A Tour of Omori
Recently I’ve been working to add tourism to my repertoire of jobs I plan to do while I live here in Omori .
I’m wondering if I can do some tour guiding using English, especially since the Sanin Region (The region and parts of prefectures that are facing the Japan Sea like Tottori, Shimane, parts of Yamaguchi and Kyoto as well) right now is having a bit of a tourist boom. At the moment I’m seeing a lot of time and money being put into “inbound”, which means foreign tourism. These tourism agencies and organizations are marketing this Sanin Region as the “ Japan that you never knew,” the Japan that has different attractions compared to large cities like Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, and etc. In this way it is being advertised to foreigners that want to experience the almost untainted Japan that has quietly been hiding in the larger shadows that were casted by the cities.
Now the thing is, I don’t really buy into that whole “experience the Japan you never knew” sort of pitch, just sounds like some big company has found a new market to exploit. I remember hearing a person say that there is a focus on foreign tourists for the Sanin Region because domestic Japanese travelers are diminishing. Some may say that this is just opportunistic thinking, but for me it just sounds like they found a new oil well, and once that well becomes empty they will just move onto the next one. I think or I have experienced a lot of great things here in the Sanin area, I really do believe that it can provide so much for people who visit, I just hope it doesn’t turn into another typical tourism spot. I’ve built a special attachment to this area of Japan, and it would bum me out to see it turn into something for people to just consume.
So there, those are some of my opinions about tourism, I’m going to leave it there for now.
So what is Iwami Ginzan all about anyways?
To cut to the chase, the Iwami Ginzan Silver Mine is, as the name implies, a silver mine and silver mining town that was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site back in 2011.
So then, what does it mean to be a World Heritage Site?
I actually didn’t really know, until now… I looked it up on the UNESCO site like a good student instead of just looking on Wikepidia. It says on the UNESCO website that a World Heritage Site is:
“To be included on the World Heritage List, sites must be of outstanding universal value and meet at least one out of ten selection criteria."
When you look at the website, there seems to be a combination of natural and cultural criteria that must be fulfilled in order to become a Work Heritage Site.
So a World Heritage Site is a location where human culture and the surrounding natural environment have sustainably coexisted which has some outstanding universal value for human kind.
So why does the Iwami Ginzan Silver Mines fit into this category you may ask? Well let me tell you why that is.
First of all the Iwami Silver Mines was one of largest producers of silver when it was in full production, facilitating trade between the East and the West. The silver at the Iwami Ginzan was know to be of very high quality and cheap compared to other silver, so it became famous and widely sought after by the Portuguese and the Chinese. Nagasaki is well known as the entrance way into Japan, but there was also a lot of interaction between Japan and foreign countries in this Iwami Area as well. Because of all of the economic gains that came from the silver, the town of Omori became the location where the Edo Shogun (Bakufu) would send their personal vessels or magistrates to manage the area. Whoever controlled the silver routes would have enormous economic influence, and although they are now gone, there were multiple castles built on top of the local mountains around here for defending purposes.
The mine itself was still being used until the 1920’s, but at that point hardly any silver was being produced and was mostly bronze.
The ironic thing is that the very reason why the Iwami Ginzan Silver Mines was designated as a World Heritage Site was because the mining was stopped in the early 1900’s. By ironic I mean that apparently there were several other silver mines around Japan at that time, but the those ones continued to mine well in the 1950’s when they started to use power tools, which meant large industrial scale razing of mountains, surround forests, and etc. However at Iwami Ginzan, because the mining of ores stopped so early on compared to others, most of the mining activities were still being done by hand. This meant that there was minimal damage done to the surrounding environment compared to those places that continued to mine well after the Iwami Ginzan Silver Mines closed.
So economically, this area was left behind by Japanese economy but because that this townscape as well as the surrounding natural environment remained.
Omori tour with Adachi-san
So that was my version of the history of Iwami Ginzan, but if you really get into it there is so much about this place it would take more than a blog post to talk about, but I’m not writing a history book at the moment so I’m going to have to leave it at that.
Let’s get back to the main topic here about my tour of Omori with none other than the man himself ADACHI-SAN!
