IN THE SHADOWS OF THE SAMURAI
Slow travellers walk past marvels of Japan
Pocky sticks and potato chips.
Everyone knows the latter, but what the heck is a Pocky stick?
The milk chocolate-dipped Japanese biscuits-on-a-stick are the unofficial, but awesome snack food of 21st-century pilgrims who walk the Nakasendo Way, a 524-kilometre-long road dating back to the eighth century that was once the Japanese equivalent of the Trans-Canada Highway.
In mid-November, I joined a group of 10 like-minded slow travellers from Australia, Singapore, Shanghai and the United States to walk a portion (around 125 km) of the Nakasendo on a 10-day journey from Kyoto to Tokyo that was both perpetual motion and meditation.
THE ANCIENT BACKSTORY
The Nakasendo is one of five routes from the Edo period (16031868) used by samurai warriors, princesses, merchants and anyone else who needed to hoof it from bureaucratic Kyoto to mercantile Edo back in the days when hooves — and feet — were just about the only way to travel. (That is unless you were Princess Kazu (Kazunomiya), who married the 14th shogun of the day back in 1862, which necessitated being carried the length of the Nakasendo in a royal box, accompanied by a 25,000-person posse and 10 boxes of personal belongings).
WALKING AND TALKING
Walking the route — past tea houses, Shinto shrines, old Buddhist statues with moss growing on them — we passed through 11 different towns, places like Narai, Kiso-Fukushima, Tsumago, Magome and Karuizawa, where for centuries weary walkers have been able to spend a night, eat a meal, have an onsen (a hot bath) and restore themselves.
Before you get the idea that it’s all so very 17th century, there are also vending machines that dispense hot coffee in cans (and bottled water and soda) for a little more than a loonie (130 yen). One day in a town called Nakatsugawa, we stumbled into a modest little restaurant called Yamashina for a superb grilled eel lunch that I admit beat the heck out of Pocky sticks and potato chips.
DEGREES OF DIFFICULTY
The Nakasendo Way is rated three stars in terms of difficulty, which is a pretty middle-of-theroad rating. I found that if the Nakasendo didn’t necessarily push you to the edge of your physical limits, it still presented a physical challenge to overcome 10 days in a row, rain (quite regularly), shine (once in a while) — or snowfall (yes, that happened).
Our journey was eased quite a bit by the fact that our luggage was shipped ahead each day by taxi, leaving us to walk with only a day pack and, of course, our phones. (And for anyone who didn’t feel up to walking that day, the option was always there to jump in the luggage taxi, get a free lift to the next hotel and spend a day in the onsen, lounging and lunching while the rest of us braved the rain and mountain passes).
PASCAL THE STORYTELLER
Walking the Nakasendo was akin to being immersed in a living museum of Japanese history, only instead of earbuds and a podcast, we got our guide Pascal’s funny, engaged and historically accurate storytelling.
Pascal is a trilingual (English, French and Japanese) speaker from France, the son of two police detectives. He used to work in banking in Singapore before marrying a Japanese woman and relocating to Tokyo in 2005, where he gave up high finance for slow travel. In other words, just another citizen of the global economy.
The Nakasendo Way was largely forgotten from the end of the 19th until the late 20th century, so there are numerous ancient shrines and prayer temples along the route. That fact was driven home at Hikone, where we visited a 700-year-old castle that was incredibly vertical and toured the adjoining grounds wherethere was a museum filled with old samurai armour — red, scary and ready to wreak havoc on bad guys. (Hikone Castle was where they shot exteriors for the hit NBC miniseries Shogun four decades ago).
STOPPING FOR THE NIGHT
The history continued at the end of each day, as we stayed in a variety of country inns, many of them family run, that dated back eight or nine centuries. Most nights, the inn featured futons, tatami mats, sliding doors, slippers, a yukata (cotton robe), a vest (ahon) and a hot, steaming bath to shake off the day’s walk.
Dinner varied nightly, but tended to be an array of local stuff: steamed, pan-fried and raw fish, seasonal mushrooms, various pickled vegetables and a number of regional specialties, all served in a succession of tiny, perfect porcelain and wooden dishes that made mefeel like dinner was as muchthe story as the shrines and temples and castles we toured each day.
A small dish of crickets was served one night at the gorgeous Shinchaya Inn near Hagome. They were crunchy and sweet and served along with a side of wild boar (shot by the Shinchaya Inn owner), sashimi, brook trout and a few dishes whose names I never got.
CONTRAST IN CULTURE
It was a little surreal as well walking a road that combined ancient Japanese history with the occasional burst of blazing neon city life — such as the kickoff to the tour, when Pascal took us on a post-dinner walk through the Gion District, a narrow historical quarter of Kyoto, where there are still a number of tea houses featuring geishas (who have largely disappeared from Tokyo and other Japanese cities).
Onahappyhourmidwaythrough our 10-day walk, we emerged from the woods into the town of Nojin. We headed to the Donguri Cafe (it means “tree nuts”), where we recovered with coffee and dessert and watched sumo wrestling on a modest flat-screen TV sitting on RIGHT: A temple along the Nakasendo Way. STEPHEN HUNT the lunch counter. It turns out that sumo is big in the countryside because a lot of country boys are the biggest sumo stars in Japan.
THE VERTICAL GAME
There were a number of mountain passes to traverse — we gained approximately 1,400 metres over the course of the 10 days — all of it a steady ascent toward Karuizawa, a mountain village. It is cottage country for wealthy Japanese business people who were inspired by Canadian and Scottish missionaries who built summer homes there in the late 19th century to escape Tokyo’s summer humidity.
Our hotel, the Tsuruya Ryokan, was a metaphor for the city itself — once a literary haven for notable Japanese novelists and poets that blended Japanese tradition with what Pascal described as “Edwardian furniture.”
On the other hand, dinner that night — our next to last of the trip — was an elegant, Japanese-style, 11-course meal that included blowfish, fried taro and shrimp, egg custard and potato sauce, grilled tilefish, salad, sashimi (southern bluefin tuna, flounder, sea urchin and yuba), a beef hot plate, lotus root and crab tempura, Japanese pickles and baby sardines.
Karuizawa, as it turned out, was also where John Lennon and Yoko Onohungoutback whenthey were dating as Yoko’s father was a wealthy Tokyo businessman with a summer house there.
There’s even a photo of them hanging in the French bakery on the cobblestoned part of the Nakasendo that cuts through town, proving that not all of Pascal’s stories were about events that took place hundreds of years ago — and also that Nakasendo Way is as much a global experience as it is local and historical.