loading . . . Iseji – Day 3 – Kiinagashima to Owase Another day, another broken night because of jetlag. Getting up at all was not easy, let alone getting up early.
My hostess kindly offered to refund me the money (a trifle) for dinner because of the misunderstanding. Which I of course did not accept. The food was tasty, plentiful and home cooked and she might have saved my legs. She made me the light breakfast with fish and rice that we know and love.
For my first bit I walked over a light pass with a view and circled around the harbour, the coast and some of the local beaches.
My barista in Berlin says he would come to Mie to surf back in the day which looks like it could be amazing. But probably not to this part of Mie for that.
The passes themselves, Ikkoku-toge, Hirakata-toge and Miura-toge were short work but it is where I met the first other people I’ve seen on trail so far. Two old geezers who had driven here and did their walk (_sanpo_) up and back down. The pass itself was short work with maybe 3-4 switchbacks. I remember having to make 1000 altimeters in the Alps where we would be doing hours of consecutive turns like this.
In Craig Mod’s account it says the walking from Minose to Aiga is relatively miserable along the road, so that’s a perfect excuse for me to skip it and take the 11:37 train. Catching that is essential because it lines me up nicely for Magose. Missing it would mean the rest of the day would be a loss because of the lunch sized hole in the train schedule.
At the Minose train station a team was re-roofing the shack. Nice to see infrastructure investment like that even in the most rural of places. Something you would never see where I’m from.
That does prompt a comparison. If you think that these towns are empty, I have some walks we can take through the Nazi riddled back country of Berlin where there is absolutely nothing. Regular enough train service on the main lines, but very spotty bus connectivity and no gastronomy anybody could ever find appealing. Living next to Brandenburg is one of the worst parts of living in Berlin. No real sights of any kind there other than the occasional remnants of a concentration camp.
During the train ride I saw some of my first fellow hikers. One Japanese woman in the train going alone and a Western couple at Funatsu station who looked like they were walking it. If that’s where I saw them and they weren’t getting on the train, then they are probably walking the entire thing. If ever they read this, _ganbatte_!
Aiga has quite some stuff going on for it in gastronomy. I wasn’t very hungry so I stopped quickly behind the train station at `Cafe do Selecao (!) for a strengthening coffee before the climb ahead. The coffee was good but unfortunately the owner was grabbed by bear frenzy. He kept trying to convince me that there are lots of bears around and I should be careful. I’m not a bear denialist, but there’s no reason to be stressed about them in this part of Japan.
Then I walked up and the climb was strenuous to put it mildly. The stone path was an interesting innovation here and I guess it helps but I’m just glad that it wasn’t raining. Even in the best conditions I would need about 15 minutes to go up 100m so the 330m here took the better part of an hour.
Then at the top I made the “fantastic” decision to go to the summit. Most of that climb were stairs but the kind that make an Amsterdam apartment staircase look reasonable. On the way up I caught myself thinking: “that’s steep, I wonder how I’ll get down this”, then I thought: “that’s a problem for future Alper to figure out!”
During the summit climb another Western couple were absolutely balling it down and to my amazement the guy had a baby in a front carrier. I admire the show of dominance here but one misstep and that baby is toast. In mountainous territory it is acceptable to carry kids in a kraxe, not an ergo baby.
The summit itself was sketchy as hell (as most summits are, really) but the views were definitely spectacular.
Back down I had to really take it step by step. My knee was not at all happy to be doing this exercise but everything kept together. Back at the pass, a group of 8 or so Japanese hikers were doing the Magose today fully decked out and with a guide even. They were amazed at me doing this alone (_hitori_) when another guy jogged up from the Owase side and went for the summit saying he does this daily.
That’s more people on the trail today than I saw in the previous days combined. Infinitely more even since I saw zero people so far.
The walk down was uneventful and led me through a large and active cemetery.
Then finally in Owase I tried to hunt down a bite and a coffee before checking in to my accommodation. It was hard to find something. Many stores were not up to date in either Google Maps or tabélog, which I find surprising since that is supposed to be the local restaurant app.
What did help me find a nice place, was just walking and looking around. I stumbled on a coffee and wine place (like all the fancy places these days are) with a proper espresso machine. The building used to house the pharmacy with an “Apotheke” sign on the building and the inside was modern and open. I got my cappuccino and saw the friendly young and creative people of Owase congregate there.
People are doing interesting things, even in Owase, and it stays true that “new ideas, need old buildings”. I see a general theme of repurposing happening all over anyway. From the sento turned museum, to the plots of land now being run as solar farms.
I checked in without seeing anybody into an empty family house up the hills in a residential area. The entire house, both floors, was mine for a song. I learned later that this was their grandparents’ house.
Then for dinner I went to a place called Inaka which has a well deserved reputation as a fantastic family-run kappou restaurant. I had some trouble trying to figure out what to order, but their summary English menu delivered the goods. I didn’t feel like figting with some wild monk-/pufferfish after a long day of hiking anyway.
What they delivered was absolute art. Probably the best meal I’ve had so far. The variety, the care, the detail and the different platings were out of the world. It is also not one of the cheapest meals I’ve had but I’m happy to pay for something _this_ good delivered this casually.
Then I made a tour of the city and Owase does not look that dead to me. During the afternoon I saw bunches of kids running around freely and in the evening the streets may be empty, but it looked like every izakaya was more or less full and people were getting ready for a night of drinking at the local karaoke, sunakku, bar or “nightclub”.
Fun as that sounds, that’s an amount of being awake and of drinking which my current schedule could not support, so off to bed it was for me.
The stats for the day say 19.94km and some 34k steps (strava1, strava2).
For tomorrow I’m doing some more drastic replanning. I only have two days left and an awful lot of walk ahead of me. I figured that tomorrow’s mountain would be my _Angstgegner_ as it was for many people before me. The time indications are roughly correct and 5h would eat up my entire day for not that much distance gained. Every 1km of altitude is equivalent in effort to 10km of distance as a rule of thumb.
Reading the end of Craig Mod’s report it seems both that that assessment is true and that it’s possible to do the chunk after the mountain in two days. That would make it an obvious choice to skip it. I’m going to see exactly how to do that over breakfast tomorrow which I’ll take after sleeping in for a change.
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https://alper.nl/dingen/2025/11/iseji-day-3-kiinagashima-to-owase/
