Japan for Wandering Travelers

About this book

Most guidebooks compete to plan your day. This one is written for the day you refuse to plan. Two hundred journeys, each one a day composed around a surrendered itinerary: the lane behind the temple taken because it looked least useful, the farm road found by the wrong bus stop, the old town read wrong turn by wrong turn, the river followed upstream with no goal, the cat followed for three streets, the long way round taken home because the short way had nothing left to teach.

The unit of the book is the journey itself — not the sight, not the route, not the facility, not the record found on the way. A shrine matters because of the back lane behind its approach; a valley because of the farm roads its maples shade unvisited. Eight parts: setting out without a plan · deliberate detours and the side road taken on purpose · old towns read by wandering · the wrong-turn country of farm lanes and village edges · watersides drifted without a destination · days spent following one loose thread · loops, circuits and the long way home · and the wandering calendar and the craft, closing with the two hundred and first journey — the reader's own town, unplanned.

Because opening hours, closures, fares, event dates and seasonal arrangements 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 (garden, temple and shrine offices, railway, bus and ferry companies, town and prefectural tourism associations, museum and park authorities, the onsen association, the forest office) whose information settles what is current before you travel — on a wandering day, above all, the return. It asserts no rankings, no strength claims and no health or healing effects. Wandering patterns are described as patterns, which are permanent; the day's arrangements are always referred to official information. Written and created in Japan.