Kōkōdō: A Delicious-Looking Shortcut

Some parents help with the school run. This one reportedly rearranged the geography.

The same man is said to have run Kōkōtei, on that side of the hill, and the tunnel became its entrance. Kōkōtei had opened as a ryokan inn in 1935. As an inn, it was visited by the writers Kawabata Yasunari—later a Nobel laureate—and Osaragi Jirō; the film director Ozu Yasujirō’s crew also used it for meetings. In 1949 it became a ryōtei, a traditional Japanese restaurant. The food signs belong to that chapter of its life.

The restaurant closed around 2004. The passage remains in use as a local route through the hill.

The entrance has outlasted the place it was inviting people into.

Openings in the side walls had been blocked with concrete blocks and covered with weathered boards. During the war, according to a local record of Kamakura’s tunnels, side passages were dug off the tunnel and put to military use. Whatever these openings had been, the boards were not telling.

One board did carry a notice. It concerned dog mess.

There was no grand arrival. The paving continued outside, past the houses and the wooded slope. For somebody heading home, the remarkable part of the journey might simply be the bit they barely noticed.

Looking back, I found no matching red gateway. From this side, Kōkōdō was a dark opening edged with plants, with the railway visible through the far end.

I had stopped for the signs, the rock walls and the view out. Having reached the other end, I was now photographing the way back in. At the far end, somebody with an umbrella was simply walking through.

The tunnel was meant to save time. I had managed to make a meal of it.