Walk around the marsh

For our 'Wednesday Walk' this week we took advantage of a shopping trip over towards Togane to go for a hike on part of the coastal plain. Around there it is about seven miles wide, running east from a low but sharp escarpment that makes the edge of the Shimousa Plateau down to the beach at Kujukuri, and it is former marsh land and pretty well as flat as a pancake. Actually five thousand years ago all this area was under the Pacific, if you look carefully you can easily pick out the old cliff line marking the former coast behind the old high road that runs parallel to Route 126.

We parked up in the Nagasakiya store car park and headed eastwards across the big area of 'tanbo' rice paddies between the highway and the JR line. Once you have crossed the railway the modern ribbon development is left behind and you are into the countryside of old Japan. The broad flat landscape is dotted with the occasional traditional single storey farm house and the big sky arches overhead from horizon to horizon. Here and there a parcel of land has fallen out of cultivation and is already colonised again by tall dense reeds and thickets of deciduous shrubs. If the land isn't taken back into farming soon it will revert to forest again in a few years. Elsewhere areas have been moved over to grow 'hatake' dry field crops, mainly beautifully maintained rows of 'negi' onions.

I say these areas are as 'flat as a pancake' but actually they aren't. Once your eye gets used to the country and to the map you can see where the slightly higher land lies by the location of farms and old road patterns. The newer land is easily identifiable by the large square rice cultivating basins and lack of trees and most of it has only been brought into cultivation from swamps and marshland in the last two or three generations. The amount of backbreaking manual work involved must have been incredible.

I really love these big flat landscapes, in England you can find them in Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire and around The Wash. The stuff of Constable paintings. But who needs to go there except for those who make a living from the land? They aren't picturesque in the way old animal husbandry country is, earlier landscapes aren't pickled and preserved here and there are no pretty views of mountains or forests. As agriculture was mechanised people moved out,probably glad to get jobs in warm dry factories rather than struggling in the fields in the biting cold rain or summer humidity.

Looping back towards the main road we walked along the gravel farm access roads through Gumyo. There's a small graveyard there not far from a copse that shelters the village shrine and as far as I can see the place didn't have any lane access at all. When families want to tend graves they must just walk around the edge of the field. Those whose ashes are interred there are probably exactly the same men and women who worked in the surrounding fields their entire lives and never made a trip further than town a few miles away. They made the place what it is - in life with their strength and hands and afterwards with what was left of them too.