The Walk and Talk, Nagano Kiso-ji

Ridgeline subscribers —

I’ll die on my dumb hill, the one where I say: the best time to visit and walk (most) of Japan is the end of November and the start of December. I think a lot of folks have a kind of North-Eastern-American mentality, where by the time December hits New York City, snow is falling and there’s a too-sharp bite to the air. Not so in Tokyo, or anywhere else west and south of the city.

So it was that Kevin and I planned a “Walk and Talk” in Nagano, on the Kiso-ji, this first week of December. It worked. It was a tad colder than expected (normally you can get away with t-shirts on sunny afternoons), but in the same way that more time is better than money, colder temperatures are better for walking than hot ones. You warm up, naturally, anyway, on the move. And we were walking from Ena up through the Kiso Valley, straight on back to Niekawa Station, some 100+ kilometers with lots of elevation to be gained.

The walk was great. The weather was nearly perfect. The company, not too shabby. The food — every meal except one — superb. It was, indeed, “worth the effort.”

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Here was the walk, should you wish to replicate it:

• Day 1: Get to Ena, stay at the 16th-generation-run Ichikawa Ryokan
• Day 2: Walk Ena to Magome, incredible eel lunch at Yamashina, brilliant coffee at Riverbed, stay at Shinchaya — 19.2 km, 530 m elevation
• Day 3: Walk from Magome to Ōtsumago, morning coffee at HillBilly, bento from Juri, picnic at Tateba Chaya, stay at the excellent Maruya — 10 km, 361 m elevation
• Day 4: Walk Ōtsumago to Nagiso, short day, stay at TIES Campground in a yurt, stuff three hot water bottles into your sleeping bag because it’s -8C — 12 km, 370 m elevation
• Day 5: Walk from TIES up and over the Ne-no-ue Pass, one of my favorite little days of walking in Japan, then down to Nojiri for lunch at Donguri, then through the picturesque Ōkuwa Village (aim for Tenchoin to hit it), one of my favorite hamlets in all of Japan, catch the train from Suhara up to Kiso-fukushima (or run the remaining 20 km, like two of our walkers did), stay at Iwaya, an inn long in operation, whose original owners died a couple of years ago, and is now managed by a Nepalese man (emblematic of some changes happening to Japan, demographically) — 22 km, 600 m elevation
• Day 6: Walk from Kiso-fukushima, lunch at Araya (dipping soba and a small duck-on-rice, yum yum), onward up and over Torii Pass, finally into Narai, staying at Iseya — 24 km, 607 m elevation
• Day 7: Easy walk from Narai to Kiso-hirasawa, stop by the Harano lacquerware shop for a demonstration up in the father/son upstairs studio, then further on to lunch at a pop-up restaurant in front of Niekawa station, helmed by the talented Chef Miss Soyo, stay at the newly opened, delicately rennovated Villa Azalea next to Lake Suwa — 10 km, 90 m elevation

To simplify bookings, we used Walk Japan, which I’d recommend you do, too, especially if you’re a group of significant size (we were nine, and had the inns to ourselves each night). I made some custom modifications to their standard walk for this route, but Walk Japan was graciously accommodating.

One big caveat: I feel like the better walk is from north to south, not south to north as we did. So I’d recommend you reverse ours, especially in warmer months. It’s overall a better walk — the views are grander walking from above, looking down into the valley. But in December, with a bit of snow on the ground, the elevation gains were welcome!

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What did we talk about on the walk and talk? We talked about who we used to be — past selves, and who we were now and who we might become, and how that might happen.

We talked about “enough” — what that looks like and how to find that space where “the feeling of wanting more becomes a sign of healthiness and curiosity” as opposed to avarice and narcissism. Enough can be zero-sum and non-zero sum. Wanting more of non-zero sums things can fall into “ethical” desires for “wanting more:” wanting more knowledge, love, friendship. The word/notion “hypersition” came up. What do self-induced hypersitions look like and how do they align / malign ideas of “enough?”

