Showing posts with label Japan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Japan. Show all posts
05 June 2012
Back to Japan
Earlier this year I repeated in part an organised trek along sections of the Nakasendo (中山道), taking a shortened winter version of the walk organised by Walk Japan. While it's fashionable to decry organised travel in any form (see comments others have left on some earlier posts), there are times when an immense amount of value can be added, and this is what Walk Japan does, providing native-level Japanese speakers, immense amounts of academically sourced background information, and access to parts of Japan (especially traditional inns and bathhouses) that in some cases might be loathe to accept foreigners if they were not confident they'd been schooled in the niceties of Japanese etiquette (sleeping, bathing, and eating in particular). Despite a great deal of travel in Japanese backwaters over the last 20 years, and despite remembering my first Nakasendo trip with a pleasure that could only lead to the second being disappointing, the winter version, with long tramps through 30cm-deep snow drifts over multiple passes, and through silent, whitened countryside, was memorable in its own right.
This is the text of a short piece, linked above, that subsequently appeared in the Wall Street Journal until the title 'Walk Me Through Japan,' just one of a number published in several locations partly intended to help revive tourism to Japan in the wake of the tsunami. Shame on me, in fact, for taking so long to publish anything on that topic here.
Walk Me Through Japan
In the suburbs of Nakatsugawa, about 300 kilometers west of Tokyo, a wooden signboard carries notices of the kind common in travelers' haunts across Asia, such as the right prices to pay for porters and transport. But in famously orderly Japan, where crime against visitors is almost unknown, it's a surprise also to see warnings against muggers and drug dealers.
But these notices are merely reproductions of edicts from the Tokugawa shoguns once in control of traffic on Japan's ancient Nakasendo, a footpath-highway between Kyoto and Edo (now Tokyo). Their relevance expired 150 years ago along with the shogunate itself, but some sections of the old route have remained unchanged since its creation in the 17th century.
Just across a footbridge over a busy highway, orderly suburbs with their gardens of tiny topiary peter out and the asphalt turns to earth with a soft coating of leaf litter and pine needles. Then as the path leaves tidy farmland and winds gently up through ever wilder landscape to an 1,100 meter pass, sections are paved with centuries-old irregular stone blocks, whose rounded edges once provided purchase for straw porter sandals. A light dusting of snow decorates path-side statues of red-bibbed Jizo, the Buddhist protector of unborn children and travelers, and Kannon, protector of pack animals and porters.
Originally only the feudal lords of Japan and their retinues were allowed to use this mountain highway, but for 20 years now specialist operator Walk Japan (www.walkjapan.com) has led small groups on an increasingly popular trek through well-preserved historic post towns and over remote mountain passes, whose beauty inspired woodblock prints by Hiroshige and others.
Nights are spent at creaking wooden traditional inns, many of which have been run by the same family for hundreds of years. They have changed little since their founding, except for the handy addition of wi-fi and heated lavatory seats.
The first day of the shorter winter version of the walk, recently revived as the first anniversary of the tsunami approaches and foreign visitors return to Japan. The walkers reach the hamlet of Shinchaya at mid-afternoon on the first day. There, the multi-course evening meal, taken seated on the tatami-matted floor while wearing a cotton yukata gown and haori jacket—as travelers have for centuries—is fit for a king, let alone a lord. It includes wild boar from the surrounding forest shot by the still spry 70-year-old host himself, whose family has run an inn here for eight generations.
His ancestors would have seen feudal lords and their retinues pass by on their way to and from Edo. The Tokugawa shoguns created their highway network partly in order to keep restive aristocrats busy by compelling them to make extended visits, and to leave family members behind as hostages. The expense of travel and of maintaining twin establishments drained resources that might otherwise have funded insurrection. More than 30 different lords were instructed to use the Nakasendo, with their travel carefully scheduled so that the post towns would not be over-stretched.
In summer tour buses drop groups at the top of the steep hill at Magome, the next post town. But in winter there's almost no one about, although buns stuffed with piping hot meat or vegetables are still on sale. Once broken open they steam in the wintry sunshine, and fuel the walk over Magome Pass.
Halfway to the next post town, a 250-year-old tea house offers tea, pickled radish and sour plums, along with mochi rice cakes in its smoky, earthen-floored interior.
