Japan for Hikers & Mountain Travelers

About this book

Japan may be the most thoroughly walked mountain country on earth — and the hardest for a foreign hiker to read. Its peaks have their profiles and its huts have their rules, but the walking itself — how a traverse is cut into stages, how a ridge is read for weather, how one path becomes four different journeys across the seasons, how a plan is made, filed and kept with a margin for the mountain's own ideas — has had no single English book. This one walks it all: 200 entries in eight parts take the unit of the journey on foot. It begins with the walking journey itself — the hut-to-hut traverse system, trailhead towns, maps and painted marks, dawn starts, ridges, valleys, forests, marshes, coasts and old highways — then crosses the great ranges one by one: the Northern Alps and their classic traverses from Kamikochi to Hakuba; the higher, emptier Central and Southern Alps, Yatsugatake and the Kiso hills; the wild northern country of the Daisetsuzan traverse, Shiretoko, Oze and the long Iide ridge; Fuji walked by all four of its routes, and the capital's own hills from Takao to Tanzawa; and the western ranges from the Rokko traverse and the Kyoto trail to Aso's caldera rim and the moss forests of Yakushima. A full part reads the mountain year season by season — lingering snow, the rains, thunder discipline, seas of cloud, the colour front, first snow and winter's low hills — and a final part is the walker's craft: itinerary design, the filed plan, pace and navigation, water and food, bears and rivers in spate, snow slopes and altitude, solo walking and walking with children. Seasons, timetables, fees and mountain rules change, and this book never freezes them into promises: every entry closes by pointing to the official source, so your walk is confirmed before it is trusted. For the hiker planning a first Japanese traverse, the Fuji climber who wants to walk rather than conquer, and anyone who has ever looked at a Japanese ridge line and wondered how it is walked.