The Seto slope town where Onomichi stacks temples, cats, and reading light

The local train from Fukuyama runs so close to the water that for three or four minutes the Seto Inland Sea fills the left-hand windows, and then the hills close in and you are in Onomichi (尾道), a town pressed into the narrow shelf between the slope and the strait. There is nowhere for it to grow but upward, so it went upward—houses stacked on temples stacked on lanes too steep for cars, held together by stone steps worn concave down the middle by a century of feet.

The climb, and the shrine the ropeway flies over

Most visitors reach the top the easy way. The Senkoji Ropeway (千光寺ロープウェイ, Senkōji Rōpuwei) lifts from a small station behind Nagaejaya up to the ridge in about three minutes; a round trip is ¥700 and one way ¥500, and the cabins run every fifteen minutes from nine in the morning until a little after five. The better decision is to buy the one-way ticket down, or none at all, and climb on your own feet.

The lower station stands beside Ushitora-jinja (艮神社), the oldest shrine in Onomichi, founded in the early ninth century. Four camphor trees—kusunoki (楠)—grow in its yard, the largest close to nine hundred years old and wide enough that three people linking arms cannot close the ring. The ropeway cabins pass directly over the canopy, so the shrine is a thing thousands of people photograph from above each day and almost none walk into. At ground level it is dim, resinous, and usually empty, the camphor shade dropping the temperature a few degrees below the lane outside.

The path of literature, and the pagoda that frames the town

From the ridge the Path of Literature—Bungaku no Komichi (文学のこみち)—drops back toward the sea in switchbacks lined with twenty-five stones, each carved with a line by a writer who lived in or wrote about the town. Near the summit sits Senkoji (千光寺), a small temple whose vermilion main hall is bolted to the cliff face, its bell rung by visitors on the hour, its terrace looking straight down onto the harbour. Just above it the boulder called Tama-no-iwa (玉の岩) balances on the ridge, lit at night in a way you will only notice if you stay past dusk.

Keep descending and the postcard view assembles itself without any help. The three-storey pagoda of Tenneiji (天寧寺三重塔), built in the fourteenth century, stands in the middle distance, and if you frame it with the tiled roofs falling away below and the island of Mukaishima behind, you have the single image the whole town is built around. The light here does most of the work: low sun off the water in late afternoon turns the grey roofs the colour of pewter, and the sea goes from blue to a flat, beaten silver.

The cat lane and the back streets between temples

Below Tenneiji the town narrows to the Neko no Hosomichi (猫の細道), the Cat Lane, a two-hundred-metre thread of stone barely wide enough for one person. Set into its walls and steps are the fukuishi-neko (福石猫), rounded river stones painted with cat faces by the local artist Sonoyama Shunji, who has left hundreds of them across the hillside since the 1990s. Real cats sleep on the warm stone among the painted ones, indifferent to the difference, and step over your feet without hurrying. At the top of the lane a former merchant's house holds a small maneki-neko collection; admission runs to a few hundred yen, and the terrace behind it gives the same framed pagoda without the crowd.

A bookshop where quiet is the rule

Lower down, on a lane near the foot of the slope, a secondhand bookshop called Nijū-deshiberu (弐拾dB, "twenty decibels") occupies a former clinic. The name is its house rule—twenty decibels is roughly the volume of a whisper, and that is the ceiling inside. The old examination rooms keep their fittings; the shelves stand where the medicine cabinets did, and the afternoon light comes in sideways through frosted glass and lands on the spines. It keeps unusual hours, often opening only in the afternoon and staying lit late into the night, so it is possible to read here while the rest of the town has gone dark.

In a hillside town, the ones who walk down see more than the ones who ride up.

坂の町では、上る人より下る人のほうが多くのものを見る。

Getting there, and one mistake to avoid

Onomichi is not on the Shinkansen. The nearest bullet-train stop is Fukuyama (福山), served by Sakura and Hikari trains on the Sanyo Shinkansen; from there a local JR Sanyo Main Line train reaches Onomichi Station in about twenty minutes for just over ¥400. Coming from Hiroshima or Okayama, the same local line works and costs less than the detour looks like it should. The station sits at the foot of everything, and the whole hillside is walkable—no bus, no taxi, only steps.

Eat the ramen before you climb or after you come down, not in between. Onomichi rāmen (尾道ラーメン) is a soy-tare broth darkened with small Seto dried fish and floated with squares of pork back-fat; the noodles are flat and firm. Tsutafuji (つたふじ), a narrow counter shop, is the name people queue for, and the queue is real by noon. For a rest from the slope, the ONOMICHI U2 complex near the station—a 1940s marine warehouse now holding a bakery, a cyclists' hotel and a bar—faces the water and asks nothing of your knees.

The channel in front of town is crossed by small ferries to the island of Mukaishima (向島); the ride costs about ¥100 and takes under five minutes, and standing at the rail with the gulls is a better use of an hour than one more temple. Come on a weekday if you can. Weekends and the Golden Week holiday in early May fill Onomichi with cyclists setting off on the Shimanami Kaidō (しまなみ海道) route to Shikoku, and the quiet that makes the place is the first thing they displace. The one mistake to avoid is the round-trip ropeway ticket: ride up if your knees need it, but walk down, because everything worth seeing here is on the steps between the summit and the sea.