Onomichi

Onomichi climbs. That’s the first thing you understand about it — a town pressed between a low mountain and a narrow sea, so that everything not on the single flat main street goes uphill, by stair and alley and slope, the houses stacked one above the next all the way to the temples near the top. Lia and I arrived on a slow train along the coast, dropped our bags, and simply started climbing, and that turned out to be the correct way to see Onomichi: on foot, aimlessly, upward, following the cats.

The temple walk and the cat alley

There’s a marked route called the Temple Walk that threads some twenty-five temples strung along the hillside, but the pleasure of Onomichi is really in the getting-lost between them — the maze of stepped alleys, too narrow for cars, running between old wooden houses with pot plants and drying laundry and, everywhere, cats. Onomichi is famously a cat town; there’s even a lane called Neko no Hosomichi, the “cat alley,” dotted with painted cat stones and cat carvings and populated by the genuine article, sunning themselves on walls with proprietary calm. We stopped constantly. Lia has never in her life walked past a cat, and here that meant we covered about two hundred metres in an hour, which felt like exactly the right pace for the place. Between the cats, the temples: Senkō-ji with its red hall clinging to the rock, its bell, its enormous boulders you can scramble among.

You can take a ropeway to the top and walk down, which is the sensible order, but we did it backwards, sweating up and gliding down, and regretted nothing.

The view from Senkō-ji Park

Near the summit, Senkō-ji Park opens out to the view that Onomichi keeps promising as you climb: the whole town tumbling down the slope below you in a jumble of grey-tiled roofs, then the narrow Onomichi strait busy with ships and ferries, and beyond it the green humps of the Inland Sea islands, bridges stitching them together into the distance. It’s one of the loveliest urban-and-sea views in Japan, and there’s a bench right at the lookout that seems designed for doing nothing at all. We arrived up there in the late afternoon, the light going soft and gold on the water, a container ship threading the strait far below, and stayed until we got cold. A literary town, too — writers and filmmakers have long loved Onomichi, and there’s a “path of literature” with their words carved into stones along the way.

Back down at sea level we ate Onomichi ramen — a local style, soy-based with little nuggets of pork back-fat floating on top — in a cramped, steamed-up shop with a queue out the door, and it was worth the wait.

Start of the Shimanami Kaidō

Onomichi is also a beginning: it’s the mainland end of the Shimanami Kaidō, the celebrated cycling route that hops island to island across the Inland Sea to Imabari on Shikoku, some seventy kilometres over a chain of great suspension bridges with dedicated bike lanes. You can hire a bike right by the ferry pier — even one-way, dropping it at the far end — and even if, like us, you’re not up for the whole thing, you can cross the little strait by ferry with a cycle and ride the first island or two. We did a half-day of it: the flat coastal road, the sea always beside us, the huge white bridges arcing overhead, lemon groves and tiny ports and almost no traffic. It’s genuinely one of the great cycle rides anywhere, and even our modest bite of it was a highlight of the whole trip.

Lia, who had grumbled about the hills of the town, took to the flat sea road with delight, and by the end was plotting a return to ride the whole route. Next time, we said again. Onomichi is a good town for next-times.

Getting There

Onomichi is on the Hiroshima coast, on the San’yō main line. The nearest Shinkansen stop is Shin-Onomichi, a short bus ride from the centre, or you can take the local line from Fukuyama, itself a bullet-train stop about ten minutes away. The town is compact and walkable, with the ropeway up the hill from near the station; bicycle rental for the Shimanami Kaidō is right by the ferry terminal. It sits neatly between Okayama and Hiroshima, worth an overnight for the hillside lanes at dusk and an early start on the bikes.