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Thirty days, maybe forty—this is my plan. The walking plan. I’m not depressed per se, no great emptiness has taken hold, but something is off, has been off a while. I feel restless. So I set off on this walk. May 2021. The timing feels right to work things over, things I’ve been ignoring for nearly a lifetime, and know of no better way to do so than to move my feet.
You may wonder why I feel the pull to walk and walk alone and do so for days and weeks and months at a time. As kids, I think it would have made sense without any explanation: all this walking. Of course we walk. We explore. In a way, it’s all we had. But later on—on the path into adulthood—many of us seem to lose this simple impulse to traverse dirt, to push on the edges of what’s known to us. We grow older and settle in and the world shrinks, and the next time we lift our heads and survey things, it can feel like we’ve been stuffed into a suitcase.
Well, that never sat well with me. That shrinking. That self-stuffing. And so ten years ago, in my early thirties, I began expanding the circle of my known world by walking the historic routes of Japan.
With that simple impulse to walk, my life was forever changed. I know that sounds hyperbolic, a bit bonkers, but it’s true. A walk? Life-changing? Yes. What did I feel on the road that first time? Nothing explicit, nothing I could name in the moment. Just the diffuse scent of purpose out there between the villages and the trees and mountains. By that point, I had lived in Japan for over a decade (that I made it past thirty is still a bit unbelievable, and the fact that I’ve now crested forty and, heck, fifty seems possible, are all facts I’m still wrapping my head around) and was looking for the reason why, exactly, I had stayed so long, and where my place might be in a country that would never see me as more than a visitor. Here it was: to walk, and walk well, and witness the people along the way. But why? That’s the riddle I’m still figuring out. To believe? To make others believe? You could say my eyes were opened. You could say I had a “conversion event.” Whatever you say, I was off walking wherever I could. Months out of the year. Often on this peninsula.
The Kii Peninsula sits as—and I feel like this is the easiest way to explain it to you, though I hesitate, and yet here I go—the chubby dangling penis of Japan. It hangs right down at the central belly of the Honshu landmass. A little lonely, mostly mountains, extremely moist. (I know, I know.) Though it has no explicitly clear physical northern boundary, you can think of its northern edge as marked by the east-west line formed by Kobe, Osaka, Nara City. (Kyoto is farther north.) It contains three prefectures: Mie, Wakayama, and Nara. To the west is Osaka Bay and the island of Shikoku, home to the famous, grueling 88-Temple Pilgrimage. To the east and south is the Pacific Ocean. It’s one of the rainiest places in the earth’s subtropical region. (More rain, even, than in the Amazon.) Its topography is composed of temperate rainforest and logging forests. It is sliced up by dozens of ancient paths and pilgrimage routes, all with individual names but many lumped together as the famous Kumano Kodō. Many of the routes are just a few dozen kilometers in length, but together, it can take months to walk them, years to fully piece them together, and a lifetime to know them.
On this walk, I’m sticking to the coast as much as possible. (None of this will make sense to you, so I placed a map above. Go, go take a peek.) I’m starting with the Ise Kaidō, walking to Ise Grand Shrine. Then heading down the Ise-ji route to Kumano City, where I’ll grab the Hongū-do path inland to Hongū Grand Shrine. Then I’ll take the tough Nakahechi back down to Nachi Falls, walk the streets to Kii-Katsuura, and finally catch the Ōhechi around the southwestern coast up to Tanabe City. I’ll touch dense forests on certain days, but mainly I want to focus on the shrinking towns and villages of fishermen working those salty waters. I want to see and hear people, damnit.
The walk began yesterday in the northeastern corner of the Peninsula at Yokkaichi Station, where I disembarked from a local train. A bit south of Nagoya, where the original Tōkaidō—one of the two famous classic routes connecting Kyoto and Tokyo—intersects with the Ise Kaidō. These are old roads, pilgrimage roads, some in use for well over a thousand years. Though today you’d hardly know it. Many of the roads of the Peninsula look like those you’d find anywhere in the countryside: One- or two-lane stretches of asphalt fringed with fields and gutters and mountains, sometimes far off, sometimes close. Not too different from where I began.
