Having visited my grandfather’s father’s hometown yesterday, today I decided to attempt to find my grandmother’s father’s village. My grandmother had done some research and had emailed me the name of the place. Armed with this information, some internet research yielded that the village had been swallowed by neighboring villages and incorporated into larger townships several times over the years. At some point, the village had been renamed Chida, which was then incorporated into Kao, which was then combined with several other townships into Yamaga. I write all this, not because its terribly important to you as a reader, but to emphasize the point that I was looking for a really small place- so small it had been “eaten†up several times. I was really looking more for a neighborhood than a village or town. There’s many reasons why I’m pleased with the order in which we’ve visited countries on our itinerary and now I can add today as another reason. There was no way for us to know how to get to the specific place we wanted to go. A year ago, I doubt we would’ve even attempted today’s journey, but we’ve learned just how localized knowledge can be and that if you head in a general direction, the way will often reveal itself. So we began taking a train to Kumamoto City, the transport hub of Kumamoto-ken. At the Kumamoto station, we asked the lady at the information booth if she knew how to get to a place called Kao-machi. She pulled out an old phonebook-looking thing, but it was filled with bus routes. Luckily, the infrequent bus was due to stop at the station in only 20 minutes!
We finally did catch the bus and after doing a circuit of Kumamoto City and passing its famous castle, we began heading out of the city. As we reached the outskirts of the city, the bus emptied and, just like yesterday, we were just two of a handful of passengers. Outside of Kumamoto City, we wound through the hills. I thought about how the land and topography looked a lot like San Luis Obispo, where my great grandfather eventually settled and built his farm. Although an immigrant in a completely foreign place, I wondered if he took comfort from the somewhat familiar landscape: mountains, rocky and grean, flat valleys of farms, and a relatively short distance to the ocean. After about an hour and still several miles from Yamaga, where I thought we had to get off, I spotted a sign that said Kao-Machi. I jumped up and asked the driver to let us off at the next stop. He did and we found ourselves on a busy two-lane highway in the middle of acres and acres of rice paddy. Rugged mountains could be seen in the distance to the east and north. We began walking back towards Kao-machi and then turned down an empty country road. It was so rural. We walked towards a village at the base of some hills. We passed several large fields of rice, spotted a few bright pink caterpillar-looking things, and a black snake slithering by roadside underbrush. A couple cars passed us, but there was very little else in the way of modernity. Obviously a lot has changed in the past hundred years, but if it was this rural today I cannot even imagine how small a place it was back then.
Even the small village we walked around looked old, as all the houses were built in traditional Japanese style. I appreciated seeing the old architecture and walking around the small little village. The ruralness and all the little old villages are one of the things I like about Kyushu. You don’t really associate old stuff with Japan because of its reputation of modernity and being on the cutting edge of the future, but it’s like almost everywhere else in the world (except the Americas) in that there are places where people are still living in the same houses in the same places that they have for generations and centuries. Anyways, it really struck me how small a place it was. I’m kind of surprised that my greatgrandparents came from such tiny places. And although there was not much to see in Fukae or in Kao-machi, at least I got to see where I come from. And there is no substitute for that.