The emotional contradictions crystallised on the beach of Fudaihama. There was no denying that we were in a place of spellbinding and under-appreciated beauty. The beach was a curve of light sand, bound at each end with limestone outcroppings crowned with twisted pines. The water was deep cerulean, rippled by a gentle swell. We were barely a mile into the day’s walk when we’d been compelled to stop for a swim.
But the second aesthetic theme was less comely, albeit just as conspicuous. As I swam I could glimpse it with each lift of the waves. Stretching across the valley, about 500 metres back inland, was a huge mechanical sea-gate topped with watchtowers.
On March 11 2011, when a submarine earthquake sent a tsunami hurtling into the seaboard of north-east Japan, the defences at Fudai, erected three decades earlier in the face of local opposition, had fulfilled their purpose. As the wave struck, it broke against this formidable bastion, saving the town and its 3,000 inhabitants. Many neighbouring communities were less fortunate. Here, in a single sightline, was the juxtaposition that defined the trail: at close hand serenity, in the distance ghosts.
It seems strange to consider, given its size and proximity to the mighty conurbations of central Honshu, but before 2011 not many people in Japan paid much mind to the region of Tohoku. Comprising the northernmost third of the country’s main island, it incorporates 18 per cent of Japan’s area but only 7 per cent of its population. In medieval times, southerners viewed it as a land of mystery and malevolent magic. To the 17th century haiku poet Basho, Tohoku represented “the deep north”, edge of the known world.
The Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, which claimed more than 18,500 lives and devastated towns and villages up and down Tohoku’s eastern shore, brought the region to the centre of national attention for the first time in years. The disaster precipitated all manner of soul-searching about the wider country’s governance and future. Among other things, it reminded people that the area inundated by the wave, a tracery of inlets and deep bays known as the Sanriku Coast, is one of the most picturesque landscapes in all Japan.
A fisherman casts off from Shirahama Beach, a few miles from the Michinoku Trail’s northern start point © Marcus Westberg
One of the izakaya gastropubs that line the pedestrianised lane of Miroku-Yokocho in Hachinohe © Marcus Westberg
As part of a “green reconstruction” initiative, in 2013 a ribbon of coast was designated part of a new national park, Sanriku Fukko (fukko meaning reconstruction). Then in 2019 a new walking trail was inaugurated, winding through the park for a total of 1,025km. The Michinoku Trail suffered a fitful birth, deprived of foreign visitors for two-and-a-half years during Japan’s long Covid lockdowns. But today it is beginning to fulfil the dual symbolism for which it was conceived, both an emblem of regional solidarity, and a memorial to its loss.
“This coastline has always been a closed place, but now that attitude is changing,” said Kumi Aizawa, managing director of the Michinoku Coastal Trail Club. Aizawa told me that the arrival of thousands of Japanese and international volunteers in the weeks following the disaster had invested the previously hermetic region with a new appetite for outsiders. “Without the tsunami, the trail would never have happened,” Aizawa said.
In September, I arrived in the northern city of Hachinohe with my friend and photographer Marcus Westberg. We were here to take a self-guided tour of the Michinoku with Walk Japan, which has been pioneering hiking holidays in the country for more than 30 years. While hardy trekkers with a couple of months to spare can opt to thru-hike the trail, our 10-day itinerary was a highlights reel, with taxis and trains bridging certain sections.
The walk began at the northern trailhead, beneath the Shinto temple of Kabushima Jinja, which stands on a rocky outcrop overlooking Hachinohe harbour. From here the route passed a series of fishing hamlets guarded by piles of colossal concrete tetrapods, before delving into stands of cedar and akamatsu pine.
Piles of concrete tetrapods guard a small fishing harbour near Tanesashi © Marcus Westberg
Author Henry Wismayer in the thermal baths at the Jōdogahama Park Hotel © Marcus Westberg
Although the trail cleaves as much as possible to the littoral, the rugged topography means that much of it winds inland through coastal forest. Some coniferous stretches were timber plantations, but we often found ourselves in much older woodland, exquisite tracts of oak, beech and maple where the leaves were showing the first blush of autumn.
Occasionally, the trail would intersect with coastal beauty spots, where picnic areas overlooked the cliffs, and simple cafés served tea and vanilla ice cream. There were also lengthy stretches where we didn’t see anyone for hours, evoking a sense — uncommon in Japan — of a land permitted to run wild. Each day ended with seafood banquets at traditional minshuku inns. Usually family-run, these guesthouses all had their own communal onsen, sometimes with outdoor pools and panoramic windows overlooking the ocean.
Back out on the trail, the going was gentle, the route for the most part impeccably waymarked and maintained. But if we ever needed to reorient ourselves, we would consult “the book”. Walk Japan’s handbook, which had been awaiting us at the hotel in Hachinohe, was a delightful artefact of Japanese fastidiousness. Its 172 pages were stuffed with contextual information, as well as a walking guide outlining every turn and timing with unerring exactitude (“continue for 440m to the third intersecting lane . . . ”), alongside illustrative photos.