Adachi-san is the chairman of the Iwami Ginzan Tour Guide Association and all around nice guy who comes by my office to say hi time to time. According to popular opinion he does the best tours around here, so I made sure to ask him to give me one of his tours of the townscape of Omori.
We first started at the Ginzan Park which is located at the the top of the “townscape” part of Omori.
Oh, just a brief info for anybody not familiar, Omori is dived into two main parts which is the “townscape” and the Ginzan area. The Townscape is the lower half of Omori that goes from the Magistrate’s Office to the Ginzan park, and the Ginzan area essentially starts from the top of the Ginzan Park all the way up to the Silver Mines.
The park is where people can see the official UNESCO World Heritage Site sign. So the thing is that apparently when people come to the Iwami Ginzan Silver Mines they are unsure what part of it is the World Heritage or much less if it is even a World Heritage Site. By having this sign here people are able to “recognize” that this is a World Heritage Site. Kind of a funny concept right, it’s one of those examples of “If you didn’t Snapchat that party, did you even go?”. I think that this is where the gap is between what popular imagination think what a World Heritage Site is supposed to look like and what they actually are.
Adachi-san and I then walked into the town, where he started to explain to me that in order to maintain the atmosphere of the townscape, the townspeople cover up all of their gas and electricity meters, and other “modern” looking parts of the house that do not fit the general look of the town.
The vending machines here are covered as well
As Adachi-san explained to me, the people of the town cover all of their outside appliances and etc. out of their own pocket money. In this way, the townscape and atmosphere of the architecture of the town is being maintained by the townspeople.
I think that Adachi-san wanted to emphasize that because there are probably a lot of examples of these historic sites where the local government does all the work to maintain the townscape. Adachi-san probably want people to know that those who live here in Omori care about their town and take matters into their own hands, a sort of a grassroots effort to protect their history.
We continued to walk down the town until we were in front of Yoshida-san’s house decorated with the characteristic iron sculptures he makes. Adachi-san points out that the roof of Yoshida-san’s house is lower than the rest, and asks me why I think that is. I just took an educated guess that it was because it was made during the Edo-period because the dirt walls and bars seemed kinda old. That college education came in handy! But when he asked me the followup question to what its purpose was, I drew a blank. Sorry mom and dad for paying for that Asian Studies Degree…
So the right answer was because there was a caste system in Japan during the Edo period.
Alright let me take it from here so I can say that degree I got was of some use.
During the Edo period, Japan had a caste system because it was essentially a feudalistic society.
samurai 2.peasant/farmers 3.artisans 4.merchants
Samurai were at the top of the system, a little factoid to anybody, before the Meiji period samurai were one of the few groups of people who had last names!
Then came the peasants and farmers, who you would think would be at the bottom of society, but they were considered being above artisans and merchants because they made food. This comes from a Confusion belief that profit making was greedy and evil. But they were peasants so it wasn’t as if they were wealthier than the merchants. Peasants and farmers borrowed land from their feudal lords, so none of the crops they would make even belonged to them.
Artisans were considered above merchants but below peasants because they would make things for people to use, but it was not food so technically not AS “necessary”.
Merchants were at the bottom because they were considered just money grabbing greedy people. But in reality this caste system from a quality of life perspective went merchant, samurai, artisans, and peasants. I mean money speaks.
Alright, back to the answer to the question. Because the town of Omori had the magistrate’s office, there would be these big parades of samurai walking through the town. According to the caste system, because anybody under the samurai were “lesser” than them, they were not allowed to look at the samurai at the same height or look down onto them. So people would kneel in the streets with their heads down whenever a samurai would walk in the streets. So it wasn’t the best thing to have a second floor on your house because then you were technically looking down onto the samurai. Yet it was also hard to tell people to not to build a second floor to their houses, so the samurai decided that if a house was to have a second floor it was to be with a low roof, and have these bars on the windows so the “lesser” people could not stick their heads out of them.
All the other houses around Yoshida-san’s residence were normal height because they were built after the Meiji period when this caste system was abolished. It’s cool seeing little bits of Japanese history being left behind in the town that you live in right?!
