The Michinoku Coastal Trail...
... footsteps, breath, remembrance.
Footstep after footstep, spongey earth trampled upon in a rhythm matched by breath, ethereal light, a rainbow’s green fractured into a million shards of other greens. The non-silence of the forest, snaps underfoot, gurgling streams, a falling leaf every time I pay attention. It could be 30 years ago, maybe two centuries; maybe we’ve jumped a generation and we’re in the future right now, who knows? Fragile—the logging areas are violent gashes, and all the Michinoku Coastal Trail runs through secondary forest—but it feels unchanging and overarching, like it will come back no matter what, and it will, really, given enough time, deep time. (“There is a dangerous comfort to be drawn from deep time,” writes Robert Macfarlane in Underland.)
But it could all go again the next second, or the next day, week, month, year, or century. And it might affect this spot, if the elevation is low enough, or maybe this spot will be spared, who’s to say? Every time a tsunami has swept the coast of Japan’s Sanriku—869, 1611, 1896, 1933, 1960, 2011—it seems the possibilities of what devastation might happen expand. The sea walls need to go even higher, even thicker. Nobody’s really sure, after all, what they can and can’t predict of nature.
October is one of the best months to walk the trail, which follows the incredible coast of Tohoku for about 1,000 kilometres, from Hachinohe in Aomori to Soma in Fukushima. At once wild but also often tamed, sea-walled port after sea-walled port protects boats and communities along the way. The trail was designed to stoke tourist interest in the coast, particularly after the 2011 triple tragedy of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident. The evidence now, at least in the first 200 km or so, is somber where unintentional—still-ruined shacks and houses—and respectful where deliberate, such as the Taro Kanko Hotel, cordoned off and left simply as it remained after the wave hit.
The trail, which runs through urban areas as well as protected and community forests, hasn’t been busy this October, though. On arrival at Same Station, near the trailhead, another hiker, possibly Japanese, gets off with me, then I see him again at the campsite, 9 kilometres away. Another tent in my tent’s colour scheme is already set up, its owner nowhere around. One cafe is open in the village but it closes at 5pm. The only diner, I have a quick curry with rice, and a matcha, topped with a marshmellow, and there’s not another soul to be seen, hiker or not, heading back to the campsite.
Day two, a German or perhaps Scandinavian guy buys supplies at the supermarket the same time as me, heading to the next campsite. Two very serious tent complexes have been set up by Japanese families, one draped with whimsical fairy lights. The horizon is awash with white lights from fishing boats trapped spectacularly underneath a cloud front. In the morning, a sole surfer paddles beyond the reef. I meet the German again the next morning waiting for the local train; he knows to get a ticket when you get on, and to present it and pay the driver when you get off. He gets off the stop before me, which is handy, because I can’t quite follow the signs with instructions.
On day three, a cheerful, wiry man from Sendai wearing a Michinoku Trail official hat—a section-hiking enthusiast—tells me he walked the optional Hashikami loop near the start of the trail a day earlier and bumped into four Australians. Later, trudging bedraggled into Kuji after 25 kilometres in the rain, a Western woman heading briskly in the opposite direction nods a hello.
Day four: no hikers, just Japanese families and couples for the extremely scenic local train ride. Two restaurants on my hitlist in Fudai are missing or closed. A friendly shopkeeper though throws in an extra pastry with my order, while one of his customers, a tiny, wizened lady, who has to sit on arrival at the store to rest, hands me a handful of chestnuts to add to my bag.
Day five, I have a guide, Kota, for the morning as this section of the trail is not recommended as safe to do solo. (When I see the ladder we need to climb down, I understand. I’m also thankful to not have to walk through two hand-dug tunnels, hosting occasional sleeping bats, alone). Kota comes equipped with bear spray (“for bear and bad person” it says on the can), good stamina, and a masterful command of Google Translate. We don’t see a single other person, just bear-chewed wooden seats and signs and bear scratches on tree trunks. Apparently there’s a preservative in paint that bears like; new seats and signs are now plastic or stone. After leaving Kota, I stop at a rest hut for hikers in what feels like the middle of nowhere. Inside is a curated display of toys and a chair with a white towel draped over its back, as if an attendant for a busy shop has just popped out for a toilet break. For dinner, a hotel restaurant 10 minutes’ walk away that I was counting on to feed me is closed; the owners act like concerned parents and offer to bring down a meal to my tent at 5:30. Just one other tent, pitched by a Japanese couple, keeps me company, along with screaming deer from the thick forest skirting the campsite.
Day six, an older Canadian couple are waiting for the local train along with two bureaucrats from Canberra. I end up sharing the trail with the Australians for the next three days—Toshi from the Michinoku Trail Club has planned our itineraries and they coincide. Glen and Anthony are speedy, navigating by paper, and aren’t using trekking poles. They choof off during each elevation stretch, waiting for me at the top, and I understand now how you can miss someone or some animal by just a minute or two in the forest and not even realise it. Eventually Glen commends me for doing well; he represented Australia in trail running 31 years ago, he says.
Day seven—we pass a northbound Taiwanese, umbrella-covered hiker in the rain—and the Taro Kanko hotel looms suddenly. In the drizzle, it’s all so hushed, sound sucked right away. I think of Macfarlane again, writing of the Saami vision of the underland “as a perfect inversion of the human realm, with the ground always the mirror-line, such that ‘the feet of the dead, who must walk upside down, touch those of the living, who stand upright’.”
At the hotel, the Western woman I’d seen days earlier joins us for dinner. She’s a British geologist and a retired coastal erosion community liaison worker. I ask her if she’s read any Robert Macfarlane. She hasn’t—doesn’t like picking up the errors that laypeople include when writing about geology—but she knows him slightly, she volunteers for a film festival he’s involved with. After two days with company, I’ve gone soft and marvel that she’s doing the trail alone, without even Toshi to help her book accommodation.
Day eight, I peel away from the Australians to camp for my last night. There’s another memorial that I’d like to spend time at, but I’ve only got an hour of light left, and I have at least another 45 minutes to walk, so I push on, marvelling that you can come so far for something, but then the banalities of logistics keep you from it.
Day nine I wake to see two tents have pitched at the campsite overnight, one with an American woman starting her hike here heading northbound. We chat and once I’m packed, I simply say goodbye and walk off, to continue along the trail, right by the campsite.
Otherwise day nine is a hiker-free 12 kilometers. As I eat a pastry, I’m swooped by a buzzard (according to a birds of Iwate website) while waiting for the first of two buses, two trains, then a shuttle bus to my hotel at Narita. I cherish the little scratch it leaves behind, faded by the time I’m in bed that night.