Japan I found steeped in yearning.
Yearning, to be sure, might be the universal human condition: inescapable, without any particular geography. You experience it everywhere and often while walking through the world. The stranger on foot, provided that she or he moves slowly, and seems empathetic, or at least forbearing, becomes a fleeting vessel of buried hopes and cracked dreams. Like the woman who stood alone, her dress flapping in the wind-raked steppes of Kazakhstan, awaiting us purposefully, impatiently, far beyond earshot of her village, to decant her bitterness at being enslaved by her in-laws. Her story spilled out between heaving sobs. Or the young man who joined our trail in Anatolia seemingly on a whim, only to spend kilometers walking far beyond his home valley, recounting in razored Shakespearian detail the recent wedding, to a rival, of the woman he loved. Or even the bearded militiaman in those same rumpled hills, who shouldered his Kalashnikov to apologize for an hour not just for a mistaken ambush but to confess in self-loathing how much he detested fighting his own people in Turkey’s horrible war against the Kurds. Longing. Nostalgia. Wanting. Aching. Thirst. A walker who comes from far away becomes a safe receptacle for such inconvenient emotions. We listen without judgment. We carry your secrets away.
Walking partner Tomonori Tanaka (left) cooks for an elderly hostess at a guesthouse in Tottori Prefecture.
Photograph by Paul Salopek
Traditional Japanese culture—if such a thing exists—is famously courtly, of course. (“Number four!” cried my walking partner Tomonori Tanaka, recording the rare occasions when anyone greeted us first with a Konnichiwa!—Hello!)
No. Not a single Japanese passerby wept openly before us along our 1,505-kilometer GPS track from Fukuoka to Yokohama. Yet this dam of human self-containment only made the penned emotions that seeped through even more striking, more moving, more pronounced, like springs on a granite scarp.
There was the frustrated newspaperwoman from Kyushu who, after walking along for only a few hours, announced later via anodyne phone message that she’d quit her dead-end job. An acquaintance-become-friend who judo-flipped his way through Tokyo’s corporate jungle wrote compulsively from his glass-walled office, asking again and again for details from the open road. Oldies holding out in Japan’s abandoned villages seemed to inhabit ghostly, parallel landscapes of desire all their own. When we spoke with them, they conjured, leaning on canes among their impeccable furrows of leeks, vistas of teeming roads, busy neighborhood shops, and squealing children, all invisible. This drift in time happens with elderly everywhere. But never have I experienced, in all my walking trails, such a disconnect between the perceived and real as is manifested in Japan. Between loneliness and kinesis. Between the curated tourist façade and the equally curated isolation of daily life. It was a dizzying testament to the human ability to see and unsee. A vibrant global culture had been constructed from that tension. The sheer virtuosity of this balancing act, pitting interior withholding against exterior giving, both dazzled and jarred.
A rainbow graces Lake Biwa after a rainstorm.
Photograph by Paul Salopek
A Japanese memory:
Once, we tried following the old Nakasendo Road across the interior of Honshu, the country’s main island. The Nakasendo was the 17th-century imperial trail connecting Edo, as Tokyo had been called, with royal Kyoto. We strolled atop its cobbled alleys through tile-roofed villages. We hiked its river lanes to hot springs favored by wounded samurai. Then one day, in a thicket of bamboo on a steep mountainside, we lost the route altogether. Google maps declared the antique pathway had morphed into a roaring, multilane superhighway. We stood directly upon it. Yet birds chirruped in pines. And sika deer browsed in the shadows.
“Paul,” my companion grinned, pointing down at the leaf litter. “It's inside a tunnel, far below.”
