I 💜 Wasting Ink

I’m Peter Orosz, a fool on the internet who goes on long walks. You probably know me as the guy who walked nine thousand kilometers around Japan. I’m the same guy who wrote The Wilds of Shikoku, a short book about another, much shorter walk, also in Japan. You can read more about me here.

A person sits on a yellow parking barrier outside a Japanese convenience store, wearing a green smock and khaki pants. There’s a white tiled wall behind him with Japanese signage, and store windows displaying advertisements. The lighting suggests it’s late afternoon or early evening, with mountains visible in the background.

Photo by Gyula Simonyi

This website, I 💜 Wasting Ink, is where I keep my archives. You can check out maps of my long walks and read the field diaries that I kept on some of them.

What I’m doing now

Writing a blog about my 9,000-kilometer walk around Japan

From March to June 2025, I’m an artist in residence at Tenjinyama Art Studio in Sapporo, Japan, where I’m writing Data Reduction 9K, a blog about figuring out whether my 9,000-kilometer walk around Japan was interesting enough for a book. Sign up here to get an email when I write a new post:

You can read older posts here.

Translating Alan Booth and myself

I’m working on a Hungarian translation that combines my book The Wilds of Shikoku with Alan Booth’s Roads Out of Time (from the anthology This Great Stage of Fools), the account of Booth’s 1983 walk across Shikoku that my book was based on. It’s going to be published on this website later this year. Sign up to my mailing list if you want to get an email when it’s done.

Projects

A walk around (and out of) Japan

Map of Japan with my walking routes in 2017, 2022, 2023, and 2024 highlighted.

Between 2017 and 2024, I walked nine thousand kilometers in four parts around the Japanese archipelago that crossed eighteen of the country’s islands, including the four major ones.

You can read the field diaries I kept on the first and seconds parts of the journey: These Walking Dreams, in 2017, and Human Again, in 2022.

I’m currently writing a blog called Data Reduction 9K about the entire walk at Tenjinyama Art Studio in Sapporo, Japan. Sign up to get an email when I write a new post.

A walk across Shikoku

Peter Orosz holds a copy of his book “The Wilds of Shikoku”.

In January and February 2019, I walked across Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four main islands. This journey was not directly connected with my long walk around Japan. Instead, I followed in the footsteps of Alan Booth, the English author of The Roads to Sata and Looking for the Lost, who walked across Shikoku in May and June 1983.

The Wilds of Shikoku is a short book I wrote about this journey that I published in print in 2019. You can read more about the book here and buy a copy in my shop.

I also kept a field diary as I walked, which has detailed maps of the journey, and a lot of pictures and short videos.

Alan Booth’s account of his 1983 journey, Roads Out of Time, was published in February 1985 by Winds, the Japan Airlines in-flight magazine, then re-published in 2018 in the anthology This Great Stage of Fools.

I’m currently working on a Hungarian translation that combines Booth’s account with mine, which will be published here later in 2025.

Keep in touch

A woman walking through an archway with distinctive architectural features. It has white walls with burgundy red accents along the sides, decorated with ornate gold sunburst medallions and decorative metal fittings. The woman, shown in silhouette from behind, is wearing dark clothing and carrying a bag as they walk toward the exit. Through the archway, there’s a view of a coastal landscape with mountains in the background, a body of water, and some pine trees in the foreground. A bright red railing is visible just outside the exit. The overall scene has a moody, overcast atmosphere with gray skies above the distant mountains and cityscape.

If you want to hear from me every once in a while, I have a low-frequency mailing list called In Between, where I send dispatches about my new and ongoing projects. Sign up here:

Last update: March 15, 2025


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