Tashirojima (Cat Island)

 There are a bunch of islands in Japan that claim to be "Cat Island". Tashirojima is one of them. It's a 30 minute ferry ride from Ishinomaki terminal, and there are only three ferries per day, so we made sure we got up and moving early. Arriving at the dock, we saw the Mangattan Museum, nestled on it's own island in the bay.

Mangattan is dedicated to Shotaro Ishinomori, which may not be a common household name these days, but he was the creator of Kamen Rider. If you don't know Kamen Rider...here's a short sample

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCSbh6nk4bs

Kamen Rider predated Super Sentai (you know, Power Rangers) by 5 years and was (and still is) hugely influential. But that's not we were here for today.

We're here for the kitties!

The mighty vessel "See Cat"

Tashirojima is an accidental Cat Island and is not advertised as heavily as some of the others. The human population has been declining rapidly on the island so currently there are only about 80 people living on the island (down from 1000 in the 1950s). Cats were introduced to the island initially to handle the mice population and protect the silkworms that were being raised for textiles. In 1602 there was a famous decree from the government to set all pet cats free to combat the out of control rat population decimating the silkworm and rice crops. Long story short, eventually all cats were set free. Here in Tashirojima, there are no natural predators so the cats thrived living alongside humans.

Nowadays, there are several hundred cats on the island. They are all very used to strange humans asking to pet them and taking pictures of them and take it in stride. There are strict rules against picking up or feeding the cats. They are wild animals, after all, though very socialized with humans, and the residents of the island don't want cats begging and mobbing tourists for food.

Most signs on the island look like this

Most are mutts, but there is a strain of Japanese Bobtail that is common here

They were everywhere, hunting, sleeping, eating, playing. Compared to the Bunny Island that we visited last year, this felt much more natural. Cats are a lot smarter and more interactive than rabbits, so seeing them out and about on their own was a lot cooler than the clusters of hungry bunnies that only come up to you for food. 

We stopped to have a snack and one particularly brave cat at first came up to us to see if he could maybe steal some food, but eventually, after a lot of ignored pleading and staring, just hung out with us while we ate.

There is also a rather cute campground near the town that is Manga and Cat themed. We took a hike up to the site to get some pictures of the cabins they have there.

"Manga Island"

Yes, we looked into staying in one, but there were a lot of complications between biking, the fact that they only have (short-looking) bunk beds, no food on the island, etc. The view from the bluff is pretty cool.

There is also a small cat shrine in the middle of the island.

The shrine

The offerings

After wandering around for the morning, we caught the ferry back to the mainland and got everything ready for leaving tomorrow, including laundry, shipping our luggage (at the very conveniently located Kuroneko depot literally behind our hotel. The owner, Sacho Mino, remember him? He happened to be in the parking lot when we were getting ready to drag our luggage to the convenience store, and told us about it or we never would have known it was there), and getting some food.

The aftermath

We have some decisions to make soon. There is rain in the forecast, and depending on how bad and how long, we'll either plow through it and hope for the best or cut the biking short and head back to Tokyo. We've have wonderful weather the entire trip (even the rain on the first day wasn't that bad), so we're willing to put up with some rain, but it can get dangerous in the mountains with too much. 

Matsushima and Ichinomaki

 Before we went to bed last night, Sumi made a lot of plans for today, including going to the Shiogama fish auction in the morning. This would have us get up at 5:30 to make it up to the market before 8:00 when the auction would start. Anyone that knows Sumi would be saying something akin to "Ain't no way you're getting up at 5:30". They would be correct.

So we got up around 8:00 and were on the road by 9:00.

We did make a stop in Matsushima, a city famous for it's numerous small islands and the bridges they build to connect them to the mainland. 

Like, there are tour buses of people that come and see this. It is pretty cool, actually. The reason we came here was to visit one of these islands, Oshima. 

Now, Japan loves it's legends, and they really don't care if they are believable or not, as long as they are fun to tell. The legend of this island is that a monk, Kenbutsu Shonin, came to the island, recited sutras for ten years, and was thus able to fly. The emperor at the time thought this was so neat he sent 1,000 pine trees to him as a gift, thus starting the whole Matsushima (Pine Island) thing. Sure, cool.

