Final update: The book is finished and available for sale!
You can buy a copy of The Wilds of Shikoku in my webshop. It includes a physical copy of the book and a free download of the digital edition. There is also a special edition of the book called Tokushima Blue, limited to 16 copies.
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“…very lovely, well considered…”
— Craig Mod, co-author of Koya Bound
“…[an] unusual winter journey…”
— John Ryle, Professor of Anthropology at Bard College
“…a ray of real experiences in a storm of fake influencers and vanity mongers.”
— Greg Takayama
Update + stretch goal
With three days to go we’ve hit 100%. Thank you all for making what is among my wildest of dreams a little less inchoate.
Stretch goal: Hit $12,000 and I will take a DJI Spark drone for aerial footage of the journey.
Introduction
Last year, I walked 4,300 kilometers along the back roads of Japan’s four main islands: Kyushu, Shikoku, Honshu, and Hokkaido. I crossed the mountainous interior of Shikoku in May 2017. It took only two weeks but it was the most interesting part of my 18-week journey across Japan. On the penultimate day, I walked through a village where nine out of ten houses were in ruins — but you could still get a cold Coke from a vending machine and walk on a perfectly surfaced road, while jetliners overhead were extending their landing gear on their approach to Osaka, one of the supercities of the world. On Shikoku, I found the melancholy future of the developed world.
Now I want to go back so I can show you. If this campaign is successful, you will be able to follow online as I walk across the wilds of Shikoku in the dead of winter, then, after I’ve made it across, read my printed field report.
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Sketch of my proposed route across Shikoku
Shikoku is the smallest of Japan’s four main islands. It wasn’t until 30 years ago that one could reach it by road or rail. It is best known for the Shikoku Henro, where Buddhist pilgrims dressed in white circumambulate the island to visit 88 of its temples. On my walk, I will not follow the pilgrims’ path, but the roads of the island’s sparsely populated interior, from Shikoku’s easternmost point to its westernmost.
The Wilds of Shikoku will be the story of the price we pay to live in comfort. Cities everywhere are growing and the countryside is fading away, while we celebrate the handcrafted beauty of country life from the comforts of our city homes. Shikoku makes this story more visible than any other place I know. If you live anywhere in the developed world, it is probably your story, too. I know it is mine.
With your help, we can turn this story into a printed, tangible artifact, and also offer some very special perks.
What We Need & What You Get
Apart from the costs of pre-production, which we have already covered, The Wilds of Shikoku will have five main expenses:
- Getting to Japan (airfare, insurance, train tickets)
- Equipment (electronics, winter gear)
- Walking across Shikoku (food, bathhouse fees, data cards)
- Our collaborators’ fees
- Production and printing costs for the Field Report
We are pricing the campaign for the break-even point. Stay tuned for stretch goals if we go beyond our goal!
If the campaign is successfully funded, I will go to Japan in January 2019 and walk across Shikoku in late January to early February. If you contribute, and the campaign is a success, you will get:
1. THE FIELD REPORT
The ultimate aim of this journey is to produce a beautifully crafted and printed Field Report about what I saw on my 500-kilometer walk across some of the most remote parts of Japan in the dead of winter.
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32 A3-sized pages of 105 g/m^2 cream-colored Awagami from Tokushima, Japan, our target for the Field Report. It feels substantial to hold.
The specifics:
- It’s big: 32 A3-sized pages (29.7 × 42 cm / 11.69" × 16.53"), printed on 105 g/m^2, off-white German or Japanese paper, weighing in total 210 grams (0.46 pounds)
- Featuring a hand-painted watercolor map of Shikoku by British illustrator Alice Cleary
- Between 10,000–15,000 words (the length of a very long magazine article)
- Dozens of original photographs by the author
- Altitude and distance profile charts
Patrons of the Digital Pack will receive the Field Report in PDF format, printable at either A4 or US Letter size.
The Field Report will be written and produced after I complete the walk. Based on the conversations we’ve had with our graphic designer and our printer, it will be done by the end of April 2019. We aim to have them in the mail by May 1, 2019 (incidentally, the first day of Japan’s next imperial era).
2. REAL TIME BROADCAST
From my first steps leaving Cape Gamouda, Shikoku’s easternmost point, until I reach Cape Sada, its westernmost, you will be able to follow my walk online, in close to real time. What will you see? Apart from the staggering beauty of the land, I have no idea.
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Sunset over Tosa-cho, Kochi Prefecture, Shikoku, on May 14, 2017
the ninth day of my walk across the island
But last year, when I walked across Shikoku, I met, among others, a French carpenter restoring an old Japanese house in the mountains, a Columbia University PhD from Tokyo who was employed by a village to re-design its education system, a naked man who asked me if I was from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a beekeeper with a sniper rifle employed to cull the deer which threaten to overrun the rice fields, a Hungarian world champion kayaker teaching junior high school in a mountain village, and an agricultural engineer who happens to be the highest-ranked swordsman in Eastern Shikoku. I will re-visit some of these people and will in all likelihood meet others just as interesting. Such is the nature of long-distance walking.
