Saijo

I did not expect to fall for a town because of its plumbing, but Saijo undid me with water. We had come mostly to look at the mountain, and instead spent our first hour crouched beside an uchinuki — one of the free artesian springs that rise, unbidden, all over the city — cupping water so cold and clean it made Lia laugh out loud. There are hundreds of them. People fill jugs, brew their morning tea, cool their beer in them. The whole city hums with the sound of water arriving, and after the dust and heat of the road it felt like stepping into somewhere that had solved a problem the rest of us hadn’t noticed we had.

The mountain that watches

Ishizuchi is the highest peak in western Japan, a sacred jag of stone that seems to lean over Saijo like a stern grandparent. We took the ropeway up into the cloud and then climbed toward the summit, where the truly devout haul themselves up bare rock by heavy iron chains — the kusari — polished by centuries of pilgrims’ hands. I managed one chain section before my nerve and my arms both quit, and Lia, who is braver on rock than I will ever admit in writing, went a little higher and came back grinning. The mountain kept disappearing into mist and returning, and every time it returned it looked older.

Following the water home

Back in town we simply walked the water. There is a district near Isono Shrine where the springs are thickest, and locals had set out ladles and cups at the public basins as though offering to strangers were the plainest courtesy in the world. An older woman filling two enormous bottles told Lia, in patient slow Japanese and a lot of gesture, that she’d drunk from this same spring for seventy years. The paddies around the edge of the city are fed by it too, so the rice here is a kind of bottled mountain. We bought some to carry home and it did, weeks later in our own kitchen, still taste faintly of that cold.

Drums in the dark

We had timed our visit, half by luck, to the edge of the Saijo Festival, when the city hauls out its danjiri — towering gilded floats, lantern-hung and impossibly heavy — and men shoulder them through the streets in a slow roar that goes on past midnight. The night we watched, dozens of floats gathered by the river and the sound was less music than weather, a pressure you felt in your sternum. Lia gripped my sleeve as one great float swayed past close enough to feel the lanterns’ heat. Afterward the crowd carried its glow out into the dark streets, and the springs kept bubbling under all of it, indifferent and constant, as they had through every festival before.

Getting There

Saijo lies on the Yosan Line between Matsuyama and the Honshu bridges; the limited express from Matsuyama takes about forty minutes, and Iyo-Saijo Station puts you within walking distance of the springs. For Ishizuchi, buses run from the station to the ropeway base, then it is a cable car and a real climb — go early and check the weather, because the mountain makes its own. If you can align your trip with mid-October, the festival is unforgettable; if not, come anyway, and drink the water.