Japan's Rivers & Lakes

About this book

Japan is written in water — and this is its water book.

Japan's Rivers & Lakes covers 200 waterside places in one traveller's format: the water itself, its history with the people on its banks, how to visit and what it tastes like, and the specific safety note that belongs to that place. The Ishikari wandering Hokkaido's plain and Mashu's impossible blue. The Tone, moved by shoguns; the Kamo, lived on by a whole city; Biwa, an ancient inland sea. The Shimanto's sinking bridges, the Niyodo's blue pools, the Yoshino's gorges. Aso's springs rising after decades underground, Iriomote's jungle river, and the mangrove mouths where Japan's rivers end in green silence.

It is honest where water demands it. Japanese rivers rise faster than almost anywhere inhabited, so safety is not a disclaimer in this book — it is part of the format, in all 200 entries: each closes with its own specific cautions and the same instruction to check the forecast, river levels and warnings in official sources, and the practical chapters teach you how to read high water before you ever stand on a bank. Places you may only look at say so. Basins with hard histories — poisoned rivers that recovered, rivers that flooded within living memory — are told in their own local telling.

Come and read the country its rivers wrote.