No country seems trendier right now than Japan, and thanks to a strong dollar, it's never been more affordable for Americans. But there's more to the country than crowded Tokyo temples with American couples dressed up as geisha and samurai, TikTok-inspired lines outside ramen joints, or Instagrammers jamming the pathways of Kyoto's Bamboo Forest.
My wife and I saw all the above. But then we spent a week in northern Honshu on quiet country lanes, forest trails, and mountain footpaths with a company called Walk Japan.
Walk Japan offers a range of walks and has been leading small groups since 1992, on trips that are deeply cultural and, to varying degrees, challenging. Walking has long been my preferred way to see a country, and we had chosen to walk in the footsteps of the seventeenth-century Japanese poet, Matsuo Basho (1644–1694), light-years away from the hordes in Tokyo and Kyoto.
It was an immersion in rural Tohoku, a part of the country that is heavily mountainous, deeply forested with towering cedar trees, and sparsely populated. Call it "forest bathing" if you like. Along with 10 other walkers, we visited impressive temples and gardens. We spent the nights in rural ryokans, sleeping on futons on tatami mats, with each ryokan boasting an onsen, a communal Japanese soaking bath.
We met the group 230 miles north of Tokyo, in the city of Sendai, reached by a quick 90-minute ride on a Shinkansen. A motley group of Americans, Brits, and Aussies, we were led by Mary Beth Horiai, an American, a longtime resident of Japan, married to a Japanese national, and a fluent Japanese speaker. She was steeped in the minutiae of a profoundly complicated culture.
Basho's famous poetic travelogue, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, is considered one of the great works of Japanese literature and inspired the walk. He was the master of Haiku, and that deceptively clever three-line puzzle of verse would be invoked many times over the week on the Basho Tohoku Tour: Narrow Road to the North.
Basho spent five months wandering in the Deep North. We would spend a week on a trip that included some of the country's most stellar scenery, such as the town of Matsushima on the Pacific Coast and a hike in the sacred Dewa Sanzan mountains.
We followed in the poet's footsteps along a path to the port town of Shiogama, boarding a ferry to cross Matsushima Bay. This striking island-filled bay is considered one of the classic Three Views of Japan, and it was indeed spectacular, with wave-washed limestone islands topped with twisted pine trees. We spent the night at a luxury ryokan overlooking Matsushima Bay.
Mary Beth schooled us in the rituals that would become habits throughout the week. Shoes left at the door, donning slippers to be worn except on tatami mats, wearing yukatas to the onsen and to dinner that night. She instructed us in onsen protocol – men and women have separate onsens, and you strip down and thoroughly wash yourself before immersing your naked body in the exceptionally hot water.
Each of the ryokans served set meals, kaiseki-style, elaborately arranged, with an array of 12 or more small lacquer and porcelain dishes. Mountain vegetables were a feature at every meal, a selection of pickled greens that included food I don't normally eat, such as knotweed, ostrich fern, Japanese mugwort, bracken, Japanese ginger, stem branch, and Siberian onion. Radishes and lotus root, miso soup, tempura shrimp, and Omadofu, or creamy tofu, made appearances, as did soba noodles, small pieces of mackerel, and, on occasion, wagyu beef for grilling on a hibachi. Asahi beer and local sake were welcome ways to unwind.
We explored the local temple complex, which featured sandstone rock carvings and gardens with moss carpets and raked gravel that rivaled those in Kyoto and Kanazawa. It was May, the season for flowering irises, azaleas, and rhododendrons. Days later, we caught the tail end of the cherry blossom season in a cluster of wild trees in northern Yamagata.
We visited Chūson-ji, a Buddhist temple in the town of Hiraizumi in southern Iwate Prefecture. A UNESCO World Heritage site, it was said to rival Kyoto in grandeur and sophistication throughout the 12th century. By Basho's time, it was already ancient history, as his haiku states:
Its Konjiki-do, or Golden Hall, is perhaps the most elaborately decorated Buddhist structure in Japan. We walked from the site of Shitomae-no-Seki, an Edo Period checkpoint, along a trail linking valleys and forest streams on the old Dewa Kaido highway, to a building Basho visited on his travels. We hiked the challenging terrain of the Natagiri Pass and had a boat ride on the Mogami-gawa, a mighty river that flows west to the Sea of Japan, which Basho also floated on.
We saw rice paddies and glimpsed snow-capped mountains as we passed through dense cedar forests, the paths strewn with heavy cedar boughs. I expected well-trodden pathways, but these were wild and untamed. It was our own private Japan.
It was also very quiet. Japan is experiencing serious depopulation thanks to a rapidly aging population and a low fertility rate. Nowhere is that more evident than in rural areas. We rarely encountered other people in the woods, or in the small villages where many of the homes were akiya, or abandoned, even walking through a derelict, overgrown ski resort, a casualty of the 1980s building boom.
There was unexpected wildlife – a screeching macaque and a viper slithering across a path. Most notable were the startling bear signs, alerting us to the presence of Asian black bears in the area. They were often hung next to a block of wood and a wooden mallet, and you were meant to whack it a few times to warn the bears that you were in the area.
On day five, we crossed into the area known as the Dewa-sanzan, or the Three Mountains of Dewa, which comprises Haguro-san, Gassan, and Yudono-san. Haguro-san, a sacred mountain, was the highlight. At its base was a 1,000-year-old cedar tree and a five-story pagoda, and we slowly ascended more than 2,400 stone steps like latter-day pilgrims. It led us to a mountaintop complex that was both a Buddhist temple and a Shinto shrine, our accommodation for the evening.
It proved to be one of the most important centers in Japan for Shugendo, a Shinto-Buddhist ascetic and mystical practice. We had a shojin-ryori vegetarian dinner before retiring for the night in very simple ryokan-style accommodations. Early the next morning, we attended a Shugendo ceremony in an enormous temple, with Shinto priests dressed in flowing white Heian-period robes, accompanied by drums, bells, and chanting, and concluding with a purification. The priest came over to us and spoke to our small group – we were the only ones in attendance – giving us peaceful words to contemplate.
On the final walking day, we were joined by a costumed mountain monk and artist, Daizaburo Sakamoto, a practicing yamabushi (mountain ascetic).
We explored the Rokujuri-Goe Kaido, an ancient trail connecting inland Yamagata with the coastal Shonai plain, and caught glimpses of the snow-streaked Mt. Gassan along the way. Spotting scarred beech trees with the marks of bear claws and an errant pile of bear scat prompted Daizaburo to blow on a conch shell he wore around his neck to warn the bears that we were nearby.
We spent our last night at Shizu Onsen, surrounded by peaks still capped with deep snow in late May. An onsen and a kaiseki meal awaited us. In the morning, stylish couples from Tokyo were arriving for a ski weekend in late May.
If there was enlightenment to be found on the walk, it came from seriously slowing down to a walking pace and taking one step at a time in Japanese forests. You need to see Tokyo and Kyoto, but a walk like this puts the entire country in perspective, letting you experience the unique, unhurried, and by turns profound, confounding and unexpected aspects of Japan.
For more details, go to Walk Japan.
This article was originally published on Forbes.com