved the relative anonymity of a Japanese town. With a five-hour train ride from Tokyo, Takayama, at the foothills of the Japanese Alps, snugly fit the bill.

Other than a customary website highlighting the region’s attractions, my research revealed precious little about Takayama. Perfect, I thought. It is in the Gifu prefecture in central Japan, bordering Hida city, which is famed for its gourmet beef.

As we neared Takayama, an announcement in the train instructed us to look out of the window — a Japanese alpine river flowed like a jade carpet billowed by winds, and pine-studded mountains of the northern Japanese Alps ran alongside the train as if playing Fetch.

I arrived and checked in at my modern-day ryokan, a Japanese-style guesthouse where one has to remove footwear before entering. I found out that the city map boasted 37 attractions — from morning markets to folk museums to heritage houses and temple gardens. My priorities rested with the sake brewery tour, and perhaps a visit to the nearby village where a lantern festival was on.

I walked along the Miyagawa and watched its congregation of pale orange koi fish, ambled along the empty streets bordered with old, wooden private houses and visited the Takayama Jinya temple. Sake brewery, my guts screamed. I changed directions and headed to the merchant district from the ancient Edo and Meiji periods.

For ¥200, I was given a little cup and directed to a cooler where different varieties of sake bottles beckoned me. I remember drinking a fruity variant and making a mental note to buy that particular bottle before I left Takayama. I also remember walking out of the shop tipsy, feeling like my shoelaces were tied together.

That sake excess notwithstanding, my evening was sober. I took a bus to the neighbouring village of Furukawa, where I felt like I had stumbled into a theatre playing a foreign movie without subtitles. An entire street was closed to traffic and on the road stood rows of lanterns instead. Trust the Japanese to pay tribute to the pop-culture in every form, for there were even the ubiquitous Hello Kitty and Powerpuff Girls lanterns.

There is an inherent beauty in watching people go about their lives, uninhibited by the presence of a stranger. I saw stalls selling rice crackers, sweet potato fries and wasabi-flavoured munchies. There were street performers, young pianists and ageing rockstars. I walked around, aiming my camera at strangers and their lanterns. Middle-aged street rockstars, with skullcaps vainly attempting to hide their bald pate, performed in an unfamiliar language. I forgot my return bus schedule. Meanwhile, the young pianists had left — the square was empty and the only evidence of their performance were the upturned plastic chairs. I peeled myself away reluctantly and walked towards the bus stand.

The next day, all fired up, I went on a hike to the nearby Kamikochi National Park. The weekend had brought the outdoorsy Japanese by the hordes and the park was filled with families with kids in tow and elderly women armed with hiking poles, bear bells and polished shoes. I walked along virgin forests among Japanese birch, willow and larch trees, their crowns slowly changing moods with a touch of fall colours. Mt Yake Dake stood at a distance, its peak deceptively swathed in white clouds. It erupted in 1915.

Next, standing in front of a takoyaki (deep-fried balls with octopus) stall, I felt a rumble in my stomach. It was breakfast time. After which, I had to go to the foot onsen, a hot spring exclusively for the feet. Without wasting time, I stocked up on supplies for my forthcoming bus ride to Tokyo and pedalled ahead to the onsen, to plunge my tired (but also happy) feet in bubbling hot water and to chew on my two weeks in Japan.

Prathap Nair is a freelance writer based in Bengaluru