Why Japan Is Best Experienced By Foot

Japan’s most celebrated poet, writing in the 17th century under the name of Matsuo Basho, found his truest home on the road. Sleeping on a grass pillow, seeking out auspicious places from which to watch the full moon rise, living not quite as a Zen priest and not quite as a layman, he is best remembered for the monthslong travels he took on foot. Yes, sometimes he found a horse to ride but, most often, he was traipsing along in straw sandals, engaging with fellow travelers — an aging priest, two itinerant concubines — and keeping a diary (in poetry and prose) of what he saw and felt.

In giving voice to what he called this “windswept spirit,” he was consciously following in the footsteps of a great line of spiritual ancestors famous for their long walks. The elderly monk Zoki headed out toward the shrine-filled pathways of the eastern forests known as Kumano in the 10th century, sleeping at times in a shelter made of branches, recording the wistful cries of deer, the rustle of autumn insects. A century and a half later, a courtier named Saigyo gave up his position as a palace guard to become a wandering poet and monk. Basho even invokes the 13th-century nun Abutsu, who in her mid-50s made the two-week walk along the Tokaido, the crowded seaside highway leading from the official capital of Kyoto to the de facto one at Kamakura, to present an inheritance claim in a court of law.

Roaming in the wake of such immortals, as he considered them, Basho thought of his walks as a spiritual discipline. In making his climactic journey along what he called “the narrow road to the deep north,” he was visiting not just a remote part of his country but the neglected corners of himself, otherwise obscured by society and routine. The full moon he sought is a classic Buddhist image of enlightenment.

Nobody could claim that walking is peculiar to Japan; Chaucer had sent his pilgrims toward Canterbury centuries before Basho was born. But Japan has long given the world an image of men and women quitting the busy world for a life of clarity and simplicity. In his classic essay on walking, Henry David Thoreau might have been drawing on the Basho who wrote, “My solitude shall be my company and my poverty my wealth.”