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 Fu

Chris Arnade Walks the World

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2024-11-16 18:00:06

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 priority 2 , 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.

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