The path snakes down prettily through giant stands of bamboo to Tsumago, perhaps the best-preserved post town of all, completely free of any sign of modernity. A magnificent inn used by feudal lords has been turned into a museum with explanations of the highway's history.
After Tsumago there's a downhill walk through farmland and forests to Nagiso to pick up a local train to Kiso-Fukushima, where an ancient barrier station has been recreated. Here samurai bristling with the fearsome weaponry now on display examined travel documents, searched for unlicensed guns and illegal Christian paraphernalia and checked the sex of more androgynous males to make sure that no hostage wives were being smuggled out of Edo.
In winter the guards dealt with only a dozen or so travelers a day, and they are as few now. At other seasons a lord's retinue might number 3000—in 1862, 17-year-old Princess Kazunomiya's party of 15,000 plus porters took a full three days to pass.
Two days later the trip ends in Matsumoto atop the tower of a magnificent wooden castle built in the 1580s, the oldest surviving in Japan and named Black Raven for its layers of darkly lacquered wood.
Many modern-day visitors merely ricochet between Tokyo and Kyoto by bullet train, but Japan seems almost purpose-built for taking things slowly. Its volcanic countryside offers gentle climbs to passes with fine views that always compensate for the effort made, as well as mineral-rich geothermally-heated spring waters cleverly piped straight to baths at each night's accommodation, and which provide the perfect balm for any aches at the end of a day on foot.
The brash and glittery modern Japan of tune-playing crosswalks and talking vending machines seems not just of a different time, but of a different country altogether.
03 March 2010
What is 'Real Travel' Revisited
> In the context of this discussion, i.e. about famils/press trips, I consider 'real' travel to be travel that is going to as close to the experience of the average independent traveler who organizes everything themselves and has to face the hiccups that come with that, from bookings that haven't been held to missed connections for example.
This improved definition doesn't completely address the points made in the earlier post on which it comments.
In order to provide quality research for the independent traveller one has to behave actually quite differently from an independent traveller: staying in several different hotels rather than one; visiting many other hotels; visiting and assessing every sight; spending time asking many questions so that no independent traveller will have to ask them; eating at many different kinds of restaurants and trying many different kinds of transport. This, at least, is the minimum for any serious guidebook work, and it doesn't resemble holiday travel, or 'real' travel under this definition, in any way.
Travel features these days rarely come with as much comprehensive practical information as they should, although editors quite reasonably presume they need to offer a good read rather than fill their pages with technicalities that can also be garnered from web sites and guide books. Nor is it clear that taking a journey once, and finding that a connection is missed (in the example given) is of itself going to tell us very much about the normal experience. Perhaps on the other 364 days of the year the connection is made. Perhaps, in order to give useful advice, it's going to be necessary to enquire further as to whether the connection is usually made. Once that is admitted the case for having to do it exactly the way an independent traveller would do is rather weakened, at least for feature writing. If the trip is part of the story of course it has to be taken, but often the destination is the story, not the method of getting there, and picking up a rental car organised by someone else, or even being driven, will make no significant difference to the quality of the experience to be described, and may indeed provide opportunities for richer writing.
There's no particular merit in spending three days trying to find someone willing to be interviewed for background (and in many cultures simply being unable to do so because you do not have the requisite introduction) when there's an agency that can make the arrangements for you. At their best, these agencies fill out the agenda you set, and there seems no good reason, when you've asked for access to be provided to a certain castle for instance, to turn down the opportunity to interview the eighth-generation owner who now resides in a small part of it, and who can tell you stories about repairs, about quirky ancestors, about her plans for the future, and other information of interest to readers, even though they will never themselves encounter the individual in question (and so, by the definition offered, the visit isn't 'real').
But travel writing isn't after all a scientific experiment, nor typically objective, and while the results need to be similar when the travel-experiment is repeated, they do not need, and indeed can never be, exactly the same. Travel writing is frequently full of fortuitous one-off events that make it more interesting to read, and none the worse for the fact that no one else can repeat those events.
The argument also seems to want to ask me to put down the tools I have at my disposal and which I would usually use to help me winkle out the facts needed by the independent traveller. These would include far more experience of independent travel than the average traveller has, often repeated experience of a particular destination and knowledge of its particular quirks, and, to take China as one example, a knowledge of the local language which 99% of other independent 'real' travellers won't have. Yet this enables me to read bus station signboards, to make detailed enquiries of departure times, ticket regulations, directions to platforms, and a great deal of background information. which the 'real' traveller would be unable to get for himself. The point of the research is provide precisely the tools the independent traveller needs, and there's no merit in simply going up to the ticket window as any other traveller would, using my native language and sign language only, and struggling to achieve my aims, when I could instead find out precisely what the 'real' traveller needs to know in a few moments using the local language in a way the 'real' traveller almost certainly cannot. Then I can give him the characters for what he needs, so he can show them at the ticket window and have a good chance of getting what he wants fairly quickly.
