Walking Japan (again): From Fukuoka to Nagasaki
Walking Japan (again): From Fukuoka to Nagasaki
I return for the craftsmanship, thoughtfulness, and care of the Japanese, not for the scenery
(This is my third long walk in Japan; the first was from Tokyo to Niigata, the second from Akashina to Fuji.
Here are my six prior posts from those trips: From Tokyo to Takasaki, A retreat to Niigata, A pointless little Japan story, From Akashina to Fuji, Walking Fuji, Playgrounds and manhole covers)
I returned to Japan for a third long walk because it’s an easy and rewarding place for week-long treks. It’s small, dense, and energetic, so you can chart a two-hundred-mile course that doesn’t require too much hugging the sides of busy roads. It allows rest each night in a different community, and there is ubiquitous, and extensive public transportation.1 Should you ever need the boost from a train, you can get it. In that way it’s very similar to England, a country I’ve done two long walks in, and will do more.
The similarities between England and Japan are much deeper than both being island nations that are pleasant to walk long distances in. As I’ve written before they are culturally relatable at the thin and thick level, but there’s one big cosmetic difference: Urban Japan is pretty unattractive. Unlike in England, there’s little of Japan’s long past present today, certainly not in the form of neighborhoods of well-persevered buildings. Instead most cities are dense, expansive modern affairs, stuffed with single to twenty story basic rectangular buildings, that if adorned at all, have a garish skin of bright and grating ads. They have a cluttered boxiness that look as if they were designed by a kid on a computer without any access to the curve tool.
Japanese cities, while scoring the highest on my walkability scale, do not look like what most people imagine that means. There are a lot of cars in Japan, and while pedestrians and cyclists come first in priority2, it still means there are plenty of roads and sections of town that look like US suburban sprawl, and other than the language on the signs, could fit well in Southern California, or outside of Dallas.
Even then, in these neighborhoods, which make up a surprisingly large portion of Japan, there are large differences that favor Japan. No matter how ghastly, cluttered, and tacky these strips are, they are always impeccably clean (almost to a fault3), orderly, and safe to walk through.
If there is street crime in Japan, or public displays of anti-social behavior, I’ve yet to find it. I’ve also yet to find a driver, or another pedestrian for that matter, who doesn’t respect the clearly designated, signed, and timed, crosswalks, again to a point of orderliness that at times frustrates my “lived in New York city for twenty years and loves to jaywalk” mind, as when I’m standing for over a minute at the edge of a completely empty road, next to an older woman shooting me “Don’t you even think about it you large uncouth Gaijin” looks, waiting for the little red pedestrian to finally turn green.
This good behavior isn’t limited to one’s social class, it permeates all of Japanese society, something you notice more fully when you walk a hundred miles in a week, which requires interacting with all strata of society in very different physical locations.
Japan might have fully embraced the modern world when it comes to the physical stuff of life, like trains, cars, homes, appliances4, and how cities look, but they are still very traditional when it comes to the cultural realm — how they approach their roles as citizens and neighbors, and how they approach the point of living.
Being a proper Japanese citizen is essential to the Japanese in a way that’s significantly different from the US and most of the western world. You have an obligation of proper behavior to the community, family, and nation that trumps your own bespoke desires, and consequently limits your anti-social desires in a way that no amount of police in less self-controlled societies can replicate. You don’t toss garbage into the streets because of shame, not just because of the fine attached by the state to it.
I don’t think it is a stretch to say the Japanese approach being a citizen as a craft to master, with their elders as the guild leaders, which makes sense because I believe the most salient cultural feature of Japan is a dedication to craftsmanship that extends to almost every part of life. That is also similar to England, a country with a long history of craftsmanship, but with the big difference that in Japan it’s the default state, where for the English being a dedicated hobbyist is an often celebrated eccentricity.
Everyone in Japan, from the garbage collector to the sushi chef to the daughter working in the family izakaya to the perfume saleswoman at the Aeon department store, performs their job with a seriousness, care, and thoughtfulness that is shocking as an outsider.
