The Mists And The Mountains

The image of Iya Valley’s ”Dancing Angels,” a nickname for the thick and fluid kinetic mountain mists separating the topography above from the winding gorges below, is an iconic visual memory I will forever keep with me after our visit to this unique and remote area of Shikoku Island in Japan.

- James JJ Acuna

Lucky for me, the mists, which usually only appear during the wet months of June and July, unexpectedly manifested with the rains on what was supposed to be a dry, icy day in February. Ethereal and hypnotic, the dance of the mists in perpetual motion take their forms flowing up and down, rapidly skimming the slopes of the Iya Valley’s steep inclined surfaces, giving us a grand show from our car. We spent a large majority of the day riding along this precariously narrow road, which loops tightly around these ancient mountains. The effect of the mists for us Shimonoshi (meaning, “outsiders from down below”), as we are known to the locals in Iya, makes for an introspective experience.

The people of Iya Valley have, for hundreds of years, lived high up in this misty mountains now accessible to outsiders, where they would build their thatched-roof kominka homes. This is quite the opposite of how it was in other parts of Japan, as the Japanese built cities and villages on flatter plains, never touching the country’s sporadically low-lying hills and mountains, believing those areas to be sacred.