Onomichi: Temples, Stairways and Cats on a Hillside

Onomichi is squeezed between the Seto Inland Sea and a steep hill, and the whole character of the place comes from that. There is no room for wide roads on the slope, so the town is connected by narrow stone stairways and alleys running up between houses.

A ropeway carries you to the top in a few minutes, and the correct way to do Onomichi is to ride up and walk down. Coming down, you pass through the temple route, past viewpoints over the strait, and into lanes barely wide enough for two people.

It is also known as a cat town. The Cat Alley — Neko-no-Hosomichi — is a lane decorated with painted cat stones, and there are genuinely a lot of cats. It is charming and it is also, unavoidably, the most photographed twenty metres in the town.

The signposted temple walk links around twenty-five temples strung across the hillside, and it is the real substance of a visit. Senko-ji, near the top by the ropeway station, is the famous one — a vermilion hall on a rock ledge with the whole strait below it.

The walk takes two to three hours at a wandering pace and it is a proper walk, with stairs throughout. What makes it good is not any single temple but the sequence: you keep emerging from a lane between houses into a small courtyard, then back into the lanes.

Onomichi was a prosperous port for centuries, which is why a town this size has this many temples. Merchant families endowed them, and the buildings outlasted the trade.

Onomichi has its own ramen style and it is distinct enough to be worth planning a meal around: a soy-based broth, usually with a base of small dried fish from the Inland Sea, and lumps of pork back fat floating on the surface.

The fat is the signature. It melts into the broth as you eat, so the bowl gets richer towards the end — the opposite of what usually happens to ramen. Flat noodles, chashu, spring onion.

There are several long-established shops in the town centre near the station and queues at lunch. It is a cheap, fast, extremely local thing to eat in a town that most people pass through without eating in at all.

Almost everybody treats Onomichi as a start line — arrive, collect a bike, leave. That is a mistake for two reasons.

First, the town empties in the evening. The stairways and temple lanes with nobody on them, lit and looking down at ships moving through the strait, are a completely different experience from the daytime one.

Second, if you are riding the Shimanami Kaido, starting at first light from a bed in Onomichi is far better than starting at 10am after a train from Hiroshima. The route is long enough that those two hours matter.

The town has a good supply of small guesthouses, several of them converted from old buildings on the slope, plus a well-known cyclist-oriented hotel on the waterfront where you can wheel the bike into the room.