Good evening from Wakkanai, Japan’s northernmost city, whose undeniable lack of aesthetic appeal feels almost intentional, serving to amplify the beauty of the country’s arguably most picturesque island, Rebun, which lies right across the water, only a two-hour boat ride away.1
When choosing the destination for this most recent hiking trip, I set two conditions. First was to find somewhere that was cooler than Tokyo. A requirement that unhelpfully narrowed down my choices to virtually every other place on earth that is not Tokyo, which this year took the humidity to such a degree that the city feels less like a place to live and more like a laboratory built to test the limits of the human body.
The second condition, as vital as the first, was to find a place with no recent bear sightings or attacks. Due to a record number of sightings and, unfortunately, attacks observed all through Japan this summer, this second condition ruled out many of the obvious choices on the four main islands, except for Kyushu, where the bear population went extinct decades ago, and smaller islands off the mainland, where the bears, despite being excellent swimmers, rarely bother to cross.
Although I was initially tempted to revisit Yakushima—Kyushu’s beloved hiking heaven—in the end, the pair of Rebun and Rishiri Islands, off the northern coast of Hokkaido, felt more attractive as the safest bet for the cool weather. They also kind of met the second condition: Rebun is entirely bear-free, while Rishiri, according to the experts, is “99% bear-free”, a statement needed after a shocking event in 2018 when a brown bear, possibly no longer wanting to put up with the depressive mood of Wakkanai, swam over from the mainland Hokkaido.
This month's letter, however, is not about the heavenly beauty of Rebun Island, which I first visited and wrote about last summer, or the impossibly good-looking peak of Mount Rishiri, especially when reflected in the water. Instead, it offers a high-tempo literary journey across Japan, starting in Hokkaido and ending in Okinawa, with the aim of introducing books that you may enjoy during your travels to all those places.
But before the books and this month`s theme inspired by Alan Booth’s travelogue The Roads to Sata: A 2,000-Mile Walk Through Japan, which I re-read while in Rebun, one quick note about these two remote islands that I just got back from: if you visit Japan during the summer, have no desire to risk death at the increasingly vengeful hands of humidity, enjoy gentle hikes with outstanding landscape scenery made even more perfect by alpine flowers that bloom between June and August, Rebun will absolutely make you happy. Rishiri has, honestly, less to offer in terms of scenery, though perfectly shaped Mount Rishiri, which you can climb up, still makes it a worthy stopover (even the lone bear could apparently not resist).
Now, on to this month’s topic and a list of more than twenty books.
Published in 1985 based on a walk that took place in 1977, The Roads to Sata recounts Alan Booth’s journey on foot from Cape Soya, the northernmost tip of Japan near Wakkanai in Hokkaido, all the way to Cape Sata, the southernmost point of Kyushu. Booth`s dry but somewhat comforting and relatable tone, thanks to his resistance to over-romanticizing the sights, his experiences, and his challenging endeavor, coupled with the easily detected affection for the country, makes it a compelling read.
In addition to his tone—and the fact that the humor in the book is mainly at his expense rather than the country`s—what makes Booth’s account of his walk across Japan stand out for me is how well it captures one of the country’s most dreary yet surprisingly rewarding aspects. Step just a little outside the safe and already proven tourism zones, which are naturally or artificially built to deliver the awe factor that we all hope to get out of our travels, and watch all the idyllic expectations you might have attached to rural Japan quickly fade away, forcing you into a new set of architectural, social, and infrastructural realities. This new reality, often at odds not only with the country`s perceived status as a high-tech nation but also romantic notions attached to rural life in developed countries (the rolling green hills, picture perfect wooden houses, lack of concrete?), will inevitably lead to unexpected experiences, offering sometimes the most frustrating, and sometimes the most thrilling cases of “be careful what you wish for” when it comes to our never-ending search for “authenticity”.
I was already 40 when I moved to Japan and had traveled extensively until then, but I think my experiences in rural Japan taught me at least as much about what I personally seek in travel as all my previous trips combined. I like to think those experiences, which first destroy the expectations you bring with you and then give you room and tools to build new ones, have made me a slightly more mature traveler.
