Day 20 - the Michinoku Coastal Trail

Gulls, Serows, Tsunamis and Trains

Today we began the Michinoku Coastal Trail at Kabushima Shrine. Getting there—and getting back—required some advance planning because trains along this coast are remarkably scarce. We took the JR Hachinohe Line from Hon-Hachinohe to Same, then began walking south with the return timetable quietly controlling our lives.

Kabushima is famous for the 30,000–40,000 black-tailed gulls, or umineko, that breed there. They are regarded as messengers of the shrine deity and symbols of fishing, safety and prosperity. Most had already departed for the season, so we missed both the spectacle and the shrine’s official “Good Luck Certificate” awarded to anyone pooped upon. Sometimes good fortune has a suspicious delivery system.

We also met a thru-hiker who was completing the entire Michinoku Coastal Trail—nearly 1,000 kilometers along Japan’s tsunami coast. Our day suddenly seemed considerably less ambitious.

The trail followed a beautiful mixture of rocky shoreline, beaches, grassy headlands, fishing villages and shrines. But the tsunami memorials and evacuation signs made it impossible to view the scenery casually. The 1896 tsunami killed more than 20,000 people, and the 1933 disaster killed or left missing more than 3,000. In 2011, this coastline was again inundated: Kabushima was flooded to a depth of more than five meters, the waves reached halfway up the Tanesashi grasslands, and homes and fishing facilities in Hashikami were destroyed. Fortunately, Hashikami recorded no deaths or missing people. Walking up those steep evacuation hills made the lesson very real—when the earth shakes, you do not stop to admire the ocean behaving strangely.

Wildlife supplied the day’s mystery. A scruffy, wolfish creature with striking raccoon eyes appeared on the trail and began coming uphill behind us. Cindy wanted a better look; Phil, considering possibilities that included “rabid stray dog,” encouraged forward progress. Later, while eating delicious beef stew overlooking the ocean, Cindy spotted photographs on the restaurant wall and announced, “THAT’S IT, PHIL!” Our alleged wolf was a Japanese serow, a protected goat-antelope that was probably far more puzzled by us than we were by it.

We eventually reached Hashikami and waited for one of the very few trains back. Near the station we met an elderly woman whose house was decorated with an extraordinary collection of American state license plates—exactly the cultural encounter one naturally expects in a tiny Japanese fishing village. We never solved how they all arrived there.

Hashikami Station was unstaffed, so we boarded, collected a boarding ticket and paid on the train. The sparse railway service made the day complicated, but it also allowed us to walk a long continuous stretch of this remarkable coast—and provided an ending involving a Japanese grandmother, American license plates and a nearly empty local train. Travel logistics occasionally become part of the entertainment.Read more