Ridgeline subscribers —

Hello! It’s been ages (well, a month or so) — I’m in constant scramble mode (or is it burnout mode?) these days. Finishing up the Random House edition of Things Become Other Things, and catching up on life itself. I published a big update to Roden a few days ago.

One of my many todos post-walk has been to dig through the film I shot while walking the Tōkaidō in May. Finally getting to that. To keep things sane, I’ll be batching these photo posts. To start: Here some portraits I took along the way. I shot a lot more on my M11, digitally, but I’ve enjoyed leaning into the bounding lope of film this past year (can’t believe it’s been over a year since I started shooting film again). The distance between seeing, photographing, developing, scanning, and — once again — looking, is kind of nice. And there’s something indisputably lovely about having hard copies of everything in the form of negatives. Anyway, I’ll write more about film at another time.

It’a been two months since I took these photographs. But I remember each and every moment with a kind of freakish clarity — where I was and what I felt in the fraction of a second of releasing the shutter.

Very male-heavy on the shots. Just this one woman — the boat woman, Hirai-san. Seventy-one years old, three kids, ten grandkids, one great-grandkid. Here she was, navigating her tiny boat across the bay of Nagoya. You know, I’m famous ‘round these parts, she said as soon as I got on the boat. Been on TV a bunch. She said this with obvious pride as she bumped into adjacent boats trying to 180-maneuver our skiff out of the jetty. She ran a boat engine company, selling and fixing and the like. She had had me put on a life jacket with some sadness: Damn boat capsized and killed all them folks up in Hokkaido, she said, that’s why I gotta give you this thing. Its thinness made me think it was largely performative. She pointed out her favorite cargo ships, showed me how you could tell how heavy their load was based on how much of the hull was above the waterline.

Anyway, she was a hoot, taking phone calls as she wiggled us between tankers and cruise ships. One hand on the wheel, the other on her cellphone pressed to her ear, screaming above the engine and the wind — selling engines, making deals, doing whatever the heck she was doing as I sat at the bow and took it all in.

The owner of a hardware shop just outside of Kyoto. First day. Felt utterly zero’d out. As I wrote in Roden:

I was probably operating at 30% of max energy, if that. I had given my all to the show, the introvert inside me had experienced death by cue cards. The first day of the Tōkaidō walk was 43 kilometers long. The second was 44 kilometers. I honestly thought: Maybe I don’t finish this walk? Maybe I can’t do it? It’s hard for me to convey just how empty I was after the TV shoot.

So it was in this kind of zombie state I was making my way around Lake Biwako, had just visited Matsuo Basho’s grave, and saw this guy standing in his garage next to his hardware store. Loved the light. Dug his face — look at that face. And he was very game for some photos.

Much later in the walk, after climbing Hakone in what felt like a typhoon (but it was relayed to me, many times, over emails, by wonderfully pedantic readers, that I was not technically walking in a typhoon), I made my way to Amazake-Chaya, the famed Edo-era tea house of Hakone, right smack on the Tōkaidō proper. Here is the owner and also the visibility I had climbing:

Three days in and I was already a bit worried about heat. I passed these folks — a rice farmer and a couple helpers. He lived across the road from his fields. This would have been in Shiga Prefecture — a prefecture with decent economic abundance. Folks were easy to chat. They invited me over for some water. I took a few photos.

Here’s the owner of Café and Bar Yokko, which he’s been running for … 40+ years? I want to say? I’ve been here several times. He always asks: What do you like about Japan?

The owner of Abekawa Mochi, on the Abe River in Shizuoka. I was looking forward to seeing this guy for almost the whole walk. He photographs well, the light in his shop is always good. The mochi is yummy. He was smoking on a stoop down the road when I arrived and I wasn’t quite sure the shop was even open. I don’t like to call beforehand — I mean, I’m not going to change my route or timing if they’re closed. So I just walk and cross my fingers and hope these places are open. Often they are.

A young archeologist (Mr. Takashima, so his handwritten name tag seems to indicate) next to a dig next to a rice field. He was the youngest on the crew by far, everyone else sitting in a line, off to the side, in the bright sun, smoking.

This guy was trimming his bushes, I asked him why and he said they had to cut off the dead bits or else the death would spread. But trim the dead and it’ll grow back just fine.

One of many non-Japan-born people I met along the way. A young Nepalese guy, working at a bento factory. He was mainly interested in if I had a girlfriend, how many girlfriends I had, and how he could get a girlfriend.

The last few days of the walk, the heat was doing a number one me, and the thought of stopping and talking to people was unfathomable. I was just trying to get to the end in one sane piece. Apropos of nothing, here’s a woman on a bike looking stressed out and some cops marking up an accident scene.

And here’s a guy I met outside a shokudo on one of my longest days. Best smile of the walk by far. He was off to sing karaoke down the road. (Left shot is M11, right is M6.)

That’s it for this batch. In my effort to keep this Ridgeline issue simple, I feel like I succeeded in making it extra complicated. Ha ha! So it goes! Hope you’re all well, and for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, hope you’re handling this heat with aplomb. I am a firm acolyte of the church of sun umbrellas. I recommend you try one too, maybe. (Certainly if you’re in Tokyo, since they’re so ubiquitous.)

More soon,
C