The next stop that we had was in front of the Omori community center where the Omori town charter is located. Adachi-san claimed that this was the town’s treasure and the reason why he does these tours.
This town charter was made as a “rule” for the town when Iwami Ginzan was being considered to become a World Heritage Site. There are a lot of benefits of becoming a World Heritage Site, such as increase in tourism, funding, and taking part in various UNESCO projects and symposiums. But for every positive there are negatives, and the townspeople of Omori were worried that these negative aspects would disrupt their daily lives. For example with more tourism means that there are more people walking around in your town and many times people do not know the boundaries between what is private and public. There have been many examples of tourism hot spots where visitors would walk into yards to take pictures forgetting that people actually live there and it’s not some amusement park. Another negatives when random restaurants and gift shops start popping up seeing business chances with the increase in traffic. You know all of those gift shops that seem to sell the exact same thing no matter where they are located, or restaurants that claim that they sell some sort of local speciality, but in reality really have nothing to do with the town they are located in.
Here is the town charter:
There is a lifestyle in this town.
Because our lifestyle is based here
it is a town we can be proud of.
While living in this town,
we are able to pass on the ties between the people
and the future of Iwami-Ginzan
to the next generation.
Towards the future we:
Will protect history, the ruins and nature.
Will make a comfortable town
where we can live with a peace of mind.
Will balance calmness and excitement.
August 2007
So what does this all mean?
I think the importance of this charter is the use of the word lifestyle. No matter what happens to this town and land, the townspeople will always put their lifestyle in front of making profit or exploiting the history and value of the town for personal gain. That even if the town becomes a World Heritage Site, this won’t change and decisions will be made to maintain the sustainability of the town’s lifestyle.
I think this is really commendable and is a vision for the town that looks out for the long term interest of the people who live here. Think about it, unless the area is a really luxurious or iconic tourist location, no matter what, the number of people who visit will diminish over time. When Iwami Ginzan first was named as a World Heritage Site, 800,000 people would come to visit a year, but at the moment it has shrunk to 300,000 and is probably continuing to shrink. However, this I feel was not a big economic shock for the town, because the lifestyle of the townspeople didn’t rely on the economic gain brought in from the tourists.
instead of relying on something that can fluctuate so easily like tourism, the town of omori focuses on something SUSTAINABLE and grounded, which is our lifestyle here.
After explaining to me the importance of the town charter, Adachi-san took me up to Kanzen Onji Temple which in my personal opinion, has the best view of the town.
Overlooking the town, Adachi-san mentions to me that usually the pictures of Omori are from the mountains down onto the town, but that this is the view that he likes the most because it shows why Iwami Ginzan became a World Heritage Site.
Oh lol, what is that in your bag?
Apparently there was a village at the top of one of the surrounding mountains here where there used to be 5000 people living there.
This view from the temple shows the townscape that was protected by the efforts of the townspeople
You can see the Iwami Ginzan Silver Mines which had historical significance to Japan
Finally it also shows the archeological site of where people used to live together with the silver mines and nature
When you come to Iwami Ginzan and Omori, you won’t see some large statue of a Buddha or a pyramid and it may not seem obvious what this “universal value” is. But when you dig a little deeper, you see what that value is and it’s the lifestyle here, that’s what can be considered the “universal value”.
Of course the town has its problems and things don’t always work the way we want to.
I think instead of”universal value”, omori has “universal potential”.
a potentiality that is universally valued.
So I feel like that this is my job here, to find the potential in this town and the lifestyle here and to share that information with a wide variety of people.
That’s what 俊’s Bar is about.
I know this is getting long but I want to leave all of you with this.
As I said at the beginning of this post, I’m planning to do some tourism here, but I don’t want to do it just to show the town around and have people forget about it the day later. I see tourism as a tool to share what I’ve felt, learned and experienced living here in Omori. In Japanese characters you write tourism as 観光 which means to look at light. That light may be a really nice view, good food, or atmosphere, but that day Adachi-san taught me something valuable:
Tourism is about showing the light of the place that you are in, but you have to remember that that “light” is not just there, it was made by the people who live there, so I want to show visitors the people who make that light here in Omori