A walk around (and out of) Japan
Between 2017 and 2024, I walked nine thousand kilometers in a big loop around the Japanese archipelago that crossed eighteen of the country’s islands, including the four major ones.
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 this walk was interesting enough for a book. Sign up here to get an email when I write a new post:
A blog about Peter Orosz’s 9,000-kilometer walk around Japan.
An overview of the journey
My walk was in four parts, indicated by the colors of the route on the map.
| Year | Dates | Start | Finish | Days | Distance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 4/13 – 8/21 | Kagoshima | Nemuro | 131 | ~4,300 km |
| 2022 | 8/22 – 9/14 | Nemuro | Wakkanai | 24 | ~640 km |
| 2023 | 9/15 – 1/6 (2024) | Wakkanai | Kagoshima | 114 | ~3,500 km |
| 2024 | 4/3 – 5/1 | Kagoshima | Yonaguni | 29 | ~500 km |
| Total | 298 | ~9,000 km |
2017: Kagoshima to Nemuro
The first, and longest, leg of my journey was in the spring and summer of 2017. I began walking on April 13, 2017 in Kagoshima, the southernmost big city in Japan, then I walked due north-east for four months until August 21, 2017, when I reached Nemuro, Japan’s easternmost city.
I kept a field diary called These Walking Dreams. It has more than 1,200 photos from this 4,300-kilometer walk through Japan, and an entry for most of its 131 days.
2022: Nemuro to Wakkanai
Exactly five years later, on August 22, 2022, I walked on from Nemuro to Wakkanai, Japan’s northernmost city, reaching it on September 14, 2022.
Human Again is a series of three longer illustrated dispatches I wrote about this 640-kilometer walk along the southern shore of the Sea of Okhotsk.
2023: Wakkanai back to Kagoshima
A year later, in September 2023, I walked on from Wakkanai and returned to Kagoshima, arriving in early January 2024. I kept a photo stream of this journey on Glass, which is no longer online, but I plan to post the photos here later.
2024: Kagoshima to Yonaguni
In the spring of 2024, I continued on from Kagoshima towards Yonaguni, a small island off the coast of Taiwan. Cape Irizaki on Yonaguni is the westernmost point of Japan, and it was also the end of my journey, on the morning of May 1, 2024.
Last update: March 15, 2025
