Stands a cafe
That's half as old as Time.
Not the stuff of which Poet Laureates are made, I'll admit, but lunch in Inari's quiet and small Jade House cafe/restaurant found me composing that SMS haiku for friends back in Australia.
I don't know how old the cafe is, but its building is about 400 years old -- a mere whippersnapper compared to the 1,300-year-old shrine that stands next-door -- and was originally an inn for the travellers and pilgrims who passed by on the old Tokaidō Road, literally half a pace away from the front door.
My midsummer's journey, however, was not on foot along the Tokaidō. It was by rail along JR's Nara Line to a city whose bridge has its own goddess: the not-so-gloomy city of Uji , where I was going to watch the fishing -- otherwise known as Ukai .
Uji's river was thrice a battlefield, flows through the middle of one of the world's first novels and past the ancient and beautiful Byodo-in temple -- and it's where I find myself afloat with a boatload of Osakan Haiku poets to watch the tethered cormorants duck and dive in the shallow river in search of sweetfish.
Darkness has fallen, and the six birds do their thing by the light of a bonfire that hangs from the fishing boat's prow and the flashbulbs of the sightseers' cameras whilst the poets hurriedly jot down hiragana haikus in their dimly-lit notebooks.
Uji is unusual in that the cormorant fishers are women. Of the 200 Usho (cormorant fishers) still working in Japan, only four are women.
And two of them -- Mariko Sawaki and Yoko Esaki -- work in Uji.
Like anyone who has mastered a difficult skill, Mariko makes it look easy as she hauls each bird on board to remove the fish from its beak before returning it to the water -- all the while keeping the other birds from tangling their lines or climbing on board the flotilla of sightseeing boats that have accompanied her boat onto the shallow waters of Uji's river.
"My soul
Dives in and out of the water
With the Cormorant"
-- Uejima Onitsura (1660-1738)
And suddenly, 90 minutes after we set out on Uji's shallow namesake river, it's all over. The boats all return to shore, the birds are fed and put back into their aviaries, and the spectators don their shoes and go to get some tea.
Because tea is what Uji is really all about, with the best-quality Uji Matcha blends selling for around AU$2.20 per gram.
Next to Uji's goddess-endowed bridge, just over the road from the Keihan Railway's retro-futuristic terminus, stands what is probably the world's oldest tea shop: Tsuen's.
The shop was opened back in 1160 by Tsuen Masahisa, a retired samurai who was also Uji Bridge's sentry.
Tsuen was a retainer of Yorimasa Minamoto, and his sinecure as bridge sentry and teamaker would take a tragic turn in 1180 when Uji's bridge became the focal point for a battleground.
The First Battle of Uji would begin the Genpei Wars that finished the Heian era and ushered in nearly 700 years of military rule until the Meiji restoration in 1868.
Unfortunately for Tsuen, Yorimasa lost the first battle of Uji and Yorimasa committed seppuku (hara-kiri) in the grounds of the Byodo-in temple -- the first recorded instance of a samurai choosing self-inflicted death over surrender.
Tsuen was loyal unto, and into, death, committing seppuku alongside his boss in the grounds of the temple where he is buried, at the other end of the goddess-endowed bridge that he guarded and where the tea shop that he opened back in 1160 is still run by his descendants, 23 generations later.
My midsummer's journey, however, was not on foot along the Tokaidō. It was by rail along JR's Nara Line to a city whose bridge has its own goddess: the not-so-gloomy city of Uji , where I was going to watch the fishing -- otherwise known as Ukai .
Uji's river was thrice a battlefield, flows through the middle of one of the world's first novels and past the ancient and beautiful Byodo-in temple -- and it's where I find myself afloat with a boatload of Osakan Haiku poets to watch the tethered cormorants duck and dive in the shallow river in search of sweetfish.
Darkness has fallen, and the six birds do their thing by the light of a bonfire that hangs from the fishing boat's prow and the flashbulbs of the sightseers' cameras whilst the poets hurriedly jot down hiragana haikus in their dimly-lit notebooks.
Uji is unusual in that the cormorant fishers are women. Of the 200 Usho (cormorant fishers) still working in Japan, only four are women.And two of them -- Mariko Sawaki and Yoko Esaki -- work in Uji.
"My soul
Dives in and out of the water
With the Cormorant"
-- Uejima Onitsura (1660-1738)
And suddenly, 90 minutes after we set out on Uji's shallow namesake river, it's all over. The boats all return to shore, the birds are fed and put back into their aviaries, and the spectators don their shoes and go to get some tea.
Because tea is what Uji is really all about, with the best-quality Uji Matcha blends selling for around AU$2.20 per gram.
Next to Uji's goddess-endowed bridge, just over the road from the Keihan Railway's retro-futuristic terminus, stands what is probably the world's oldest tea shop: Tsuen's.
The shop was opened back in 1160 by Tsuen Masahisa, a retired samurai who was also Uji Bridge's sentry.
Tsuen was a retainer of Yorimasa Minamoto, and his sinecure as bridge sentry and teamaker would take a tragic turn in 1180 when Uji's bridge became the focal point for a battleground.
The First Battle of Uji would begin the Genpei Wars that finished the Heian era and ushered in nearly 700 years of military rule until the Meiji restoration in 1868.
Unfortunately for Tsuen, Yorimasa lost the first battle of Uji and Yorimasa committed seppuku (hara-kiri) in the grounds of the Byodo-in temple -- the first recorded instance of a samurai choosing self-inflicted death over surrender.
Tsuen was loyal unto, and into, death, committing seppuku alongside his boss in the grounds of the temple where he is buried, at the other end of the goddess-endowed bridge that he guarded and where the tea shop that he opened back in 1160 is still run by his descendants, 23 generations later.
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