Day 6: Tomonoura

Tomonoura (鞆の浦), formerly known as Tomonotsu, is a port and tiny fishing town near Fukuyama. It has been featured in a few movies, such as Ponyo and Wolverine.

Journey

Today we leave Hiroshima for Osaka. I cracked my first joke in Japanese in the elevator:エキスプレスじゃないんでしょうか (this does not seem to be the Express) as the lift stopped on every floor on the way down and the old Japanese woman next to me chortled. I love how it is possible to mix polite and non polite forms in a single sentence so you can tell others what you feel without risk of offending.

We stopped halfway at Fukuyama station to make a detour to Tomonoura – a small fishing village famous as the location for several films: notably Miyazaki’s Ponyo, Wolverine and most recently Hiroshi Tamaki’s latest movie – Detective Mitarai (mitarai-movie.jp).

We went to the bus terminal, found a bus waiting there and immediately jumped on to it. Unfortunately that turned out to be a very bad move, as it was the wrong bus. We realised our mistake when the bus dropped us half an hour later in the middle of nowhere.

After explaining our predicament to the bus driver (I think he was pretty annoyed at us) we had to wait for the return trip. Fortunately he took us to a bus stop where we were able to transfer to the right bus.

Tomonoura

We finally made it to Tomonoura – it is a very pretty fishing village set against a circular quay – almost like a mini version of Sydney. The visitors centre had lots of information on where the Ponyo and Wolverine filming locations were, but we were able to only visit a few of them as some require a car to access.

Still, we spent a happy two hours exploring the port. There’s a beautiful view of the harbour from the top of the temple and we also saw some stray cats. The streets in town are extremely narrow and can barely fit a bike let alone a car.

We tools photos of the famous lighthouse as featured in the Mitarai movie and there’s even a cardboard cutout of Hiroshi (I shall forever remember him as “Chiaki-Sama” from Nodame Cantabile) next to the lighthouse.