Anyway, the historical telling is that Kenbutsu, who was part of an ascetic hermitage sect of Buddhism, lived on the island for 22 years, carving buddhas and scripture into the rocks. His dedication was so inspiring to the sect they erected a 3 meter tall obelisk as a memorial to him. This is far more believable and still kinda out there. Take religion out of the story and you basically have a crazy old guy living alone on a tiny island and carving up all the rocks. But add Buddhism and now it's a holy place.

Regardless, it was very pretty and a nice stop.

We continued up the coast and into Ishinomaki, the last reasonable-sized town we'll be staying at for a while. We're here because this is the port that you leave from to get to Tashirojima, the cat island. We're also staying at The Tama Hotel, a cat-run hotel. More on that later.

We got into town a bit early and needed to find some food. A family restaurant called Tomatoes & Onions piqued our interest because who doesn't like tomatoes and onions? It was also on the way to the hotel. They had a grilled chicken meal, which sounded good after a week of convenience store food and very salty meals (curry, gyoza, ramen).

The sweet corn was very good.

Salad, dinner roll, french onion soup.

Well, the chicken was the darkest white meat I've ever seen and I guess came from somewhere close to the breast. The rest of the meal was really good. Japan doesn't do spices well, so I don't know who taught them to make french onion soup. It was great, like really well made. The roll wasn't white bread fluff either. The chicken was the worst part of the meal and it was ok, just not chicken breast. 

Check in at the Tama Hotel was listed as 3:30 and at exactly 3:30 a man with large glasses, an even larger wristwatch, red pants and short, spiky, bleached hair came in to check us in. Sacho Mino (real name Satou Minoru) is really something. He is a graduate of the Tokyo MAX Beauty School, teaches high school here in Miyagi prefecture, races motorcycles, and has run the Sendai Half-Marathon. How do I know all this? It's in the hotel information guide.

There are birthday collage posters of him on the walls in the hallways. 

And the room decor is absolutely what one would expect from someone who graduated from Tokyo MAX Beauty School. Color and design everywhere, the exact opposite of the very standard business hotels we've been at for much of the trip. And the hotel is just...different. He has a whole selection of bath salts (free) down in the lobby. He has free wine in the lobby. Yes, wine. He cooks every night and has a small bar in one of the three buildings that make up the hotel. And then there's the cats.

There is an entire room for the cats

There are 11 of them (we saw 7)

This is Tama. As in the Tama Hotel. He is the manager.

Sumi in heaven.

They were all very well socialized and friendly, asking for pets, playing, hanging out with us. We spent quite a while with them. Finally we grabbed some snacks at the nearby Family Mart and called it a night, We have to be up and out by 8 tomorrow to catch the ferry to Tashirojima. There are only 3 ferries all day, so we can't miss it. Unlike the fish auction, Sumi will definitely be up for this one.

One last thing. I've seen several of these in the area and I just cannot imagine it is any good. This is a dinner vending machine. Like beef stew, glazed ham, ginger pork. And I got to wondering, how is it prepared? Like, are these frozen meals that are microwaved right then and there and served hot? Is it just all cooked and kind of under a heat lamp all day? There is no combination of storage and prep that makes this sound like a good idea.

Walking Up 1000 stairs

 A lot of times when you see some tourist thing advertised, it's either hyperbole or straight up exaggeration. So when we decided to head to Yamadera to "climb the thousand stairs" I was...not doubtful but skeptical that the temple really had 1000 stairs. It was certainly an impressive, sprawling collection of buddhist buildings built into the side of a mountain.

View from the city below

Yamagata is about an hour west of Sendai Station by train, so we biked up to the closest station to our hotel on the east side of town, Nakanosakai, and spent the next 90 minutes heading west. Yamagata is a small tourist town with a ton of omiyage (souvenir) shops on the roads leading out of the station to the base of the temple climb. 

One thing that actually shocked me was that until March of THIS YEAR, the Yamagata train station did not accept IC cards. IC Cards are the magnetic fare cards that you can charge up (Suica, Pasmo, etc) and use instead of buying tickets at machines with cash. We have been to some tiny stations in the middle of nowhere with one-man train cars that don't use IC, but a major tourist destination like Yamagata not even using technology from twenty years ago was quite a surprise.

As we left the station, we couldn't help but notice an enormous pot on the side of the road.

