I 💜 Wasting Ink → Diaries → These Walking Dreams → Day 36 (May 18, 2017)

Kawai, Tokushima → 📍 Kawai Pass → Ishii, Tokushima

Map of Tokushima Prefecture with author’s route between Kawai and Ishii highlighted. 🗺 Open map in GaiaGPS →

Panorama of a valley flanked on both sides by forested hillsides, with a road visible in the bottom left.

A wall clock half-buried in a carpet of cedar branches. 📍 Kawai Pass, Tokushima

A collapsed Japanese house at the edge of the forest, surrounded on all sides by flowers and saplings. 📍 Ebatake, Tokushima

Japanese houses decay from the inside. Once abandoned, water gets into the roof through a tile or two blown away in the late summer typhoons, then, once the beams have rotted, the roof or the entire house folds on itself. In the verdant valleys leading from Mount Tsurugi towards the fertile basin of the Yoshino River, house after house stood like this, melting into the earth. In a few years, they will be gone without a trace, like the railways of the Upper Congo.

A Snoopy figure holds a coffee cup by a lantern in front of a house.

Two men sit at a restaurant table, one watching television, the other reading a newspaper. 📍 Kawamata, Tokushima

Looking into a Nissan Skyline R32’s intercooler from the front.

A bucket of sky blue paint with a brush inside.

Closeup of a body panel of the Skyline, painted bubble gum pink mixed with glitter.

The pink rear end of the car has a huge aftermarket wing.

The car parked in front of a Japanese house. 📍 Kamiyama, Tokushima

That’s one happy Skyline. I like Skylines. And who wouldn’t like a happy Skyline?

These Walking Dreams is a visual field diary of a 4,300-kilometer walk from one end of Japan to the other, in the spring and summer of 2017.

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