Walking across Japan, part 2: A retreat to Niigata

Failure, and an escape from the heat

My planned walk across Japan started to unravel in Kumagaya, when I woke at 4 a.m. to make the twenty-five miles to Takasaki before a midday heat in the high nineties overwhelmed me. It collapsed the next day, when the heat not only decided to stick around, but went a notch higher, regularly touching one hundred for the next week.

I like to walk, I like to complete my plans, but I’m not a fanatic who likes to play around with heat stroke. I can’t say I was disappointed though, not deep down. While the climb out of the flat Tokyo basin and up into the mountains was going to give me a brief change, a few hours of nature trails, after that the rest of the walk was through a well-developed valley running all the way to Nagano, which from what I could tell from maps and a little intellectual extrapolation, was another eighty miles of urban landscape similar to the prior hundred plus miles I’d walked, only this time with mountains on the horizon.

A landscape of jammed-together modern drab office towers, boxy apartment buildings, and a sky thick with poles, wires, and antennas. A landscape that I’m not crazy about, and contrary to the popular opinion that Japan is beautiful, I think is pretty ugly.