https://walkkumano.com/iseji/
Allow me to share what I love about a good walk in Japan: I love the small villages, coming across a rusted and worn down kissa, sipping a ¥200 cup of the dankest coffee around, listening to an 80 year old mama relay debauched stories of love lost over a slice of pizza toast. I love the Japan-walking clichés, those moments in the forest, alone, uguisu birdsong above, winds shifting the bamboo treetops like a Ghibli film loop, stopping to catch my breath next to a grave marking the spot where a loyal horse conked out two hundred years ago. I love coming across the remnants of teahouses at mountain passes, foundation stones blocking off volume for the mind to fill in. I love cutting through rice fields, greeting suspicious farmers in all their various stages of planting or prepping or harvesting depending on season, photographing their weather-gouged faces, dubious dentistry, the clockwork movements of steam-punk planters dropping seedlings into the shallow ponds of their fields. I love walking past an abandoned and roofless forest shrine in May, returning in December only to find it glowing with fresh hinoki wood — Whoa, someone still cares. And I love the plainness of life on display: The bedsheets and museum-grade underwear drying in the sun, cars washed before jagged mountain backdrops, the maintenance on homes, plaster walls, kayabuki thatched roofs, the squat pulling of weeds from moss gardens. I love all these seemingly insignificant details, but details that, en masse, form the fullness of a time and place, both in the historical aggregate and of that very moment in which you're stepping. It's a helluva thing, the gift of walking the world.
Let me emphasize that this is not a guide, but it's also not not a guide. It's a collection of notes, tips, and, I guess, "travelogue" entries about walking the Ise-ji route of the Kumano Kodō. I wrote this because I love the Ise-ji, and want you, also, to think: Damn, that looks like a fine hike.
So consider this a persuasion or seduction, a thing to bookmark and return to, for when you decide to give this walk a go. Consider it a playful dare, for when we can all go out and walk again.
Let me emphasize that this is not a guide, but it's also not not a guide. It's a collection of notes, tips, and, I guess, "travelogue" entries about walking the Ise-ji route of the Kumano Kodō. I wrote this because I love the Ise-ji, and want you, also, to think: Damn, that looks like a fine hike.
So consider this a persuasion or seduction, a thing to bookmark and return to, for when you decide to give this walk a go. Consider it a playful dare, for when we can all go out and walk again.
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