The start was not pleasant: I walked past the world’s loneliest pine tree. I walked past a pachinko gambling parlor. I walked past two, three, five, seven, a dozen convenience stores—FamilyMarts, Lawsons, 7-Elevens. I walked past a pharmacy the size of a baseball field. Cars and tractor-trailers whizzed by. Ramen shops showed off their noodles in glass cases caked in exhaust. Curry shops spiced the air. A robot screamed at me about deals for used cars. No one else walked. I was alone in the walk. Drivers seemed hesitant to make eye contact.
And then, just like that, the path veered at the Hinaga-no- Oiwake junction, narrowed, went back away from the busy road and then farther away still. Cars vanished. So did the convenience stores. The pharmacies turned into rice paddies, the horizon appeared dotted with mountains.
What I saw: A home with a beautifully manicured tree. A driveway blocked by cones cast in golden morning light. Behind them, fields. This time of the year they glisten like shallow ponds. Seedlings poke up above the water in neat rows. Crows hop between, look for worms, squawk. Kudzu envelops homes and telephone poles. Kilometers pass. The rural landscape seems to set. You can hear the nightingales sing.
The road slips by and the working-class tone of the landscape, the farming machinery, the lumber equipment, the quietude stamped atop it all by COVID cause my mind to drift back across the ocean. I think about the town I grew up in—a blue-collar, post-industrial home. A town once filled with hardworking folks commuting to the bottling plant or nearby armory or airplane-engine factory. As industry left, problems mounted. Decades ago I escaped its complicated gravity. My ability to even think about college was thanks to my mother. She began saving at age twenty, years before she was married or even knew she’d adopt me. I didn’t know much, but I knew that I needed to be as far away as possible. I found three Japanese universities that had English websites. Applied on a whim and got into one. Tuition was a fraction of what we were told college should cost.
Arriving in Tokyo at age nineteen, this is what I felt: excitement, terror, disbelief, salvation. How could it be that I was here? A cityscape I knew only post-apocalyptically from a bootleg copy of that now-cult-classic animated film Akira. Now I was in it, the landscape of that film. Those first steps I took outside the borders of our town felt like kicking myself in the nuts over and over. Each step, another smack. Because in each step I felt so clearly our deficits. Holy smokes, were we running on fumes. Everyone I met in the great city seemed so much better prepared—for life, love, sanity. The city of Tokyo itself, too, its clockwork precision, maintained at an unfathomable scale, broke my mind. Unlike our town, there were no guns, no drugs, few homeless. I felt a peace I never knew was possible amid so much movement. It put the few other cities I had seen to shame. Packed trains crisscrossed above and below, filled with purpose-driven women and men buttoned up with a consistent formality that didn’t exist back home. A whole army of resolve on the move, dressed for the part. Entire blocks rose in chunks of concrete and glass again and again and again from the bay to the horizon, their buildings separated by just a hair’s breadth. Cars deftly negotiated alleys barely their width. Not a scrap of garbage anywhere. Little kids walked to school in shorts year-round, families bathed together, confusing food lurked around every corner. That first year I fell madly in love—with the promise of the cityscape, alcohol, language. But more than any of that, I fell in love with long walks, of being subtly changed by the lives I heard behind open windows. That very first shot in Akira—the one after the boom, the anonymous alley with the blinking rectangular sign—that image was seared into my mind and I spent countless nights looking for it (still looking for it now, a quarter of a century later). I had my heart broken more times than I could count, and drank myself into the pavement just as often. When all you feel are deficiencies, accepting love from a person or even a place is like trying to fart yourself to the moon. So I kept my feet and body moving. Spent weeks hitchhiking from coast to coast, drinking, waking up on the floors of homes I had no memory of arriving at. Was given rides by lonely folks commuting on their own, with their own myriad deficits. They bought me donuts, they drove me to cafés on the side of the highway, they smoked slowly without saying a thing, they stared at their cigarettes and rolled the ash off in plastic ashtrays. I helped push a tractor-trailer up a snowy road just outside Hiroshima, nearly dying in the process. And that was just the first six months.
