Lifestyle

Journeying along the Route Romantique, the Route 66 of Japan


A view of the Motonosumi Inari Shrine (Picture: Adam Bloodworth/Metro.co.uk)

If Japan’s familiar urban hubs like Tokyo are there to offer peak stimulation, then the lesser-visited samurai castles and pristine Japanese gardens will lull you into a sense of deep relaxation in a way your millennial sleeping app never could.

The contemplative, peaceful attractions of rural Japan have typically been attractions for third or fourth-time visitors to explore. But with a new British Airways route directly from London to Osaka now running, it’s easier than it has ever been to dip into the untouched western Japanese countryside.

My idea of rural Japan before I visited was formulated from cliched images on television. Perhaps James Bond in You Only Live Twice, when Connery’s Bond visited a traditional Ryokan, the Japanese term for an overnight inn. The film depicted serene natural settings and striking traditional architecture – but could reality live up to fiction?

The westerly region of San’in stretches from the cities of Osaka to Fukuoka, on the north coast of western Japan. You’ll need to hire a car, or book onto an Inside Japan Tours trip to get the best from the region, as there are long journeys between destinations, but that’s kind of the point. Route Romantique, as the area is known, might just be the Route 66 of Japan, only with better food and more surprising attractions.

Inari shrine (Picture: Adam Bloodworth/Metro.co.uk)

San’in has samurai castles, trinkety towns, hot thermal springs, dramatic coastlines and spiritual shrines, each one devoted to a specific God. To this day, the remote region is famous among locals as Japan’s mythological romantic heartland, and acts a pilgrimage spot for young Japanese singletons who go here to look for love, and to get a dose of Japan ye olde.

Start your trip at Ohana Residence in Yanagawa, a grand former residence a few hours’ drive from the gateway city of Fukuoka, reachable from Osaka or Tokyo by bullet train.

The regional dish popular in this part of Japan is smoked eel, and stopping for lunch at Ohana is the best way to enjoy the attraction. The Ohana restaurant, with traditional floor-level seating and paper-thin sliding ornate doors, offers views of the chocolate-box residence gardens while you dine.

Head to Ohana Residence for a traditional meal (Picture: Adam Bloodworth/Metro.co.uk)

Japanese gardens are internationally famous for their beauty, which is achieved by combining various assortments of geometric shapes: dumpy, neatly preened bushes that look like grown-up bonsai trees, gently-arching bridges over streams, and manicured lawns so carefully kept and fantastical in appearance that the whole thing seems fake: more like the inside of Willy Wonka’s factory, (‘If you want to view paradise, take a look around and view it!’) than natural gardens, only these have clear-running water, not chocolate. These gardens become a common theme as we explore the region further.

We drive through Jurassic vistas of rocky outcrops, skirting near the coastline and up through rural Japan for a few hours, until we reach the Motonosumi Inari Shrine, a mid-century mythological monument in dazzling red.

With the shrine’s dainty red arches leading the way toward the dramatic rocky coast, it’s hard to resist filling your phone with photos – try to resist too much hedonism and just switch off to get the most of the picturesque setting and enjoy it in the spiritual way it was intended as you wander beneath the arches towards the sea.

Nearby, in the town of Nagato, the region’s natural thermal water is used by a number of hotels that have hot public baths, which are available for a range of different budgets.

You’ll want to snap a load of pictures of the Inari Shrine (Picture: Adam Bloodworth/Metro.co.uk)

We stayed at affordably-priced Yumoto, which had hot spring baths (in which you’re required to bathe naked), a bowling alley and multiple karaoke rooms. Karaoke is popular across the generations in Japan, so expect to see groups of older men and women sitting uniformly and singing come nightfall.

The hotels in Nagato are a real local find; guests typically treat them like getaways from the grind of city life, and will come here for the weekend (sometimes longer) to do absolutely nothing other than soak in the baths, eat local food, and take walks in the neighbouring verdant countryside. Think of it as similar to a visit to Butlin’s or Centre Parcs.

