Side trips and wanderings

Japan’s mountains are crossed mostly on foot, along paths that existed long before the paved roads. Narrow valleys, cedar forest, timber villages holding to the slope: the rhythm changes as soon as you gain height. The Nakasendo, the old road that once joined Kyoto to Edo, keeps several stretches intact — among them the walk from Magome to Tsumago through the Kiso valley, past a former post town and a tea house where walkers have been stopping for generations. Many of these mountain regions are hot-spring country too, so a day of walking sometimes ends in an outdoor bath in the trees, the steam against the cold air.

The Seto Inland Sea, between Honshu and Shikoku, is calm water scattered with islands that small ferries stitch together. On the Shima peninsula the ama still dive without tanks for abalone and seaweed, as their grandmothers did. You eat what they bring up, grilled at the water’s edge, in a wooden hut darkened by salt.

The Japanese year is not divided into four seasons but into seventy-two, each a few days long. In late March the cherry blossom moves up the archipelago from south to north over about ten days; in November one heavy rain can take the maples down in a single night. You come for a moment that cannot be ordered in advance, and that is exactly what it is worth.

Some towns have kept their old drawing: narrow lanes, merchant houses in dark timber. In Kanazawa, in the Higashi Chaya district, a craftsman still lays gold leaf by hand, breath held, onto very small objects; in Takayama the morning market sets up along the river as it has for four centuries. These are places to walk with no particular aim, where you tend to find what you were not looking for.

The Kumano Kodo, a thousand-year-old network of pilgrimage paths on the Kii peninsula, links three shrines through damp forest punctuated by moss-covered stone altars. Higher up, at Koyasan, you spend the night in a temple: the monks’ vegetarian dinner, waking before dawn, floorboards that creak underfoot. What stays with you is the silence, the incense and the cold of the morning.

In the far valleys the rice fields climb the slope in terraces, held by low stone walls; in June the young plants are reflected in the water, in October the fields turn to gold. At Shirakawa-go a few thatched houses have stood for more than two hundred years without a single nail. You can stay with a family there, around the open hearth, in a slower Japan where the welcome counts for more than the comfort.