Tanabe

We arrived in Tanabe to catch a bus, and almost left the same way — the town is famous as the last outpost before the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage trails, a place to buy trekking poles and sleep before the mountains. But our bus was the next morning, and so we had an evening to fill, and that evening rearranged what I thought this trip was going to be. Lia found us a bar in the Ajikoji alley district, a lantern-lit warren of maybe sixty tiny izakaya packed into a few blocks, and by the end of the night we’d been fed grilled fish we couldn’t name, taught a drinking phrase we immediately mangled, and adopted by a table of retired fishermen. Nobody was performing for tourists. We just happened to be there.

The alley they call Ajikoji

Ajikoji — “flavour alley” — is the reason to stay in Tanabe. It’s a dense lattice of standing bars and counter restaurants, most seating six or eight people, steam and smoke and laughter spilling into lanes barely wide enough for two. We wandered without a plan, ducking under a noren curtain wherever it looked busy. At one counter the master grilled us sanma, the autumn saury, so fresh the flesh was still faintly sweet; at another we ate umeboshi so good Lia bought a jar to carry home. This whole region is Japan’s kingdom of ume, the pickled plum, and Tanabe’s Kishu variety is the aristocrat of them. I am not a pickled-plum man, or I wasn’t. I am now.

Benkei’s town and the shrine in the trees

By daylight Tanabe is quieter and stranger. It claims the warrior-monk Benkei as a native son, and there’s a statue of him near the station, all glowering muscle. We walked to Tokei Shrine, tucked into a grove near the centre of town, where Benkei’s father is said to have served — a mossy, unhurried place where a groundskeeper was raking gravel and a cat asleep on the offering box. Then down to the harbour, where the morning boats were unloading and gulls wheeled over the ice. Tanabe doesn’t dress itself up. It’s a real port that happens to be beautiful in the ordinary way working places are, and I found that more moving than any manicured garden.

The doorway to Kumano

Of course Tanabe is also, genuinely, the gateway to the Kumano Kodo — the thousand-year-old network of pilgrimage trails through the Kii mountains, a UNESCO World Heritage route walked by everyone from retired emperors to us two, hungover and hopeful. From the Kii-Tanabe station, buses run up into the mountains to Takijiri-oji, the traditional trailhead where pilgrims once purified themselves before entering the sacred range. We only walked a few hours of it that trip — Lia’s knee, my excuses — but standing at Takijiri where the forest closes overhead like a door, I understood why the town below exists the way it does. It has spent a thousand years feeding and sheltering people about to walk into the mountains. We were only the latest.

Getting There

Tanabe is easy to reach and that’s part of its usefulness. Limited express Kuroshio trains run from Shin-Osaka to Kii-Tanabe in about two hours, hugging the Pacific coast for the last stretch — sit on the sea side. From the station, local buses climb to the Kumano Kodo trailheads at Takijiri-oji (about 40 minutes) and onward to Hongu. If you’re driving, it’s roughly two hours from Osaka via the Hanwa Expressway. Stay at least one night: the Ajikoji alleys only come alive after dark, and they are the whole reason to come.