Comparing Alan Booth’s walk through Japan in 1977 with mine in 2017
Left: Alan Booth in 1977, south to north. Right: me in 2017, south to east.
These maps compare two rather different approaches to journeys that can both be described as “walking the length of Japan.” The black and white outline map shows Alan Booth’s journey in 1977 that became the subject of his book The Roads to Sata. The topographical map on the right is my own journey from 2017 that I wrote about in the field diary These Walking Dreams. We walked in broadly opposing directions: Booth from north to south, me from south to east.
| Booth | Orosz | |
|---|---|---|
| Start date | June |
April 13, 2017 |
| Finish date | November 3, 1977 | August 21, 2017 |
| Start point | Cape Sōya, Hokkaido | Kagoshima City, Kagoshima |
| End point | Cape Sata, Kagoshima | Nemuro, Hokkaido |
| Approx. distance | ~3,300 km | ~4,100 km |
All night the wind blew into my room in the minshuku at Cape Soya and I couldn’t sleep. The wind sang as it blew through the stovepipes till I thought there was a nest of birds singing: crafty birds, Japanese birds, transforming the pipes into their own loudspeaker. In the morning the owner of the minshuku gave me a small cotton handkerchief with a map of Hokkaido on it. It would come in handy if I took a wrong turn, he explained. Carefully, he unfolded the handkerchief and stamped the address and telephone number of his minshuku in the top right-hand corner.
‘What’s the date?’ he called out to his wife in the kitchen.
‘The twenty-eighth,’ she called back.
With great concentration he inked a second rubber stamp and neatly stamped ‘June 28’ under his address, stepping back to admire the effect. But it still didn’t satisfy him, so below the date he wrote in small red characters ‘7:00 start’.
As though on cue the next-door speakers squealed into life and for the third or fourth time I retied my bootlaces.
‘It’s the twenty-ninth,’ I remembered.
‘It’s the twenty-ninth!’ the minshuku owner howled, scratching through the last figure of the date with his ball pen and scrawling the new figure in on top of it so that the result was a barely legible mess.
‘My wife is a donkey,’ he whispered.
— Alan Booth: The Roads to Sata↩︎
