– Imabari 今治
One Thursday, in December of 2009, as I was cycling my city bike – a one speed Bridgestone girls bike, standard issue - down a small residential street, meandering along the edge of a hill, to work, I chanced to glance down at a strange bundle of books placed by the side of the road, for recycling. Among the tidily wrapped lumps of magazines and paperbacks were seven or eight photo albums. 
I stopped and stared. Someone’s memories were being disposed of. Probably someone had died and their children, or grandchildren, burdened with cleaning up and the daily grind, had just given up and decided to get rid of these things. Or so my thoughts went. But people around here often live to be quite old; it’s not in the least unusual to see people in their eighties out and about. There is one man I see periodically, riding a bike, who I swear looks about….a thousand and ten years old. Methusalah! On a bike!
One should never pick up things that are not one’s own in Japan. It is almost stealing, even if it’s garbage. And the local neighborhood association ladies (they’re usually old ladies) would be sure to be somewhere close by. But, after a moment’s thought, I quickly picked up those albums, unable to bear the thought of their being burned at the city incinerator. I furtively pedalled the rest of the way to work and took them into the back room (the storage room) before opening them.
The view from a biplane.
There were photos, many of them from what looked like middle or high school, many from the beach, some from, obviously, elsewhere. They looked like they were taken in the twenties, or thirties and perhaps into the early forties. Some bore the stamp of a local photo shop. Some were quite beautiful, like the picture of the young woman with hair down almost to her ankles (!)
I showed a few of them to my English students, among them my landlady, Mrs. Nagai, and she recognised one of the landscapes as being from a neighborhood just to the west of my GEOS school, perhaps 4 kilometres from her house, where I lived, and where we were sitting. She had grown up there sixty years before.
I thought I could recognise Karakohama beach, at the south end of town, from it’s distinctive rows of pine trees. Everyone agreed this was so.
Imabari Kita High School - possibly then a girl's school
I recognised Imabari Kita (North) high school, not a block from the house outside which I picked up these books. It looked very different, but not as much as one would expect, given a couple of renovations over seventy or more years (!!)
Katsuhiko told me the picture of a young man with a catcher’s mitt, taken in a middle school photo, became a famous baseball player in Japan in the thirties. He took me to a small museum at Botchan Stadium in Matsuyama, when his sons were playing a match there, and, sure enough, there he was.
Much of the time people had trouble working out the ‘old’ kanji (pre-1945, that was when the Kanji system was overhauled, and some symbols mothballed. Japanese Kanji were just overhauled again a couple of years ago). Eventually, on a pennant, I stumbled over the name ‘Imaharu’ (now-stomach?!!). I am told Imabari means ‘ocean place’; this older name seemed strange. Katsuhiko told me that this was indeed the old name for Imabari. In 1945, after being carpet bombed (there is a plaque in front of Nanko-bo temple), the people of the town apparently changed its’ name.
After they’d been sitting around for a few months, I decided that the photos should perhaps be placed into the city archives, so I took them to my friend Akiko Tokura at ICIEA and asked her where I could find the archives. She said she would take them and try to place them (something about the library).
On further reflection, I wanted to document these pictures by making digital copies; these images are from that collection.
This picture was taken on Ishizuchi-san, a sacred mountain about 50 kilometres southeast of Imabari. These are the first set of chains, a test of faith set by Kukai.
Below: the trail on the ridge leading to the final flank of the climb. Ishizuchi-san is surrounded by a special mountain ecology, more here.
It looks like the view south eastward from the north side of TenguDake, Ishizuchi's co-peak.
Finished high school, or joining the army? I read a book recently about the life of a country geisha in this period, called 'Autobiography of a Geisha', by Sayo Masuda. Masuda-san just died a few years ago.
This looks to my eye exactly like one spot on the ohenro walking trail up to temple 58, Senyuji, from Asakura, in south Imabari. Not outrageous if you consider this trail has been here, and in daily use, since about 800 AD.
As for the name, apparently the combined Kanji making up Imabari - 今 and 治, can be pronounced ‘Imaharu’ as well…so the written name didn’t change, just the pronunciation.
