About a long walk in Japan
If you’re reading this letter, you likely had something to do with that book I wrote three years ago, the one about a short walk in Japan called The Wilds of Shikoku. Perhaps you supported its fundraising campaign on Indiegogo, bought a copy in my webshop on Gumroad, or came to one of my book-launches in Hamburg, Budapest, or Tokyo. All of it happened in the last year before the Coronavirus Era so there’s a chance that none of this makes any sense anymore — if that’s indeed the case you can unsubscribe immediately in the footer of this letter and you will not hear from me again.
But if it does, or kind of does, my name is Peter Orosz and you’re reading the very first letter from the I 💜 Wasting Ink Mailing List, which shall serve to keep readers — you! — up to date about my work. If you want to make sure you receive the letters I send, it’s a good idea to add my email address, peter@ilovewasting.ink, to your contact list. And if you were forwarded this letter, you can subscribe here.
As for the work I’ve been doing, two years before that journey in 2019 which became the subject of The Wilds of Shikoku, I walked all the way from one end of Japan to the other, a distance of some 4,300 kilometers and a lovely way to spend 1% of my life. I kept a visual field diary while I walked, published under #roadsfromsata on Instagram. Since then, Instagram has become a rather unlovely place for publishing anything so I dusted off that diary and gave it both a new home on my website and a new name, These Walking Dreams.
Even if you do remember my diary from the long-ago spring and summer of 2017 it’s perhaps worth another look. There are four times as many pictures in These Walking Dreams as there were in the Instagram version, most of them never published before, and on my website they have space to breathe and sing. I hope you will enjoy looking at them. I also made maps for each day of my walk so even if you aren’t familiar with the geography of Japan — I certainly wasn’t before I walked across it — it’s easy to follow along. It begins on a spring day in Kagoshima, in the very south of Japan.
One-sixth of These Walking Dreams is online at the moment: my walk across Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands (shown on 272 pictures as opposed to 70 in the original). The remaining parts — across the island of Shikoku, then across two-thirds of Honshu, the main island, and finally across Hokkaido, the northernmost island — will be published in the coming weeks. I will let you know when they’re ready in my next letter, in March 2022.
If you have any questions, comments, or remarks, I’d love to hear your thoughts. You can reply directly to this letter, in English or természetesen magyarul is.
I hope you have a wonderful day.