Work as the central point of your life can sound empty and meaningless and not something you think I would admire given that I write about needing something spiritual that isn’t confined to this world, but also tries to make sense of what comes after death. Yet when you are a stakeholder in your job, that is when you are your own boss, which is one of the defining differences between craftsmanship and simple labor, then there can be a spiritual component, which while not as deep and complex as faith, can give someone a clear sense of purpose that extends beyond this life.
To once again reference one of my favorite works of modern philosophy, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” by Walter Benjamin, there is a foundational difference between something individually created by hand, versus something mass produced, no matter how mechanical the process might be. A sushi chef makes hundreds of nigiri each evening, yet each is in their mind unique and imbued with the aura of creation.
In Japan, partly due to permissive zoning laws, but also because of historical precedent, there are independently owned and run restaurants almost everywhere, although they tend to cluster next to train stations, which are also almost everywhere5. These small businesses are the economic and meaning-making engine for almost everyone who works in them, which is often both parents, and a few of their children. That sense of ownership, coupled with a culture of thoughtfulness, means the food in them is almost always amazing, no matter the location.
In Fukuoka, while looking for a bathroom, I found a restaurant in the basement of an office building that at eight on a Friday night was almost completely empty. Intrigued by the odd location, and looking for something less hectic than what was outside, I went in and discovered an elderly couple, well into their eighties, he the sushi chef, she the waitress, and only one other couple as customers.
They greeted me about as warmly as possible, and clearly had a lot of experience making misplaced foreigners feel welcome, as their board of thank you letters from all over the world showed6.
Their restaurant7 has been open for over forty years and the food was exceptional in a way that almost all food in Japan is — not only was it tasty, but it was also clean, healthy, fresh, and delicate, so you walk away from the meal feeling rejuvenated, rather than weighted down. All of that is intentional, and the result of a care at every level of food production, from its source however many months or years before, to its transport into the city, to its prep and cooking, to the plating at your seat. The best example of this is rice, a thing we think of in the US as an afterthought, but in Japan it is a national obsession that results in a dish that’s as close to our version as Italian pizza is to Sbarros.
The next two days I walked through some of the fields that provide these restaurants with such high quality rice and vegetables. It’s not hard to find them, even in the most urban parts of Japan, because fields of crops are wedged into whatever little space that hasn’t been built on, or into large tracts of land carved out in an otherwise dense urban environment precisely so there’s always enough home grown rice to meet the Japanese need for high-quality ingredients.
These fields show the same Japanese dedication, care, and thoughtfulness, including the amount of engineering that has gone into flood control and irrigation, another rightful source of Japanese pride8.
All of this has made Japan, at least for me, the country that has the best, and healthiest food culture in the world, as measured by taste, quality, ubiquity, and the variety of different, and welcoming, inexpensive restaurants.
While I’ve written up France’s food culture9, Japan stands slightly taller because of how high their average is. Most Japanese eat good, clean food, at almost every level of society. You have to work at getting a bad meal in Japan, even when it comes from the convenience stores.
Those convenience stores are also a notable exception to my “most restaurants in Japan are independently run” rule. They are extraordinarily popular and a lot of people eat at least one meal from them per day.
Yet, despite that, they also exhibit a level of care, and even craftsmanship in them, that far exceeds the US, both in how well run the stores are, and also the type and quality of what is sold in them. From the simple white bread sandwiches, to the more complex full meals you heat in the microwave, the quality is exceptional, especially given how inexpensive they are, and how convenient.
They are evidence that the thoughtfulness, and care, of the Japanese, especially when it comes to food, is a culture trait that’s independent of economic incentives. They take their jobs seriously, independent of the material rewards, because to frame it in language the policy class can better understand, their utility function is more influenced by non-economic cultural factors. Your priority is to be a good citizen, and that means treating your job, no matter what it is, with a respect that we in the US would find deferential to a fault, but in Japan, is about playing the role you’re meant to play in this world to the best of your abilities.
