Introduction
Sixty-five percent. That’s how many of the foreign visitors who’ve been to Japan have come back a second time, or more. Which basically tells you how much people enjoy travelling here.
Of course, people come back for all sorts of different reasons. The culture, the food, the shopping, all the new experiences. After a long time living in London, I’ve started helping out with some luxury travel work here in Japan, and I think I understand that pull a lot better now. But today I want to dig into a slightly different question. What makes travelling in Japan so good that people keep coming back for more? And part of the answer, I think, goes back about four hundred years.
Hi, I’m Satomi Takayama, a Japanese artist based between Japan and London. On this channel, I share what I’m learning about my own culture all over again, the aesthetics, the craftsmanship, and what it teaches us about the things we shouldn’t forget today.
Have you been to Japan before? And if you have, what first brought you here? I’d love to know. I’ve been to quite a few different countries in my life, and what really strikes me about Japan is how strong its tourism is.
In fact, tourism here has kept growing over the past few years, and in its most recent index, the World Economic Forum ranked Japan third in the world for travel and tourism.
The Japan I Love Is Out in the Countryside
But it isn’t only the places everyone goes, like Tokyo and Kyoto. For me, the real pleasure of travelling here is out in the countryside. There’s an area I love between Tokyo and Kyoto, up in the mountains, called the Kiso Valley. Have you been? The story I want to tell you today is connected to that area, and it’s a slightly unexpected one. Once you know it, I think you’ll enjoy travelling in Japan on a whole different level.
The Shogun Who Ruled From Edo
You might know that Kyoto was Japan’s capital for over a thousand years. But in the seventeenth century, a warrior named Tokugawa Ieyasu took control of Japan, and he ruled from Edo, which is what we now call Tokyo. He had an extraordinary amount of power. The Tokugawa family would go on to rule for more than 260 years, and for most of that time, nobody could seriously challenge them. What they said was final.
Sankin-kotai: The Rule That Moved a Country
One of the ways the Tokugawa held onto that power was a rather clever system called sankin-kotai. We learn about this in any Japanese history class. The Tokugawa didn’t want the other feudal lords getting too powerful. So they created a rule. Regional lords, no matter how far from Edo they lived, had to travel there and stay for a set period, usually about a year at a time. And all that travelling ended up costing the lords a fortune, which kept them weak. But no one back then could have known this rule would end up shaping Japanese tourism centuries later.
How the Post Towns Were Born
Remember, there were no trains and no carriages. So a procession coming up from the provinces took days, sometimes weeks. And that’s how a whole culture of shukuba grew up, post towns all along the route. Places to sleep, from grand inns for the lords down to the cheapest lodgings, but also teahouses, somewhere to sit and eat and rest your legs before carrying on. Really, the cafés of their day.
Built for Power, Inherited by Everyone
All of this was built for official travel at first, not for ordinary people. But it didn’t stay that way. The way travel works in Japan today grew out of a system that was built for power, and quietly ended up belonging to everyone.
The most famous of those routes are the Tokaido and the Nakasendo. Some of the old post towns are still kept almost exactly as they were, and I love walking through them. And along the Tokaido, travellers crossing the harsh mountain passes would often stay at the hot springs nearby. Even then, there was already a whole culture around how you recovered from a long day on the road, the kind you’d still recognise in Japan today.
A book I read makes the point that this is what helped build Japan’s whole system for moving people and goods around. After all, hundreds, sometimes thousands of them were on the same roads every year.
Meanwhile in Europe
And what I found really interesting in that book was how different travel was in Europe and in Japan at the same point in history. In Europe around the same period, travelling wasn’t quite such a casual thing. Wars were frequent, and the roads carried real risk. Apparently, Goethe carried pocket pistols on his journey through Italy. And when wealthy young Europeans did travel for pleasure, on the Grand Tour, it was an enormous production, with servants, tutors and mountains of luggage. Meanwhile in Japan, even ordinary people, including women and children, were setting off on pilgrimages to Ise, where our most important shrine is, and they travelled remarkably light. Almost like going out for a walk.
I’m sure the real picture is messier than that. But the comparison did make me look at travelling in Japan a little differently.