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Roadside statues on the Sadamisaki Peninsula, Ehime Prefecture, Shikoku, on May 6, 2017
I will carry two cameras and an iPhone, and post several times a day to Instagram and YouTube. The broadcast will be freely available for everyone, and archived on The Wilds of Shikoku website (to be launched in Summer 2019). For examples of similar broadcasts from my other journeys, see The Roads from Sata (my 4,300-kilometer walk across Japan in 2017) and Autocracy Holidays (an 8,000-kilometer road trip from Kazakhstan across Xinjiang, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Iran to Iraqi Kurdistan, in 2018).
3. LIMITED EDITION MAP PRINTS
The centerpiece of the Field Report will be a hand-painted watercolor map of Shikoku by the London-based illustrator Alice Cleary. She has already sketched it out and will paint it when the campaign is successfully funded. Alice works for print magazines and you may have come across her paintings and maps in Delicious Magazine, Delicious Australia, Great British Food, and Veggie Magazine.
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This is not the final map, just a sketch on Alice’s worktable
We will be offering limited edition art prints of the map. Alice will paint the original at A3 (29.7 × 42 cm / 11.69" × 16.53"). Our prints, mounted on thick cardboard, will be at the same size. They will stand on their own and will also be suitable for framing.
Unlike the Field Report, which will be for sale on The Wilds of Shikoku website after the campaign is over, the prints will only be available for the duration of our campaign. If you want one, make a pledge by December 24, 2018.
4. ARTISANAL INDIGO TENUGUI, MADE ON SHIKOKU
The prefecture of Tokushima in Shikoku has been for centuries the center of Japanese indigo production: the plant-based fermented dye responsible for the magnificent color also referred to as Japan Blue. After the country opened to the West in the 19th century, the indigo industry was decimated by synthetic dyes. It is now experiencing a quiet comeback, and Hanga Yoshihara-Horvath, a Hungarian-Japanese artist, is one of the figures in the center of this revival.
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Photo by Kyoko Nishimoto
Hanga, a classically trained textile artist, has lived in Tokushima for a decade with her husband, the indigo researcher Hitoshi Yoshihara, and their son Mihály Aoi. Her indigo work combines the Japanese techniques of sashiko (decorative stitching) and shibori (resist dyeing) with traditional Hungarian patterns and motifs.
Hanga will design and dye original tenugui — traditional Japanese cotton towels — for the supporters of The Wilds of Shikoku. They will be approximately 35×90 centimeters in size. Tenugui can be used for practically any purpose that calls for a piece of cloth: you can tie it around your forehead on a hot day, wrap stuff in it, use it in the bath as a washcloth, and so on. Artisanal handmade tenugui, like the ones Hanga will make, can also be hung and displayed. You can read more about tenugui in this article on Tofugu.
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Photo by Kyoko Nishimoto
We will limit the number of tenugui Hanga makes to the number of days it will take me to walk across Shikoku. We are offering 10 pieces for sale during the campaign.
5. ALAN BOOTH’S ESSAY COLLECTION, SIGNED BY EDITOR TIMOTHY HARRIS
If you’re reading this, you probably need no introduction to Alan Booth. He is the late author of The Roads to Sata, the famous travel book about his walk across three of Japan’s four main islands. Several years later, he traveled to the fourth, Shikoku, to walk across its mountainous interior. Until a few months ago, you had to have been on a Japan Airlines flight in early 1985 to have read the account of his walk, because it was published by WINDS, the airline’s in-flight magazine.
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Alan Booth (right) with Timothy Harris, both looking very theatrical. Photo by Stuart Varnam-Atkin
But Timothy Harris, Booth’s close friend and editor, recently put together an anthology of Booth’s uncollected writings, This Great Stage of Fools, which includes the account of Booth’s walk across Shikoku, titled Roads Out of Time.
Tim has graciously offered to sign copies of the anthology for supporters of this campaign. Here is an excerpt from his introduction to Roads Out of Time:
He decided to [walk across Shikoku] along the island’s longest axis: east to west — a five-hundred-kilometer walk. The walk was, of course, accomplished in a fraction of the time the longer journey took — eighteen days as opposed to four months — but, day for day, it was at least as hard, since Alan had chosen to walk not along the coast, but through the mountains and hills of the island’s interior — country as remote and rugged as any in Japan.
I had not known of Booth’s walk across Shikoku when I walked across the island in 2017, but we crossed the island on very similar paths (more on this if you read on). In memory of his life and his work, the walk I plan to complete for The Wilds of Shikoku will follow in his footsteps exactly, as far as they can be reconstructed from his account.
