Path to Japan’s wonders
On a walking tour along the Nakasendo Way, Gill Charlton finds herself on the path to understanding the intricacies and wonders of the real Japan.
As I unrolled the cotton futon on the floor and nested my head on the firm buckwheat pillow, I was ready for a bad night’s sleep. The walls were paper-thin and ablutions were communal in this simple minshuku homestay.
The next sound I heard was someone telling me it was time to get up as breakfast was ready.
Traditional Japanese inns turn out to be havens of quietude. The straw tatami mats, paper screens and wooden shutters deaden sound. Apart from the odd swear word when someone struck their head on a low beam, my travelling companions had, it seemed, embraced the Japanese way with its respect for personal space and desire not to inconvenience others.
Our dapper host, Mr Sakai, was justly proud of his historic inn. His ancestors had been samurai warriors, he told us. When peace came to Japan after the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, they laid down their arms and opened the Daikokuya resthouse in Hosokute for travellers on the Nakasendo Way between Kyoto and Edo (Tokyo).
‘‘When we first came to the village more than 20 years ago, it was going downhill fast and most of its wooden shops and homes were shuttered,’’ said Tom Stanley, an American academic who set up his company, Walk Japan, after discovering the untapped potential of the country’s ancient highways.
‘‘In our second year, we brought 90 walkers to Daikokuya. This year it will be more than 1000.’’
No wonder Mr Sakai was up with the larks, a big smile on his face. He’s been able to give up his government job and hone his skills at cookery school. Our supper of fish, tofu and vegetables, a medley of nuanced taste and texture, had been beautifully executed and was served with warmed sake. For breakfast there was a perfectly boiled egg and some homemade miso soup.
Walk Japan attracts those who want to stretch their minds as well as their legs, and look beyond the country’s glossy, modern veneer.
Our group of eight included a British television producer, a Malaysian lawyer, a Californian doctor, and a New Zealand yoga teacher. It was like joining a roving house party where everyone felt at ease. I might strike out alone, crackling fallen magnolia leaves underfoot, or slip into conversation with whoever was close by.
Our leader, Tom Stanley, grew up in Japan but wears his learning lightly, initiating us in the intricacies of Japanese etiquette and drip-feeding memorable tales and snippets of history using props found along the way.
The 480-kilometre Nakasendo Way was set up by the Tokugawa shoguns in the 17th century to relay orders and messages to the puppet emperor in Kyoto (in 40 hours using relay runners). The shogunate also required its vassal lords to spend part of the year in Edo using only approved highways. Providing for their retinues was a blessing and a curse for villages that had to maintain the path and provide food, porters and horses for fixed prices.
In 1691, a German doctor wrote the Nakasendo was ‘‘upon some days more crowded than the public streets in any of the most populous towns of Europe’’.
Today, much of it is little wider than a footpath, though stretches of the original rock paving survive on the ascents. Statues of the horse-headed goddess Kannon act as waymarkers protecting travellers against sickness and accidental death.
Mossy stairs lead to Shinto shrines guarded by statues of foxes wearing dashing red neckerchiefs, messengers for the god Inari, a deity still worshipped by Japanese students about to take exams.
As we admired a giant cedar tree in the village of Okute Marumori, 1300 years old and venerated as a Shinto god, a man hailed us from a restored wooden house across the way. Now a community centre, inside smiling grannies pressed us with salty plum tea and asked us to sign the guest register and have our photo taken.
On my return home, I found a postcard on my doormat of our group in front of the village’s festival chariot. ‘‘Have you enjoyed Japan? Please come again. Waiting . . . ’’
This charm offensive by pensioners, many born during World War II, is a boon to Japan’s tourism ministry. They lie in wait at post towns to hand out leaflets, sell local crafts, and run cafes in historic buildings.
In one town, we found ourselves persuaded to join a dawn keep-fit class, led by 85-year-old Hisabu Shimojo, who later arrived at breakfast bearing photographs of our efforts.
There are 69 post towns on the Nakasendo Way, beautifully captured by the 19th-century master of the woodblock print, Utagawa Hiroshige.
Some have hardly changed since he drew their likeness.
Others are now modern towns, like Ena, where we stayed in a high-rise hotel near the excellent Hiroshige Museum. It felt odd being shut away in an insulated en suite room.
We missed the camaraderie of the inns and the informality of wearing the traditional yukata dressing gown to dinner after our turn soaking in the hot tub.
The road from Ena to Magome took us through a suburban valley where persimmon trees sagged beneath ripe fruit. We didn’t dare to scrump – Japan makes you behave yourself, in public at least.
The artistry of the everyday was remarkable: a trio of twig brooms hung precisely on a wooden frame; seasonal flowers threaded through wicker basketwork; walls laid herringbone-style in smooth oval river stones.
The sound of water was our constant companion: burbling along beside us on its way to water rice fields, thundering down waterfalls and dripping through mossy outcrops.
Our approach to Ochiai was heralded by indigo banners.
We found their maker washing newly dyed cloth in the village stream beside her folk craft shop, a homage to shibusa, the Japanese aesthetic of subtle beauty.
That night we stayed at the Nara family’s home at Shinchaya, a centuries-old tea house kept in tiptop condition. They grow their own rice, hunt wild boar, and make a heady plum wine.
Dinner was a feast of regional delicacies, including young fried grasshopper and plumpgrained sticky rice, delicious eaten on its own.
It was clear we would not be losing any weight on this trip.
As is the Japanese custom, the Naras waved us off until we disappeared into a timeless landscape of golden rice paddies and purple mountains veiled in mist.
Magome is the epitome of picture-book rural Japan.
In the 1970s, the town’s elders had the foresight to recognise that its tumbledown inns may have a value when the rest of Japan was bulldozing its heritage in the rush to modernity. They persuaded banks to give loans to restore the buildings. It was a brave move, but they had a marketing card.
Magome had been the 19th-century home of Toson Shimazaki, whose social realist novels have been read by every child.
Today, coach-loads of tourists throng the main street eating chestnut buns, buying handmade cedar bento boxes, and drinking the best coffee in Japan at Daisuke’s HillBilly Coffee Company.
Neighbouring Tsumago followed Magome’s example, restoring the shop-houses, inns and streetscape so authentically that the village is used as a film set for historical epics. The cedar-clad walls of its waki-honjin, the principal inn, have the lustre of black lacquer from a century of wiping away soot from the open fire.
Up the hill, a modern hotel houses a traditional onsen, a thermal hot-spring bathhouse where nakedness is de rigueur. There was relief all around when Stanley told us the pools were single sex.
In Japan, you wash first (soaping yourself from a wooden basin while squatting on a toy stool), and soak later in the communal bath held at a sweatinducing 43 degrees Celsius. There is no better way to end a walking day.
On Kaida-Kogen, high in the Japanese Alps, the forest wore a brilliant autumn cloak, showy as an emperor in a cloth of gold shot with flashes of brilliant crimson. We walked with our phone cameras at the ready.
In Karuizawa, a pastiche of a New England town built by American missionaries a century ago, we celebrated our journey’s end at Tsuruya Ryokan, a favourite with Japan’s literary lions.
Several sought-after delicacies were on the menu – wagyu beef, sea urchin and blowfish.
Stanley had booked a private dining room so we could wear our post-bath yukatas for the last time, now correctly folded and tied.
We had walked 160km but travelled a great deal further in our understanding of Japan and its punctilious etiquette.
In 1691, a German doctor wrote the Nakasendo was ‘upon some days more crowded than the public streets in any of the most populous towns of Europe’. Today, much of it is little wider than a footpath, though stretches of the original rock paving survive on the ascents.