The Inland Sea, or Seto Naikai, is full of islands, and I passed through them as crew on the sailboat Amigo in 2018. One of the places we stopped was Suo Oshima and I wanted to return with my bicycle. Suo Oshima is joined to Honshu by a bridge, but I had noticed a ferry route going from Shikoku to Honshu, with a stopover at Suo Soshima.
It was a longish ride from the Dogo neighbourhood to the ferry terminal in the Mitsuhama port area on the outskirts of Matsuyama. There in the waiting room, as if just waiting for me to come along, was a little box with slips of paper in English, Japanese and Korean for itinerant would be poets to write a haiku.
The friendly women at the concession stand selling traditional sweets took a photo of me submitting my haiku, the one written the night before about Dogo Onsen.
My destination on Suo Oshima was further west on the north shore of the island from the Ihota ferry terminal, so after disembarking I started off on the roughly 20km ride. On the first hill I realized my first gear was making alot of noise and I couldn’t figure out where exacty it was coming from, so decided not to use first gear at all.
I couldn’t check in until 3pm, and riding by I saw a sign for an onsen, so I took the turn off but was quickly dissuaded by a steep hill. A restaurant on the corner with a waffle stand looked more enticing, and the young man at the counter spoke English very well, so we got to talking.
He was from Indonesia, born in Pontianak in Kalimantan, but grew up in Jakarta. I’d actually been to Pontianak, it’s a town right on the equator, when I did an update on Kalminatan for Lonely Planet back in the 1990’s.
At one of the other guesthouses on the Shimanami Kaido, one of the staff was a young woman from Nepal but she was too busy to chat much with me, so it was interesting to find out a little more about the the young people from Southeast Asia and South Asia I’ve noticed working in Japan as part of government labour program.
The boy from Pontianak had studied Japanese in Jakarta and had been on Suo Oshima for four months. He was hoping to move to Osaka soon. I could understand why Suo Oshima, for him, being somewhat isolated, didn’t hold much charm, and he said the work was difficult.
I wasn’t able to chat too long because he was also busy. Meanwhile, seeing the food going by from the adjacent kitchen into the restaurant had me thinking the waffle was not enough. I think it was one of the best meals I’ve had so far, and required a bit of nap afterwards on the seawall.
Suo Oshima is close to the city of Hiroshima, and you can see in the far distance the smokestacks of industry on the Honshu coast. Riding past small settlements, fishing villages, I couldn’t get out of my mind the thought of what people witnessed here at 8:15 am on August 6th, on that clear day in 1945, a day very much like today. Blue sky and bright.
Kill civilians
To end a war, so they say
Brutal games men play