6. A PRIVATE PRESENTATION OF MY WALK
In every journey there are stories that don’t make it into any Field Report. Stories too extraordinary to be believable, too personal to print, too ephemeral to publish. These are some of the best stories. You have them, too. After the Field Report is printed and mailed, I will tell the story behind the story of The Wilds of Shikoku. This will be in the form of a 60-minute presentation, with unpublished pictures, followed by free-form conversation. The ideal setting for this would be a small group eager for strangeness and adventure: your institute, your startup, your school.
This rewards is limited to 2 backers. You can choose any location in the world (the cost does not include me getting there).
7. A PRIVATE WALK ACROSS SHIKOKU
I have the feeling that I can write on these enormous partitions, of 3,000 or 4,000 meters high, as a professor writes on a blackboard with a chalk. But I don’t only make that to write these lines, these imaginary lines, I live these lines. I also have the impression that after, these lines remain there, even though I am the only one that can feel them, see them, that I live them and nobody else will ever be able to see them, but they are there and they will remain forever there.
— Reinhold Messner, in Werner Herzog’s The Dark Glow of the Mountains
The world is a palimpsest of imaginary lines and we all walk in the footsteps of others. Alan Booth once followed the steps of Saigo Takamori, the brooding 19th-century samurai with a dog named Tsun, and last year I unwittingly retraced the footsteps of Alan Booth across Shikoku.
Works of art about travel and walking have exerted a disproportionate influence on my imagination, and I have often felt their authors loom large in my life. For this campaign I’m offering something I have never been able to do myself: to experience a work with its author in its original setting.
For one supporter of The Wilds of Shikoku, I’m offering the chance to re-walk the exact path of my walk. We will go together, at a time of your choice, across this beautiful and haunted island, in the footsteps of Alan Booth, myself, and countless others, to which we will add our own, and nobody else will ever be able to see them, but they will be there, and they will remain forever there.
About Peter
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Photo by Kyoko Nishimoto
Peter Orosz is a peripatetic writer and photographer. In 2017, he walked 4,300 kilometers across Japan from the south of Kyushu to the east of Hokkaido. A year before, he walked 850 kilometers across the Zagros Mountains from Hamadan, Iran to Erbil, Iraq. Back when he wasn’t walking, he wrote for Roads & Kingdoms, Wired, Jalopnik, and other websites, and served as an editorial manager at Gawker Media.
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Why Walk in Winter?
In May 2017, on my walk across Shikoku, I had breakfast with Ayano Tsukimi, a lady who lives in a mountain village named Nagoro. She served me a simple Japanese breakfast of miso soup, braised potatoes, and mountain vegetables she had picked herself. She is the creator of an art project about the depopulation of her village, where she makes a life-sized cloth doll for every villager who moves away or dies. Her dolls now vastly outnumber the humans in Nagoro. Her life and her work were the focus of Valley of Dolls, a short documentary film by the German journalist Fritz Schumann.
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Ayano Tsukimi chilling in front of her house on May 17, 2017
On that beautiful spring day, it was hard to see the harshness of life in Nagoro. But after breakfast, Ms. Tsukimi showed me pictures of her life in winter. On this gentle subtropical island, known for its temples and tangerines, she stood waist-deep in the snow in front of her old wooden house, which was heated by a single charcoal burner and connected to the outside world across a mile-high pass in the mountains. Barely more than 200 kilometers away, across that pass and two great bridges, lay Osaka, one of the world’s biggest cities. Its canyons of glass and steel could have been another planet, one vastly more massive than little Nagoro, with an irresistible gravity.
Here was the star of a film seen by more than 500,000 people, living in a country which loses the same number of people every year. Her spacious wooden house is a thing of handcrafted beauty. Wildflowers drop into the cold spring water of her drink cooler, and she breathes the pure mountain air. Her aesthetically pleasing life is also unimaginably hard, and it’s a lifestyle that doesn’t survive contact with the big city. The quiet forests and the verdant mountains don’t stand a chance against the siren song of 24/7 convenience stores and central heating, and this contrast is brought into sharp focus in the winter, when nature is at its cruelest, and the life to be lived there has very little to do with how we imagine life in the developed world.
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The schoolhouse of Nagoro, Tokushima Prefecture, Shikoku, on May 17, 2017
The sort of country life we find beautiful only exists until the people who live it have no choice. Once they do, they leave it behind. No young professional will move back to a place like Nagoro from Osaka. And couples with young children definitely won’t: the village school is closed, and the bridge across the river which leads to it lies unrepaired, guarded by two of Ms. Tsukimi’s dolls.