Karaoke rooms are fitted with a pleasingly kitsch Nineties television sets, complete with Teletext-like display. I was, without doubt, the only westerner in residence that night, I realised after we’d hung up our mics and I began to fall asleep on my futon bed, laid on a bamboo floor in a traditional Ryokan room. Outdoors, beyond the decorative sliding wooden shutter doors, the rich, dense forestry was mapped out below.

An hour’s drive north, with views which peeped onto stretches of coastline, through dense forestry and past local’s homes, we stopped for lunch at Tsuwano, a historic village lined with samurai houses. The town, which is easily walkable, has chocolate box cuteness. One example being that the locals bred multi-coloured carp for food centuries back, but now they outnumber villagers nine to one and swim in narrow streams along the edges of the roads. They’re fun to look down on as you pass over tiny bridges over the stream, (this is also a great excuse to get an artsy photo including the carp).

Some tasty ramen broth (Picture: Adam Bloodworth/Metro.co.uk)

Tsuwano is a bit like a British Lake District town: quaint while being authentic and touristic at the same time. That said, tourists are nearly entirely Japanese, because the San’in region hasn’t become familiar to western tourists yet.

In Tsuwano, visitors buy local pottery, sweets and freshly-brewed sake from locals who offer a generous smile. Take in samurai history if you’ve got a while before you hit the road, otherwise wander the colourful carp-littered lanes for an hour or so. Struggling with language barriers when making purchases is all part of the fun, but it’s within the Japanese culture to be incredibly helpful, so you’ll never find yourself too stuck.

A few hours further up the coast and you’ll hit Matsue Castle in the Shimane prefecture, one of the last medieval castles left standing in Japan. Ascending three or four flights of stairs, I removed my shoes and put on simple white slippers to protect the original wooden flooring.

Some of the original fixtures which date back centuries are on display inside, but save extra time to appreciate the view from the top, which sets out the low-lying land’s tapestry of lakes, gardens and rice fields.

Head to Matsue for delicious local seafood (Picture: Adam Bloodworth/Metro.co.uk)

Spend the night in Matsue and go that step further by having dinner at Minami, that does excellent local food in a setting to dress up for. The various components of dinner are served all on one large plate, and eaters are encouraged to get interactive as they boil seafood in a broth above a fire burner (known as steam bowl cuisine), with cold sushi on the side, made with an assortment of local fish. Warning: some, including the large conch shells and vinegar shellfish, are not for the faint-hearted.

White mackerel, flounder, red snapper, shimeji mushrooms, ponzu, miso soup and ginger and sea bass are typical western Japanese ingredients, and are way more approachable if removing a large shellfish from its conch shell, raw, and eating it, sounds not like your thing.

The nearby Adachi Museum of Art is a spectacular place to draw your trip to a close. Founded by the late Zenko Adachi, the art inside the gallery responds to the formal Japanese gardens outside (the most impressive of our tour). Different shaped windows expose fragments of the garden outside, putting them into the context of the museum, as if the views are paintings. It’s mesmerising stuff.

Like all Japanese gardens, the Adachi’s is precisely engineered to be as close to perfect as is humanly possible. The tumbling waterfalls in the distance, blossoming trees in the foreground and rocky outcrops create the feeling of nature, while also offering an odd juxtaposition: what you’re looking at is so manmade, it arguably isn’t natural at all.

Here, the Japanese will meditate, think deeply, or just sit calmly for hours – it’s the sort of peaceful contemplation that’s engrained into the Japanese culture and celebrated in the rural regions at shrines, gardens, ancient towns and in pristinely-made Ryokan inns.

San’in is where Japanese tourists go on holiday to escape the inescapable noise of Japan’s overcrowded cities. Being privy to that as a British tourist is an incredibly powerful experience.

British Airways fly to Osaka from £572 return. Inside Japan Tours offer trips around Western Japan which include the attractions I visited. 

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