A journey to Sapporo and other ways of having fun
There’s a good chance you haven’t heard from me since October 2023. Peter here, the guy who was then walking around Japan.
The last letter you read on this mailing list I wrote from a convenience store in Goshogawara, a town in a region of north-eastern Japan called Tsugaru. There, the gangs of schoolchildren swinging by to get their breakfasts were treated to the sight of a middle-aged European guy typing on a small computer in a nest of walking gear, taking a break 5,700 kilometers in on a 9,000-kilometer walk around their country, and thinking about apples between eating apples. It was apple season in Tsugaru, and the apples grown there are only rivaled by the apples in Almaty, which is an unfair comparison as the slopes of the hills south of Almaty is where apples come from.
This indecent orb I got from a grandmother, followed by dozens more, was my first Tsugaru apple:
My walk ended seven month later, on the morning of May 1, 2024, at the westernmost point of a small island called Yonaguni. My wife, Natalie, had joined me when I left the Japanese mainland a month earlier, and we traveled together on a long arc from there to Yonaguni, walking across seven of Japan’s enchanted southern islands between long ferry rides.
Maybe you also like maps? Here is a map of this whole lunacy (open full-size):
When we ran out of Japan at last, we could have seen Taiwan, which is closer to Yonaguni than the nearest of the Japanese convenience stores I last wrote you from, but, alas, it was a cloudy morning. The place is in the news a lot recently because the Japanese military has built a large base there, in preparation of the world becoming even weirder than it already is. We walked by the base at night in a rainstorm and were blissfully unaware of it, our only companions a coconut crab and some strange birds. Without it, Yonaguni feels like one’s image of a remote Pacific dream-land. On the sea voyage there, we watched brown boobies hunt flying fish like javelins, and on the island itself, we were often surrounded by nothing but small feral horses and the steel blue sea. When they brush up against the dark grey coral rocks, the horses leave tufts of their hair on them:
Now, at last, I’m going to write about it. Horse hair on coral rocks, volcanoes in the Okhotsk fog, unmade beds in the ruins of an earthquake, EVVVVVERYTHING.
!!My new project!!
We’re currently packing our bags to return to Japan. For the next three months, we’re going to be artists in residence at Tenjinyama Art Studio in Sapporo, the northern city I walked through twice on my way around Japan. There, Natalie is going to paint the pictures for a book she’s working on, while I’m going to write a blog about my journey. It’s called Data Reduction 9K, launching next Friday (March 14), and you can sign up here.
The question I’m looking to answer is this: Was this whole thing, which began in 2017 and ended in 2024, interesting enough for a book? How does one write about EVVVVVERYTHING on a 9,000-kilometer walk, anyway? (One of my literary heroes, Rory Stewart, who walked 9,000 kilometers from Turkey to Bangladesh in 2000–2002, did so by not writing about 8,400 kilometers of it, then writing a haunting, mesmerizing book about the rest.) Also, does the world in 2025 need another book about another long walk in Japan written by another middle-aged white guy? A lot of uncomfortable questions. What I’m going to do to find out is go through the mountains of notes, maps, pictures, voice memos, et cetera, that I kept and took and drew on the journey, and see if a clearer picture emerges from them. Data Reduction 9K is going to be about this process.
What I already know is this: walking around Japan was the most interesting thing I’ve ever done in my life. And I suspect it wasn’t so much about Japan as about the act of walking on such a scale. I hope you’re going to find my blog fun to read. Here, again, is the signup link.
Writing in Hungarian after 10 years
Hungarian is the language I grew up speaking, and while most of my writing has been in English, I’ve also written in Hungarian, but not since 2015. It’s a shame because writing in Hungarian is such fun. So what I did to have a few weeks of that fun is I translated my book The Wilds of Shikoku, which I wrote in English in 2019, into Hungarian — and concurrently, looking for more fun, I also translated Alan Booth’s Roads Out of Time, the in-flight magazine article from 1985 (!!) that my book was based on. Translating had always made my stomach turn, but to my great surprise it was the most fun I’d had since walking around Japan. If you can read Hungarian, I think you’ll be in for a treat. It’s going to be published on my website later this year and I’ll write about it here when it’s done. I’m not very funny but Booth is, and in Hungarian he’s just as funny as he is in English.
One thing I learned that’s missing from the Hungarian language: the expression “pissed as a newt”. Someone should invent it if only because the word for newt, gőte, is one of the gems (it rhymes with the name of the German poet). Too bad Newt in Aliens wasn’t called Gőte in Hungarian. If I were a girl, I wouldn’t mind having that name. They’re among the more beautiful and mysterious creatures I’ve come across.
A name-giving ceremony
For the several years that this very-low-frequency mailing list has been up, it didn’t have a name. I just referred to it, after the name of my website, as the I 💜 Wasting Ink Mailing List. It’s now called In Between but is otherwise the same thing, and if you were subscribed to its old iteration, your subscription has been automatically transferred to this new one. I’m planning to write a little more frequently, maybe once every month or two. It’s an announcements list and also my coffee table, and you are always welcome to join or leave.
Promises: I will not write about books I’ve read recently (even if I still have waking dreams about Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Between the Woods and the Water).
I have to pack
Coffee grinder, computers, a change of clothes, binoculars (maybe the red-crowned cranes are still on Hokkaido?!), sleeping bag, ice cream spoon, see you very soon.
And sign up for Data Reduction 9K if you want to read my Japan blog.
With warm wishes from Estonia,
Peter