Whatever I will experience on my walk will never approach the hardness of daily life in a village. But maybe, over weeks of walking, there will be moments when I will be able to see it, so I can write about it truthfully. About how we shed our beautiful clothes, how we leave our beautiful houses, how we stop making our delicious food, how we may lose our language, and how, in return, we get a comfortable life. And once we’re comfortable, we realize what we had lost. This is what I want to show you in The Wilds of Shikoku.
Why Follow Alan Booth’s Path?
In the summer and autumn of 1977, the British writer Alan Booth walked the length of Japan from the northernmost cape of Hokkaido to the southernmost cape of Kyushu. A few years later, he wrote an account of his journey, The Roads to Sata, which became one of the classics of 20th century travel writing.
It was one of the books which inspired my own walk across Japan, so much so that I titled my field notes from the journey The Roads from Sata. I had set out, in April 2017, to retrace his steps, but the gravity of the mountains pulled me into Japan’s interior. Our paths barely crossed and our walks differed in almost every way. While Booth walked from north to south, followed the coastline when possible, avoided the mountains, and slept in country inns, I walked from south to east, traversed as many mountains as possible, and slept in shacks, shrines, and under the stars. But the main difference was that he never set foot on Shikoku.
On my way home, in August 2017, I stopped in Tokyo to meet Timothy Harris, Alan Booth’s old friend and editor (Booth himself passed away in 1993). Over a couple of excellent beers in Shinjuku, Tim mentioned that in 1983, six years after his walk across Japan, Alan went back to Shikoku and walked across it as well — following not the pilgrims’ path but in a straight line across the island’s mountainous interior. And so, unwittingly, I retraced his steps in the very place where I had thought there were no steps of his to be retraced.
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Roads Out of Time, Alan’s account of his walk across Shikoku, was published in February 1985 by WINDS, the in-flight magazine of Japan Airlines. At our meeting Tim told me that he was working on an anthology of Alan’s unpublished writings, which would include the story of his Shikoku walk. The anthology, titled This Great Stage of Fools, was published earlier this year by Bright Wave Media. When I received my copy, I was astonished to read that he had walked on many of the same roads as I had, in many cases across the same villages, making very similar observations along the way.
That’s when I decided that I would go back to Shikoku. To follow in Alan’s footsteps and to retrace mine, to treat his account as a screenplay to be staged, to try to see with his eyes what became of the wilds of Shikoku 36 years later.
Risks & Challenges
I have been walking alone for years and have covered over 6,000 kilometers in the past three years on walks ranging from three days to four months, in Croatia, Iran, Iraq, Hungary, Japan, and Serbia. I walk with a 10-kilogram rucksack and sleep where I fancy. I have been writing and taking photographs for an audience for 15 years. The Wilds of Shikoku builds on these skills.
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The author in Higashinaruse, Akita Prefecture, on the 92nd day of his walk across Japan. Photo by Tadashi Honma.
The Walk
Low-to-medium risk. I’m in good physical condition for my 38 years, with no known medical issues. I have a good set of gear that I would trust my life to. I have walked in temperatures ranging from –15 °C to +45 °C, from sea level to above 4,000 meters. With my pack, I can comfortably cover 40 kilometers with 1,000 meters of elevation gain in a day, 55 with 2,000 if I have to push it. I would say low risk, period, but in Japan the weather can get interesting, particularly in the mountains in January.
The Field Report
Low risk. We have a graphic design team in place, and a printer we’ve worked with for 20 years. Once I have the report written and proofed, they will get to work.
The Online Broadcast
Low risk. I may be going into the mountains, but this is still Japan: if my phone breaks I can replace it within a day, and these days you need nothing else to broadcast.
The Map
Low risk. Alice painted the sketch you see in a day. Imagine what she’ll be able to do when she has a full week at her disposal.
The Tenugui
Low risk. Hanga is a proper Japanese artisan who has been doing this for 20+ years. She has a vat of fermented indigo dye in her own bathroom, just in case.
The Alan Booth Book
Low risk. The books are printed, and they’re warehoused in Tokyo, where Timothy Harris will sign them and the publisher will ship them out from.
The Private Presentation
Low risk. One cannot walk 500 kilometers and leave without very interesting stories.
The Private Walk
Low-to-medium risk. You can do this with zero preparation. If you don’t believe me, ask my brother, who flew out of his office last year to join me for the last 1,000 kilometers of my walk across Japan. But there is always the weather. See above. Also, the spirits: You have to be on good terms with them.
Media
Credits and thanks
In memory of Alan Booth
Additional thanks to Gábor Bazsó, Ry Beville, John Ebert, Timothy Harris, Hanga Yoshihara-Horvath, Gábor Tálos and Ágnes Irina Vigh, and the hundreds of strangers who helped me on my walks, expecting nothing in return.
Best wishes,
Peter