"Japan's Number One Imoni Festival"

Every year in September, the city holds an Imoni festival. If you, like me, wondered what an Imoni festival is, Imoni is a kind of taro soup. This pot is actually built on top of a large grill pit and during the festival, they fill up the 6.5 meter diameter pot with over 3 tons of taro root, 1.2 tons of beef, and other ingredients and cook a soup that serves 30,000 people. It take about 4.5 hours to cook the soup. Wild.

About a half mile walk from the big pot was the start of the temple climb.

That looks...steep.

Ascending the first set of stairs we came across a very tourist-y area selling a bunch of stuff along with some old temple buildings. As we kept going up, the tourist stuff faded away and there were a lot of gravestones, temple buildings, and other carvings into the rock of the cliff.

After about 600 steps, I was starting to believe them. The original temple, Risshakuji, was built in 860, and was the northern edge of the empire at the time. Also the famous poet, Basho, composed one of his most well-known haiku here about the stillness of the area:

閑けさや　岩にしみいる　蝉の声

Shizukesa ya/ Iwa ni shimiiru/ Semi no koe

Ah, the Quiet, but piercing the Rocks — the Cry of the Cicada

Brevity and all that. What do you expect when you only get 17 syllables to work with? In any case as we got higher up the mountain, the views got better and less crowded.

At the top of the mountain (and it was OVER 1,000 steps!), above even the temple, was Godaido, a building built in the 1700's over the edge of the cliff at the top of the mountain with the best view of the area. It was also where all the school kids on their field trip were getting their pictures taken, so it was a bit crowded and noisy, but the view was spectacular.

First with a couple of dorks in the way

A dork-less view

Fleeing the mobs of middle schoolers, we walked back down the 1,000 steps (I'll never doubt them again) and stopped at a little shop/restaurant for the sakuranbo (cherry) ice cream that was a specialty here. It turns out it wasn't just a specialty but, and I quote, "Among the top 11 ice cream stands in Japan" according to an NHK television show. First of all, you can just say "We're number 11". Second of all, yeah the ice cream was really good. Their sakuranbo actually was ranked first in the nation, according to this show, which consisted of a rather large woman visiting ice cream shops and...eating ice cream. 

It was still relatively early when we got back on the train to head back, so we decided to visit Masamune Date's mausoleum in Sendai. It's a much smaller version of Toshogu in Nikko that we visited on our first day up here, but with the same intricate and often gaudy style (known as the Momoyama period). Date was one of most power daimyo of the Tokugowa Shogunate and is directly responsible for establishment of Sendai as a major city. He also had a cool helmet, which is used as an icon all over Tohoku for just about everything

Musubimaru - MAJET (Japanese English Teaching) logo

Random fence in Sendai

So, we took the local tourism bus, The Loople, to Zuihouden, the shrine and mausoleum of the Date clan. Getting off the bus, we walked around the corner and saw

That looks...steep...again.

After the climb up and down Yamadera, seeing an 8% grade leading up to the shrine was a bit disheartening, but we slogged our way up. Zuihouden was impressive, with a lot of the same kind of decoration and scrollwork, but with different subject matter, all very well restored. Most of Sendai was flattened during WWII, and many of the buildings here did not survive. Most everything was rebuilt in the 70's and 80's as faithfully as possible to the original designs.

We had thought about checking out the castle, but were getting tired and hungry (we hadn't had a meal yet today), so we walked to the subway and headed back to Sendai Station where just a few blocks away was an Ichiran Ramen shop!

Extra garlic and green onions, firm noodles, light broth, extra chili. Heaven.

Ichiran has so spoiled us that it's hard to enjoy ramen in the US. It's always too thick, the noodles are too heavy, the pork is a slab of meat instead of a thin slice. Yep, we're Japan snobs, we know. It was the perfect way to end a long day of walking. We headed back to the station pick up our bikes only to find...a citation. Apparently we parked in a spot that required a sticker to be purchased. The good news is, the citation was quite nice and basically asked us politely to go get a sticker. They also would have liked us to pay for the day's parking, but as we have no way of doing that (it was after 5PM and we're leaving tomorrow morning) we will forever be parking fugitives in Nakanosekai.

Across the street from the station in this nice, upscale area, was an oddly named "Dining Izakaya" (bar that serves food)