Has anyone ever compared you to Alan Booth? I don’t know - should they?! I drink far less beer (or any alcohol) than Alan. The Kumano Kodo is entirely structured around shrines and temples and syncretic belief.Ĩ. The Nakasendo has no explicit spiritual or religious component unless you count the grand spirituality of business hotels. The Kumano Kodo is almost entirely in the forest, past mamushi (pit vipers) and deer carcasses. The Nakasendo, today, is mainly on roads, often alongside pachinko parlors. The Kumano Kodo, a series of pilgrimage paths. What’s unique about the Nakasendo trail as opposed to the Kumano Kodo? Oh, they’re completely different beasts! The Nakasendo was, in part - along with the Tokaido - utilitarian, a sankin k ō tai highway. The worst? Walking into a headwind for eight hours straight on my way to Sekigahara, and just having to endure the endless whoosh, the tilted gait, the dehydration, the sand in the eyes, the drabness of that particular landscape.ħ. What was the best part about being so frequently bored on the walk? The worst? The best? Boredom itself! That was the goal. That said: One man on a rusted bicycle with a single tooth kept saying over and over again, “Such a fast walker!” and another old man, who had wandered over in his pajamas from lord knows where, kept repeating the phrase, “It’s not going to work out. Did you get any unique reactions? There wasn’t any particularly unique reaction, but a more general reaction that shocked me: Time and time again people stopped what they were doing and came over for a long chat. You wrote for Wired that you became a “disgustingly kind hello machine” during your epic walk. Those of us adoptees, I think, have a proclivity, or at least childhood compulsion, to imagined parallel lives.ĥ. My walking began in earnest when I arrived in Tokyo in 2000 and started wandering the back streets late at night.
Has walking always been a passion? It has. Why? I had been going on increasingly longer walks and was looking to “level up.”Ĥ. In May you went on an epic 997-kilometer walk across Japan. In a homogenous society, being considered an insider - even if it’s performative and from a place of knowing, almost like a wink - can be a tiny gift of being made to feel not The Other, if only for a second.ģ. Living in Japan as non-native, it’s probably the first time they’ve ever been asked that question. And so: I love to flip the equation, to ask “Where in Japan were you born?” to people who are clearly non-Japanese, but who seem to have been living here for a long time.
I don’t think this is really understood in Japan. How should people answer the “where are you from” question? I always give extra context, quickly: “Well, I was born in so-and-so, but I’ve been living here for 20 years.” Asking where someone “is really from” can be hurtful.
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