Walking the Ohechi (one of the ancient pilgrimage routes), there are moments when my feet simply stop.
From asphalt to earth, from earth to grass.
With every step the surface changes, and that feeling travels from the soles of my feet all the way to the top of my head.
Pain shoots through.
Even that pain feels like a signal, reminding me exactly where I am.
I felt the same on the Camino. Walking a long distance slowly removes everything you hide behind.
When you leave behind the speed of modern life and move only as fast as your own feet, you start to notice things you normally walk past.
Horizon and Parallel
OTTOTTO
When people ask me why I walk, I never have a clear answer.
But I know this. There are things you can only feel when you go on foot.
I am drawn to recording things.
When I hang the camera around my neck and face the subject, I am asking myself what I am actually responding to.
What I see through the camera is not the landscape. It is my honest feeling in that moment.
What moved me. Why I stopped.
Keeping that evidence in photographs is something like drawing a map of who I am.
The things I feel while walking, captured by the camera.
I think those small pieces, built up over time, slowly shape who I am.
The Samurai of Ago
Local Cat
After School in Nachikatsuura
It was along a mountain path where birdsong carried clearly through the air.
I looked up, and a rocket was rising into the sky.
From the town of Kushimoto, the first rocket ever launched by a private Japanese company roared upward and vanished into the sky.
The most advanced technology of our time flew over the quiet ancient road, as if looking down.
Watching that, I almost asked myself where I had come from, and where I was going.
Almost.
The white smoke rising ahead, the roar moving through the mountain silence, the dull ache and tiredness still throbbing in my feet. Having all of it inside me at once felt strangely wonderful.
The Mark of Great Challenge
On the Ohechi, I found things I never found on the Camino.
The more I walked, the more I felt the weight of Japan, my own country, pressing in around me.
It felt like a luxury, uncovering step by step a richness in Japan I had always been too close to see.
When I was wandering around asking where I could pitch my tent, a monk noticed me, stopped me, and offered me a place to stay at the temple.
Passing by neighborhood grandmothers chatting together, one of them held out Japanese rice and tempura. "Here, eat," she said.
Their kindness carries a certain distance at first, the kind given to travelers passing through.
But when I greeted them in Japanese and the conversation went deeper, something in their faces softened and they let me a little closer.
Because we shared a language, they saw me not as someone passing through, but as one person to another.
Each time I felt that depth of kindness, I understood a little more what language can do, and the warmth that grows from it.
The Buddha who always watches over us.
A peaceful Zen room — not scary at all
Why do I walk.
The answer to that vague question is a little clearer to me now.
Walking, I realized again, is a careful way of observing the world through your own body.
Beautiful Wakayama Prefecture
