Japan for Touch Travelers

About this book

Most guidebooks compete for your eyes. This one is written for the oldest sense of all. Two hundred journeys, each one a day composed around what the hand meets: the temple step worn to a shine by centuries of feet, the great gate's timber giving back the morning's cold, the mountain stream over the palm, the ferry rope on the crossing, the noren's heavy cotton at a shop door, the kiln wall still warm an hour after the firing, the storehouse wall holding its shade at noon, and the first snow of the year, met in a bare hand on its own ground.

The unit of the book is the journey itself — not the material, not the craft, not the workshop, not the place handled on the way. A temple matters because of the stone its approach gives back to the palm; a garden because of the wooden edge where the hand may rest; a market because of the straw and bamboo that wake before its stalls. Eight parts: setting out into the hand-felt country · stone, gate and temple-ground touch journeys · water, stream and shore journeys for the wet hand · forest, bark and earth journeys · cloth, paper and town journeys through the woven streets · clay, kiln and craft-town journeys crossed for their kept surfaces · rope, rail and working-town journeys · and the texture calendar and the turn, closing with the two hundred and first journey — the reader's own street, under their own hand.

Because opening hours, closures, fares, event dates and seasonal arrangements change, the book never asserts them as current fact: every one of the 200 entries closes with its own official check — the named official source (garden, temple and shrine offices, railway, bus and ferry companies, town and prefectural tourism associations, museum and park authorities, the onsen association, the forest office) whose information settles what is current before you travel. It asserts no texture rankings, no strength or coldness claims and no health or healing effects. Textural patterns are described as patterns, which are permanent; the day's arrangements are always referred to official information. Written and created in Japan.