Although Alan Booth walked the country in 1977 and much has changed since then, I think the sentiment he conveys about travels in deep rural Japan still lingers today, urging you to look more closely without any clear sense of what the reward might be, ultimately pushing you to create your own.
As you might have noticed, re-reading the Hokkaido sections of Roads to Sata during this latest trip, before bed, and remembering Booth`s inconsequential but subtly moving account was a joy (elevated further by the cool weather that required me to close the windows in the evenings). To honor that joy and in the same spirit, I’ve compiled a list of some other books, arranged by city/region from Hokkaido to Okinawa, that may hopefully bring a similar sense of delight to your own travels in Japan.
I’ll quickly jump from location to location, north to south, dropping book names with a short summary of each, both to keep this letter to a reasonable length and to disguise my shortcomings in the book-review department.2
Alan Booth's walk starts at Cape Soya, the country's northernmost point, which I had been a little too lazy to visit despite heading that far up north several times. In the first two chapters, which cover the Hokkaido leg of his journey with stops in small towns like Tomamae as well as larger cities such as Sapporo, Booth never lets us forget the island’s remoteness and wilderness. He refers to Hokkaido as the “outpost” in one chapter, and as the “savage island” in another, and, along with the account of the early days of his walk (full of blisters and limping), delves into the island's history, with a focus on its original settlers, the Ainu, and its centuries of isolation.
In one of the best-known works of fiction set in Hokkaido, Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase, the writer similarly taps into the island's remoteness as an atmospheric backdrop for his story, centered on a search for a mysterious sheep. He takes his two protagonists first from Tokyo to Sapporo and then, slowly, deeper into the northern territory, and dials up the level of mystery with each step towards the north.
I am not a Murakami fan, but I am definitely a fan of Hokkaido, which I first became aware of when I read A Wild Sheep Chase many years ago—a book that admittedly does a great job of portraying Hokkaido as an enigmatic place, maybe even more than it actually is.
Leaving Hokkaido behind by hopping on a ferry from Hakodate to cross the Tsugaru Strait to Aomori, we arrive at Tohoku, a region that frequently features in this newsletter. Despite being part of Honshu, Japan`s largest and most populated island, parts of Tohoku often feel even more remote than Hokkaido.
While increasingly gaining the recognition and interest it deserves for its cultural wonders and dramatic landscape, the region, particularly its eastern coast, is unfortunately still mainly known for one of the country’s most devastating natural disasters: the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, which struck Tohoku and resulted in more than 20,000 deaths.
David Pilling's book of essays, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival, published three years after the earthquake, reads in part as an ode to the resilience of the people of Tohoku and their strong sense of community. Pilling, who served as the Tokyo bureau chief of the Financial Times for nearly a decade, offers insights into the systematic and even historic factors that may have contributed to the tragedy and how the country dealt with its aftermath.
Although I highly recommend Pilling’s book for a whole new perspective on Japan, Alex Kerr's most recent book, Hidden Japan, published in 2023, may be a better option for a more uplifting read about Tohoku. A long-term resident of Japan and a renowned expert on Japanese culture,3 Kerr devotes two of the book’s ten chapters to Tohoku: in one, he travels to Akita Prefecture to explore the origins of Butoh, a Japanese dance theather, and in another, he visits Minami Aizu and the nearby Ouchi-juku in Fukushima Prefecture, a region famous for its thatch-roofed houses—though not as much as Gifu’s Shirakawa-go—hence the title Hidden Japan.
Right next to Fukushima Prefecture in Tohoku sits Niigata Prefecture, part of the Chūbu region and Japan’s primary rice-growing area, which is famous for its sake. The prefecture, more specifically its onsen town of Echigo-Yuzawa, is also the inspiration for one of the most well-known books by Japan’s first Nobel Laureate in Literature, Yasunari Kawabata. Snow Country tells the tragic love story of a married Tokyo man and a local geisha against the backdrop of a snowy hot-spring town—a setting that is not difficult to find in mountainous Japan, and feels as magical in real life as it does in novels and movies.
