PEOPLE WALK for all kinds of reasons. Socrates, Nietzsche, and Kant famously walked in order to think. Confined within four walls and physically stagnant, they felt their thought processes were stultified and restrained. Thoreau and Muir both walked to become more alive by immersing themselves in the wild. “Life consists of wildness,” Thoreau wrote, “and the most alive is the wildest.”
The Japanese poets Saigyo and Basho walked to gain aesthetic perspective by freeing themselves from the familiar and habitual. Santoka, another Japanese poet, said that he walked because it was the only thing he could do besides drink sake and scribble haiku. He spent almost thirty-five years on the road.
On a practical level, all of us, particularly elderly or sedentary persons, are encouraged to walk for our health, to get the blood moving through our bodies and brains. Working our thigh muscles, the largest muscles in the body, effectively pumps oxygen and nutrients through our entire systems. Of course, many people also walk as their primary mode of transportation, and others just to get out of the house.
In my own case, I have always liked long walks for the same reason that I enjoyed running track in junior and senior high school and jogging in later years. The cadence my body settles into after the first ten or fifteen minutes puts my mind in a meditative state that edges out the peripheral clutter that often lodges there. Unlike the great philosophers, I do not find walking or running a wellspring of deep thought, or really any thought at all.
Which brings me to another reason I love to walk: to participate fully in the rhythm not just of my own body, but of the environment around me. With my consciousness freed from the distraction of nagging, scattered thoughts, I can see, hear, smell, and feel my surroundings in a way that I normally don’t, partaking of it all with every step. This frame of mind is often referred to as being “present” or “engaged,” and when I walk, I can attain it effortlessly.
SIMILARLY, people travel for different reasons. Some travel for recreation, others to see new sights and meet new people, still others to get away from their jobs and homes, to loosen the fetters that bind them to their everyday lives. The problem with modern travel is that we often take our everyday lives with us, in every way that it is possible to do so. What kind of clothes will I need? What items can’t I do without? What will I read or watch? How will I stay in touch with family and friends? Should I take my iPod, iPad, iPhone, Nook, Kindle, laptop?
The ancients in Japan and China called travel hyohaku (
), the kanji meaning “to float along on a river or stream, following the eddies and swirls of the current” and “to tie up for the night.” This is letting go and moving freely. Fitting the bare necessities into a backpack and doing without accustomed luxuries may bring its discomforts, but comfort is rarely the objective of travel. We are comfortable enough at home. If you are looking for five-star hotels, you can likely find one close to your home and save the bulk of your travel expenses.
Happily, modern travel offers many modes of conveyance, but this can also have a downside. Usually, we get to Europe or the Far East by airplane and then take a bus or taxi from the airport to our hotel. After that, side trips and visits to local attractions often require more taxi, bus, tram, or boat rides, which end up consuming a good bit of our travel time, so that our feet rarely touch the ground. In Japan they call this a “Daruma journey” (
), after the Zen patriarch who sat for so long that his legs fell off.
If we travel seeking new experiences beyond photo opportunities and local cuisine, these days we often fall short of having them. Like Edo-period warlords, we ride along in modern-day palanquins, emerging at our destinations and missing everything in between. Arriving at a post town by train or bus, we are cheated of the satisfaction of slower but steady progress on foot, tantalizing views of our goal in the distance, the sweet anticipation of a journey’s end. But when we bypass the tiny teahouse selling gohei mochi (soft rice cakes grilled with sweet miso sauce), we cheat ourselves of the taste of three centuries of travel in the Kiso.
THE WALKS BETWEEN post towns along the Kiso Road are not particularly taxing: some are as short as three and a half hours, some as long as six. Most of the scenery between the towns is stunningly beautiful, and there is plenty of opportunity to empty the mind and find one’s pace. There are quaint mountain villages, small towns that take you back hundreds of years, and large towns like Kiso Fukushima with historical sites well worth visiting.
For travelers specifically interested in the history and culture of the Kiso or the Edo-period walking culture of Japan, there are a number of books that might be read beforehand, some of which are noted in the “Suggested Reading” section at the end of this book. And, although most Japanese (particularly younger ones) can understand simple English when it’s spoken slowly and clearly, a short Japanese phrase book may come in handy.
But for traveling the Kiso Road, you really need very little: a few material essentials, an open mind, good cheer, and the determination to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
Itte irasshai!
And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all.
—T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, “Little Gidding”