I was very much a fool, flailing, overwhelmed, unable to process even the thinnest sliver of what I saw, but I recognize that even amid the confusion and blackouts, these were my first days truly out in the world exploring. Filling my brain with archetypes of people and social and political structures I never imagined possible.
Since then I’ve learned that Japan was once a country filled with remarkable pilgrim walkers. Pilgrims who’d regularly clock ten ri a day. One ri is about four kilometers. They were marked off by ichi-ri-zuka milestones—hulking mounds of dirt alongside the road. There are a few left to be spotted if you know what to look for. When I pass them I like to think of the millions who walked before me over the centuries and yell out to them—both the mounds and the dead—ICHI-RIIIII, for no particular reason. It just feels good and dumb and right.
The old walkers wore waraji straw sandals, bought for five sen, or five hundredths of a yen. A fraction of a penny. Blew through a few pairs a day, the spent ones recycled as animal feed. They carried their lives on their backs. As my body complains on my own walks, I keep these strong men and women in mind.
Given time, these roads shift. A shed-sized Baptist church appears, a hill is now neatly covered in concrete, a home subsumed by kudzu. Historically, many of these roads have been reconfigured by capricious war machines. Cities reduced to ashen frames. A city that was bombed? You feel its aborted history in architectural blandness. A loss of something bigger than the city itself. But alongside that loss, even today, a connection to the deep past can persist. A nearby, previously dilapidated and seemingly abandoned woodland shrine is suddenly, mysteriously, renewed with fresh, glowing timber.
I’ve walked these Peninsula roads before, many times. Over and over I’ve returned to Kii, a place disappearing before your eyes from depopulation, and yet a place with an incredible, beautiful, inspiring history of syncretic Buddhist and Shinto theology and philosophy. Visiting now—while those who knew parts of the old Peninsula are still alive, while some of the old shops are still around—feels paramount.
I’ve come to crave the solitude and asceticism of these solo walks. There is no quieter place on earth than the third hour of a good long day of walking. It’s alone in this space, this walk-induced hypnosis, that the mind is finally able to receive the strange gifts and charities of the world. If that sounds like woo-woo nonsense, it feels even more woo-woo to experience.
I’ve come to realize the only true walk is the re-walk. You cannot know a place without returning. And even then, once isn’t enough. That’s why I’m back. Back on the Peninsula. Walking these roads I’ve walked before. It’s only through time and distance and effort—concerted, present effort, controlled attention, a gentle and steady gaze upon it all—that you begin to understand old connections, old wounds. That the shape of once-dark paths becomes clear.
From the book Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir by Craig Mod. Copyright © 2025 by Craig Mod. Published by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
How to get there
For the Ise-ji, take the Shinkansen train from Tokyo to Nagoya, and transfer to the Kintetsu Limited Express down to Ise City.
Where to go
Walk from Ise Grand Shrine to Shingu Hayatama Shrine over eight or nine days. Or else take the train from Ise City to Owase, set up base in Owase, and spend a few days exploring Yakiyama Mountain and Magose Mountain Pass.
Where to stay
A historical inn in Ise: Asakichi
An easy hotel along the route: Fairfield by Marriott Mie Okuise Odai
A detail-oriented B&B-style ryokan-inn: Misuzu
An onsen ryokan with opulent meals: Minoshima
An inn with a seaside view: Owase Seaside View
What to pack
Keep things light. No boots. Trail running shoes are best—there can be a lot of up and down depending on which parts of the Ise-ji you’re walking. Collapsable hiking poles can be handy. Bring layers—merino wool base layers with tops, fleeces, and jackets depending on the season. It can rain a lot on the Kii Peninsula, so a light, collapsable umbrella is never a bad idea. A big floppy hat is great to beat off the sun, which can be utterly brutal from May through October.