How do you know, or learn your role? From your elders, most importantly your parents. The cover photo comes from an izakaya I found randomly on the first night of my walk, in a small-ish town I was staying in only because I’d forgotten one of my four cardinal rules of traveling in Japan (see below), which is always book hotels for Friday and Saturday nights well in advance, so my only option this particular evening was a Ryokan10 next to an interstate near the Futsukaichi station about twenty miles outside of Fukuoka.
I didn’t spend too much time worrying about which of the ten or so izakayas within a few miles of my hotel to go to, because I’ve learned, as I wrote above, it’s hard to get a bad meal in Japan, and anyways, my interests are less about the food, more about the ambiance, which I try to judge from the outside by asking, does it look “well used.”
This one did, and ambiance inside11 was local regulars spending their Saturday night at the family run place down the street they always go to. It was the classic small business set up, with the father as the cook, the mother as the waitress, and then in this case, the oldest daughter trying her best to help mom.
I suppose some might find the idea of an eight year old working the night shift at the local diner a little outdated, and cruel, but I cannot stress enough how happy she was, how thrilled, how proud, to be the big kid finally getting to be a little like mom.
I’ve never seen anyone in my life bus tables with such immense joy, and while I’m not naive or rash enough to claim this is an uniquely Japanese experience12, I do think it’s a small instance of how the Japanese culture of craftsmanship is maintained across the ages, because when replicated over and over, in towns across Japan, as it is, it shapes how children understand their role in society, and ultimately, if successful, helps them understand the point of being alive.
The grandparents and parents are the master educators, and the children are the apprentices, and that’s how a culture gets maintained and passed on and in a well functioning society, while the smaller details can change across time, as they have in Japan as they’ve embraced modern technology, the foundational principles that give people meaning, don’t.
For Japan that’s being a good citizen, which is a pretty good foundational meaning making principle for a well functioning society, although one wonders how long that can last in a world where globalizing forces are constantly wearing away and eroding the notion of a national identity.
My four cardinal rules of traveling in Japan
Download the Suica app, and attach a credit card to it, and fund it. This allows you to tap and pay on almost all buses, metros, and rail lines. The notable exception being the bullet trains, where you have to purchase tickets individually from a ticket office or machine. My suggestion is to try and find a ticket office (in every bullet train station) rather than the machines, since the machines are impossible to figure out.
Carry around cash, because all those small independent izakayas often only take cash. You can get cash at an ATM in a Japanese post office (only open during office hours) without a fee. If you use the ATMs in the convenience stores expect to pay a large (like 10%) fee.
As noted in the article, book weekend hotels well in advanced. The Japanese love weekend getaways and if you are anywhere near a hot spring or flower garden then hotels will be booked often months in advanced for weekends.
Get out of Tokyo, at least after spending a few days there to hit up all the major sights, because the food, parks, and stores it offers can be found in almost all mid-sized cities without the cost, hassle, and crowds of Tokyo.
The actual details of the walk across Kyushu Island
I sometimes forget to add in the logistical details from my long walk, so for those interested here they are.
My goal was to walk from Fukuoka to somewhere about a hundred miles south, without using too many train boosts, but recognizing I would have to take a few because of the mountains and distances involved.
The mountains are especially a problem for walking Japan because there are not a lot of trails or paths, and the roads that exist have a lot of tunnels, so walking on the shoulder isn’t even an option.
My route ended up taking me on a direct path from Hakanta station in Fukuoka to Kurume, then from there directly to Takeo, where I got a train boost to Ureshino (a hot spring town), then another boost to Omura, then a final boost to Nagasaki. On each of these boosts I did walk maybe six miles to a station, then took a train, then another six miles to my hotel.
My favorite part of the walk was the area around Saga, which is where most of the pictures of irrigated rice fields come from. My least favorite part of the walk was Ureshino, which I didn’t realize until I got there, was an old resort town on its last legs. The area around it was nice, but the town itself had a lot of soaplands13 (perhaps ten), which for a city of 10,000 is absurd.