We had one especially interesting night meditating on “what are the forces moving the world in a positive direction?” For all the chaos of today, it’s hard to not believe the world has generally moved in a more positive direction (for general humanity, at least; cows on the whole, maybe not) (again: macro-scale, century-scale, not week-by-week, or month-by-month nitpicking). And this wasn’t a conversation about “if” the world was better, what was good about it, or what was bad. But rather, is there a generalized set of forces that enable “good” to defeat “evil” with at least a 1% house advantage. The most compelling for me was that “truth” was inherently good. And evil implicitly required duplicity. And that “energy difference” between the two — the natural flow of truth vs the duplicity of lies — puts truth out ahead, if only by a little. Truth: a force (fundamental, mathematical) in nature that helps compound good. Evil: built into itself, the cause of its own demise by the necessity to deceive. 1+1=3 requires more energy to maintain. That sort of thing.

We had a night simply chatting about “beautiful experiences” and, sure, why not: what “beauty” means to each of us. We considered if friction and scarcity weren’t in some ways “required” for “beauty” and if “truth presented elegantly” wasn’t a kind of core precept for a certain kind of beauty. I talked at length, of course, about “fullness” and “yoyū.”

We talked about our “philosophies of life,” which is as fraught a phrase as you might imagine. More “fullness” from me. The idea of the “finite vs infinite game” came up (James Carse | amzn, bkshop), and how the better game to play was always the infinite one. We talked about how “certainty” can be an enemy of the infinite game (the rules must change over time). About the principle of “disagree and commit.” And cooperative board games.

And finally, we finished by discussing “personal heresies” — which are things you believe that the people you respect most, don’t. You’re kinda trolling with these. I poked the group with, “I think everything on the internet should be deleted every two weeks.” I had some caveats, of course, but my favorite part of heresies is getting people to explain why a certain thing makes them uncomfortable, which in turn results in some pretty great conversations / elucidations, revealing blind spots and more.

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These last few years of my life have been my busiest to the nth degree. So, in fact, a “primary goal” of the next few months is to be “more selfish” (a phrase I often used on the walk, much to the jovial consternation of a few walkers — “Why are you calling it ‘selfish?!?!’”) and say no to stuff (we’ll see how that goes) and actually be, simply, at home, catching up on a pile of essays and other work that has languished amidst the infinitude of “life gunk,” in particular these last six months.

Which is to say, I have many, many reasons not to do these walk and talks right now, but I’m always grateful that I did. This one was especially time-consuming in that I planned it all, managed it, logisticized it, and stewarded us through it as interpreter and cat herder. I even walked it twice in October. In the end, though, spending a week with a group of good people, curious people, people working at the tops of their fields, with complex histories, is nourishing on All the Levels, and certainly worth the effort.

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The “magic” of the walk and talks is in the length: a week is critical. More would probably be too much (I find six days of walking to be ideal), less, and you don’t go quite as deep. It’s wonderful to see friendships bloom. “You’ve changed my life” is a phrase more than one walker has said to Kevin and me over the years. Well, these walks have changed my life, too. In ways easily discernible (new friendships, new countries), and ways more sly. We’ve done nine or ten of these now. Meaning I’ve spent a good two-and-a-half-months walking with upstanding humans, true archetypes, hearing their stories, believing in their stories. If that doesn’t affect you in the positive, then your head ain’t screwed on right.

Grateful, as always, for people making the time, and taking the “risk” to join us on the unknown (walkers don’t know who they’ll be walking with when they say yes). And grateful for the spouses and coworkers back home who allow these folks (parents, CEOs, humans with umpteen responsibilities) to roam wild with us goofballs for a week.

This might be my last Ridgeline for 2025. (Maybe not, though.) If it is, thank you all for following along, for buying my books, for supporting my work. It’s been a FULL year, to say the least. I’ll be running my SPECIAL PROJECTS members-only board meeting at the end of December (annoucnement going out to members soon). Hope to see you there.

C

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