To argue otherwise amounts to supporting the position sometimes taken in defence of the Lonely Planet method of sending people off to write guide books about countries they haven't previously experienced: "That's good, because they travel just like us." But I don't want a book that through pure ignorance leads me into pitfalls that the authors have been unable to detect, with information that is false, as is the case in many a shoddy LP guide. I want a book written by someone with long experience of the destination, familiar with the local culture, and with command of a local language, who will actually be able to find out what it going on.
Ignorance is never bliss, and avoiding the high prices that may be paid as a result of inexperience is precisely the reason people buy guide books.
> I see the experience of being chauffered everywhere by a driver with a PR person at the elbow as being sanitized, artificial and therefore 'unreal' because this isn't how the vast majority of people I'm writing for travel. It would be different of course if I was writing for people who primarily take organized tours, as the experiences are very similar.
The first point has been dealt with previously and above, and while there's every reason to be cautious of PR people, the agenda of many is no more than to enable writers to get the stories they want, which gives a richer and more informative account to those who will travel independently afterwards, not a less informative one.
I engineer and tweak itinerary contents to suit my own agenda, and turn down trips where it's clear that's not going to be possible. The lady who drove me from place to place around Jamaica was perfectly frank about the country's problems, while providing a lot of background into Jamaican culture simply through conversation about both our lives and about what we saw as we drove around. I didn't want her to start with, because this can sometimes turn out really badly, but if I return to Jamaica (as I hope to do) I'd be very happy to travel with her again. She enabled me to get a lot of good material, as the best guides with the best tourism bureaux, often do.
I'm not long back from possibly my 40th trip to Hong Kong and another excellent experience with a guide who took me round tiny back street areas for a story on lesser-known Hong Kong districts, constantly revising the itinerary as she grew to better understand my needs.
There's no dichotomy here: not all PR efforts are evil or deceptive, and very little travel undertaken to assemble travel stories directly resembles the experience of individual leisure travellers. Usually it cannot; and it certainly need not do.
The second point concerning organised tours is, I think, incorrect. Groups press trips, as already pointed out, bear no resemblance to organised tours as usually experienced as, once again, they are designed to make it possible for a group of journalists to get material usable for stories. They also take routes to combinations of destinations no organised tour would ever take, and often offer special access that make the stories richer. I usually avoid these, not least because there's often one idiot journalist (or 'journalist') who makes things difficult, everyone ends up taking home the same stories, and these stories are often rather obvious and predictable. But occasionally they are designed flexibly enough that individual writers can get different angles from each other, and provide access otherwise hard to get if travelling individually.
But I can't in general think of a good argument for turning down the offer of making arrangements for access to sumo training stables if those are the focus of a story; nor the provision of an interpreter who quickly scribbles down for me translations of what the stable master or trainer is saying to the trainees; nor the opportunity provided to talk directly to the trainees and staff (nor the provision of a taxi to get there). It's hopeless to think that in two weeks in Japan I'm going to be able to say very much that's meaningful (despite multiple visits I speak only a few phrases of Japanese) about a culture that's so complex and different, and I'd look pretty foolish if I tried. Concentrating on the detail of the stables' history and traditions, the experience of watching the training sessions at two of them, I'd still be foolish to turn down the assistance provided. (Thanks, Tokyo Convention and Visitors Bureau for making the arrangements, and apologies that appearance of the piece has been delayed.)
Finally, it needn't be (and in fact isn't) the purpose of all travel writing to provide instructions to others as to how they can follow the same route. Some travel writing intends merely to inspire readers to do their own research and make their own arrangements, and other travel writing, as was originally the case of most of it before the whole population of the developed world took to the skies, intends merely to describe, in an entertaining and vivid way, experiences that readers will probably not be having for themselves. In these cases whether the castle is reached by public transport, by self-drive in a rental car paid for by someone else, or by chauffeured limousine is neither here nor there, as long as the castle is reached.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)