I’m writing this from Fukuoka, where I returned to take a ferry to Busan in a few days. From there, I’ll go to Seoul to spend a final four days resting, before flying home.
It’s been a long six weeks of travel, and my next piece might take a little longer to be published given the logistics of flying from Korea to the US. So until then, be safe and be kind!
Here are the other pieces from this trip.
Japan has probably the best train/bus system in the world. You can usually get from any randomly chosen point A, to any other randomly chosen point B, by some combination of trains and buses, without major waits, and without it costing too much. All are also very clean, efficient, and pleasant to be on. The only problem, for outsiders, is figuring out the ticketing process for longer distances. For shorter rides (that is most trains other than bullet trains) you can use your Suica card (always download the Suica app and fund your card before arriving in Japan.
There is little to no street parking in Japan. When you buy a car, you have to have proof of a place to store it — either in your garage, or a public garage. The result is walking along roads is a lot easier without the clutter from cars lining both sides.
As I’ve written before, if you eat in the convenience stores like I do on my long walks, and forget to dispose of your trash in that store, you can go miles holding an empty plastic bottle because Japan has almost zero trash cans. In addition, the idea of littering in Japan is so utterly completely wrong, such a rude thing to do, that you can’t even bring yourself to place an empty recyclable can next to someone’s locked personal garbage can.
As anyone who has used a toilet in Japan knows, most appliances are far more modern than in the US! Needlessly so in my opinion.
Which is one of the primary reasons Japanese cities score so highly on my walkability scale because of “localized distribution,” that is the resources to life are not clustered in one small area you have to live next to, or drive to.
Also, the waitress played a fun game with me where she would see how far she could fill my beer glass without it spilling over. LOL
Sushi Tatsumi, 812-0036 Fukuoka, Hakata Ward, Kamigofukumachi, 10−1 Ｂ１Ｆ
I wrote before how the Netherlands is really a nation of engineers, and I think that also applies to Japan. The rice fields, especially the ones I walked through this time between Kurume and Kōhoku are in a flood plain, which has been turned into useable land via lots and lots of canals and drainage.
And I’ve also attacked the US food culture.
I wanted to write in this essay more about ryokans and especially traditional public baths, something I’ve only this trip started to use, and am regretting that I hadn’t begun earlier.
Ryokans are traditional hotels, where you sleep on a futon that’s placed out for you by a maid. They are also usually built around public baths that are fed by special hot springs with claims of healing powers.
While I’ve grown to really like the Ryokans, despite their cost, I really really like using the public hot baths, but almost all inexpensive business hotels (where I prefer to stay) also have public hot baths, that while maybe not as glamorous, are still pretty great.
To put it more bluntly, I was not a Japanese public bath addict and I can’t believe it’s taken three trips to Japan to become one.
This is the name of it on Google, お食事処 わ, and here is the address 1 Chome-11-12 Futsukaichinishi, Chikushino, Fukuoka 818-0071
The food isn’t exceptional, or even that great, so I am not suggesting it, beyond being an example of what you get in Japan if you literally randomly chose a place in a small town on a random night.
This could and does happen in the US, although less and less. I had a paying job at the age of ten, and plenty of family-run businesses have their underage children working in them, but it’s becoming an outdated idea as we expand the notion of a protected childhood.
Basically houses of prostitution that exploit loopholes on public baths.
I spend a lot of time in Tokyo, and have found that if you go more off the beaten path, you can experience that same "Japan, but sans tourists" feel that you can in, say, Nagano or Sakai. You don't get the countryside, of course, but you get the family run and operated businesses, more local shrines and temples, and far fewer crowds, Soaplands, maid cafes, etc.
If you come back please consider a walk in my neck of the woods - along the Sanin coast (Shimane/Tottori) - and definitely visit Matsue and Izakaya Matsuura (https://maps.app.goo.gl/NfJirj1vKcBeRcmx5 ) where Mao-chan, aged about the same as your young waitress in Wa, will happily help bus tables rather do her homework :)