(If you have not read the prologue, start here)
My journeys begin long before I climb onto a bicycle. Before I experience a place with my body, I experience it in my head. That is how I like to travel. In conversations with ChatGPT about the places along the route, I deepen my understanding of their history and culture, and work out where I might want to stop. With a basic grounding in Japanese history and geography, I can explore in finer detail, which makes the preparation wonderfully absorbing. It was a luxurious way to spend my time.
Take the hillside rice terraces at Obasute, for example. Rice terraces are hardly unusual, I thought at first. But consider what they require: each level patch has to be carefully carved out of a hillside. Before machinery, that must have meant an enormous investment. Could such a landscape have come into being without the long peace of Japan’s last shogunate? And if that is the interesting part of the hardware, there is software to consider too. These extensive terraces are intimately connected from top to bottom by water. Surely a system like that could not function without a strong local community.
Today, those small, inefficient fields and weakening community ties must be undermining the economic logic of the terraces. There are support programs to help sustain them, and tourism revenue presumably helps make the economics work again too. Seen that way, perhaps even I, arriving here on my bicycle, become part of the system that keeps these terraces alive.
Apparently the world-famous woodblock artist Hiroshige even made a famous print of these hillside rice terraces. If this place is this intriguing and this famous, how could I not stop? And so the route kept evolving
Or take a weaving town deep in snow country, called Tokamachi. The AI tells me it is known for a crinkled textile called Echigo chijimi. Reading further, I learn that weaving developed as a side gig during the snowbound winters, when farming was impossible. Spreading the fabric over the snow to bring out its colors is another practice that belongs to snow country.
That raises another question: how did they sell it? I discover that kimono merchants in Tokyo maintained purchasing offices in the town. In the other direction, local textile wholesalers sent employees to the great city to visit VIP customers, including samurai households, and take their orders.
So that was how they heard directly what customers wanted, and developed their products accordingly. A luxury product, made to order with a long lead time, suited a snowbound place with plenty of labor available. A lightweight product, easy to transport, suited a remote production center far from its customers. Here was a product—and a way of doing business—that belonged to this particular place.
A little farther downriver, another town leads me to a remarkable samurai leader from the final years of the shoguns’ rule: Kawai Tsugunosuke. The more I read about him, the more fascinating his life becomes. In his ability to see where the times were heading, he resembles the revolutionaries who would help build modern Japan. Yet his sense of honor will not let him support overthrowing the old government. He tries instead to pursue armed neutrality, fails, and throws himself into war. I had no idea such an extraordinary man existed. Before I knew it, I had even read a book about his life and written a blog post of my own.
For studying the terrain, Google Maps alone no longer felt sufficient. Searching for something more, I discovered a technique called Red Relief Image Maps, available through Japan’s national mapping agency. This marvelous visualization technique makes even the subtlest folds in the landscape clearly visible. It was developed in 2002, of all things. That such advances are still happening in a seemingly mature field like map rendering is exciting in itself.
Using these maps, I begin to understand the river terraces we will pass along the way. Yes, I can see the land stepping down like terraced fields. Isn’t this what formed when we poured water through the sandbox at nursery school? What is the physical mechanism? I see: as the land rises, for example, the river cuts deeper, leaving its former riverbed high above it. Repeat that process, and you get this great staircase.
Farther north, around a great volcano rising near the coast, the shapes look unmistakably like lava that erupted, cooled, and solidified. Those boil-like bumps to the north might be masses of rock hurled out by an explosion. My knowledge of physics, the relief map in front of me, and the lives people lead on this land begin to come together.
I spent days absorbed in this research, in conversations with AI, in discoveries and the questions they raised. What a luxury of time. This is how my own picture of the places I am about to visit begins to take shape in my head.