Japan for Wind Travelers

About this book

Most guidebooks apologise for the weather. This one travels in it. Two hundred journeys, each one a day composed around the wind itself: the coast read by its bent pines, the headland climbed for the full strength of the blow, the harbour crossed to the music of its masts, the pass road taken in the gusts, the sheltered table earned by the exposed morning, the festival eve reached while the town lashes itself down, and the week, late in the year, when the traveller stands on a familiar cape and meets the first cold wind of the season on its own ground.

The unit of the book is the journey itself — not the place, not the windy spot, not the thing the wind moves. A cape matters because of the exposed road that earns its weather; a harbour because of the gusts it works under; a table because of the lee wall it is set behind. Eight parts: setting out into the blowing country · windy coast and headland days lived at wind pace · river, lake and harbour journeys on water set moving · hill, pass and ridge ascents climbed into the weather · the windbound road of trains, ferries and crosswind bridges · wind table journeys to sheltered tables · festival-eve and working-coast journeys · and the wind calendar and the turn, closing with the two hundred and first journey — the reader's own street, on its first windy day, at home.

Because opening hours, fares, event dates and the day's actual wind change, the book never asserts them as current fact: every one of the 200 entries closes with its own official check — the named official source (railway, bus and ferry companies, ropeway and observatory operators, shrine, temple and garden offices, market and port authorities, prefectural tourism associations, the meteorological agency) whose information settles what is current before you travel. Seasonal patterns are described as patterns, which are permanent; the day's arrangements are always referred to official information. Written and created in Japan.