Hayashi Soy Sauce Brewery
There were several days of rain in Yamaguchi and Tokyo. Seemingly the rain followed me around Japan.
Today was clear and a little chilly and beautiful. Perfect running conditions. A few days ago, a random look at the map around Shin-Yamaguchi revealed a tiny soy sauce brewery three kilometers south of my hotel.
A pleasant way of running while on work trips is to select a destination that is at least mildly interesting and also far enough away that its attraction will motivate me to run to it and back. Well, really, to run to it. The motivation of running back is always there. Not getting back means I won’t make it to the job. The idea is to create a small mental crisis for myself: I have to finish the run or people will be mad at me. That is more than enough to slog through heavy legs and belly.
At six-thirty I headed for the Hayashi Soy Sauce Brewery.
The road for most of the run was a ramrod-straight path with two sandy tracks for farmer vehicles to navigate the surrounding fields. The best of the two tracks for running was whichever I was not using at a given moment. The path paralleled the estuary where the Fushino River crawled or even backslid from tides in its last stretch to the Seto Inland Sea. But it was shrouded by a large concrete wall that protected the fields where I ran. My footfalls scared up ducks and egrets from the small canal running directly to the east.
Looking left at ducks I annoyed and the wall that shrouds the estuary
I got to the end of that road. The last few hundred meters were a vehicle road that went over the estuary on a bridge that gave views down to the sea.
The Hayashi Soy Sauce Brewery was a house with a kura and a building in back. It was surrounded by a phalanx of multicolored crates and sake bottles. I think the sake is used in the soy sauce brewing. A small canal ran under a bridge between the house and the building. Two small vans in the driveway had signs that said 日の出醤油 Hinode Soy Sauce. I would like to try that soy sauce. I could sit there all day.
Across the road from the brewery were miles of fields with a light morning mist above them. That sight made my day.
It was time to get back. I needed to visit a lavatory but the only one I knew was 2.5 km away near the hotel. So the return slog resumed. It was pleasant. Back on the same sandy tracks. Nice and slow. Only the most preliminary consideration and then dismissal of using a field as a lavatory. I got back on time and savored the run all day.