What the Woodblock Prints Are Really Showing
You can actually see this in the ukiyo-e woodblock prints many of you might have come across, Hiroshige’s Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido, or Hokusai’s work. They’re full of people travelling, and once you know this history, looking at those prints becomes a completely different kind of pleasure.
And even then, travel in Japan was about more than just getting somewhere. People stopped to look at the seasons, went to the local festivals, ate whatever each town was famous for. The journey itself was the point. And I think that’s still how travel feels in Japan today.
Why Japanese People Holiday at Home
But of course, there are more practical reasons too. Japan has a fairly big population. But only around seventeen to eighteen percent of Japanese people hold a passport. Which basically means most people tend to travel within Japan rather than abroad.
There are a few reasons for that. The weak yen is one. There’s also the language barrier. A lot of Japanese people feel a bit self-conscious about not speaking English well. It’s a kind of invisible barrier, I think, and it can put people off travelling abroad. My own parents included. When I first moved to London, I was genuinely surprised that people of every age were casually travelling abroad all the time, swapping stories about where they’d been on their last holiday.
And for people working in Japan, it’s still hard to take a long holiday. All of that together is part of why travel within Japan has grown the way it has.
Every Town Has Something of Its Own
And that’s why so many regions here put real effort into their own tourism. Everywhere you go, you can feel that people are working to bring their own town to life. A lovely independent shop, something you can only find there. Traditional craft is a perfect example of that, and I genuinely love coming across it wherever I go.
And almost every town has something that’s properly its own. For some towns it’s the festival, for others the hot springs, or the dialect. And the food most of all. Now, you’d think food is just food. But even the tap water is a little different depending on where you are. For example, in Kyoto, they say the softer water is part of why the cooking became so delicate. And of course the currents on either coast aren’t the same, so the fish changes from coast to coast too. Some people will even travel just to eat that fish.
I could go on forever. Each region leans into its own character, and that’s part of what makes the whole country so interesting to travel around. Maybe that’s my Japanese bias talking. But this is the thing that makes Japan feel really special to me.
The Two Kinds of Quiet
And to finish, I want to tell you a little about what’s keeping me here.
One of the things I love about coming back is that the quietness here is a different kind of quiet. There’s an unspoken understanding that you don’t raise your voice in public. You hardly ever hear a car horn. The streets themselves are quiet. That’s a physical kind of quietness.
But there’s another kind too, which I love, a quietness you find in the space itself. Garden design, interior design, there’s a real culture here around ma, the idea of leaving space on purpose, and being inside that kind of space genuinely settles me. That’s not always what I want, of course, sometimes a room full of art and energy is exactly what I need. But when I want to sit with myself, Japan has so many places built for exactly that. And that, I think, is one of the biggest reasons I want to stay here right now.
It’s still a half-formed idea, but I’d love to create that same kind of quietness somewhere abroad one day.
Poetry Written While Walking
The travellers on those old roads walked for days to reach Edo, resting in the post towns each night before setting off again the next morning. But if efficiency was all that mattered, none of what we see today would exist. And I think it was exactly that unhurried pace that shaped the whole culture around it. For example, people actually wrote poetry as they walked. Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North is the book I talked about in my previous video, and it came out of a journey like that.
These days we tend to rush from one place to the next. Get there, tick it off, on to the next one. But maybe what makes a journey a journey is what sits in between. The things you didn’t plan for. The stretches where nothing much seems to be happening. And that’s the kind of quiet I love.
Is there a place in your own country where even the journey there is part of the pleasure? There are still so many places I don’t know, so I’d really love to hear about them in the comments.
Before You Go
Anyway, I’ll keep sharing more of this, both from Japan and elsewhere, so if you haven’t subscribed yet, I’d love to have you along.
I might also put together some experiences here in Japan at some point, things you could take part in. I’ll share those first on my newsletter, over on Substack, in a space called Quiet Japan. That’s also where I go deeper in writing on anything I didn’t get to here, and it works well as a podcast too. So if any of that sounds like your kind of thing, do come and have a look.
Thank you so much for watching until the end. See you in the next one.