One effect of this anodyne thumbnail series was to downplay the scenery to come. As the trail slalomed southwards, each sight of the sea had a note of revelation. Past Fudai, the route was hewn directly into limestone cliffs before burrowing through hand-carved tunnels. At Kitayamazaki, we looked out from observation platforms over a coastline splintered into a series of towering stacks, arches and craggy islets, and watched as ospreys swooped along the tree line.
Henry stands on the beach at Jōdogahama © Marcus Westberg
A black kite takes flight near Tanesashi © Marcus Westberg
Natural rock arches along the coastline at Kitayamazaki © Marcus Westberg
After four days the weather turned. We arrived at the celebrated bay of Jōdogahama in a downpour, hunched under borrowed hotel umbrellas. A tiny beach, sheltered on its seaward side by a serried row of rocky teeth, the site is said to be an embodiment of Buddhist paradise. Every 10 minutes a skiff full of local tourists, hunched in bright rain-jackets, would putter into the bay from the adjacent marina, whereupon it was promptly beset by gulls.
South of Jōdogahama, the cliffs and sea-stacks gave way to a gentler, more populous coastline of deep inlets, known as rias. From here, the devastation wrought in 2011 became more evident. At Aketo Beach, the remnants of a levee that had been blasted apart by the tsunami lay in a pile of shattered concrete and contorted rebar, slowly being engulfed by ivy.
Realising what the towns and villages must have gone through, and the way they have recovered — you can’t help but be moved
Looking seaward from the Michinoku’s vantages, we were struck, at first, by the coast’s abundance. Trawlers drifted at sea, their nets forming narrow crescents across waters that are considered to be among the richest fishing grounds in the world. All along the littoral we saw buoys marking harvest sites for the myriad invertebrates — abalone, squid, oyster, urchin — that dominate the local diet.
But I cannot deny that I spent a lot of time thinking about the wave. There was simply no ignoring it. Every community had its memorials and high watermarks; regular signboards featured photos of settlements before and after the catastrophe unfolded. Several museums were built around surviving buildings, permitting visitors to see, in the drifts of uncleared detritus, or the upside-down car marooned on the fourth floor of a fisheries school, the violence of the tumult with startling immediacy.
Hikers make their way down a forested ravine beneath the Kitayamazaki viewpoint © Marcus Westberg
The observation window at the Ofunato Onsen © Marcus Westberg
Barely a day passed without the trail running alongside one of the flared seawalls that have been constructed in the 13 years since the disaster. These often had stairways, so you could walk for hundreds of metres along the battlements, like defenders standing sentinel over a restive and unknowable frontier.
“I remember seeing video sequences of the tsunami, but it’s different when you’re standing where it happened,” said Jim Breen, from Melbourne, who was walking the Michinoku with his wife Julia on what was their 15th trip to Japan. “Seeing the signs indicating how high the waves reached is chilling. Realising what the towns and villages must have gone through, and the way they have recovered — you can’t help but be moved.”
The aftermath of the tsunami was a period of national grief and reckoning. Paradoxically, it was also a time of grace. Midway through our walk, I met Sumiyo Nakamura in a coffee-shop in Ofunato, a town overlooking a broad inlet. In the weeks following the disaster, Nakamura was among those who travelled to Tohoku to volunteer in the recovery. In Ofunato, she’d found friendship among the evacuees. Within a year she had decided to stay. Now she works as a guide leading both Japanese and foreign visitors on the Michinoku, which she considers a gateway to “an older side of Japan”. “Tohoku people are shy, but they are very warm,” Nakamura told me. “They tend to welcome hikers like they are family.”
A small izakaya gastropub on Miroku-Yokocho, a lane of bars and restaurants in Hachinohe © Marcus Westberg
Dinner at the Kurosaki-so, a guesthouse on the Michinoku Trail between Fudai and Kitayamazaki © Marcus Westberg
Her colleague, Yoshitaka Shida, who also managed the popular Ofunato Onsen, admitted that the tsunami had renewed his affection for a hometown which, as a young man, he had been eager to leave. He hoped that more tourist business might staunch the flight of young people to the south. It was ironic that the tsunami might now serve as a pretext for an increase in visitors, but the region needed to take what it could get, Shida told me. “The population of Ofunato has fallen by 10 per cent in the last five years,” he said.
The truth was that, for now, tourism in Tohoku retained an antique character. The guesthouse rooms had tatami mat flooring and futons for sleeping. Timeworn peep-boards, where visitors could pose as samurai and portly fisherwomen, stood outside many of the train stations. Of Japan’s current inbound tourism boom, fuelled by the weakened yen, there seemed little evidence.
Travelling to a place where tragic events are yet to fade into the detachment of history comes with a side-order of disquiet, an anxiety that coming here betrays a certain ghoulishness. But Shida and Nakamura insisted that the Michinoku experience, in exposing the tension between remembrance and moving on, could scarcely be more Japanese. In his heart-rending 2017 book, Ghosts of the Tsunami, Richard Lloyd Parry quotes a Shinto priest: “It is the universe we inhabit, and the only life we have on these islands,” he says. “Volcano, earthquake, tsunami and typhoon . . . they are as much a part of Japan as the rich crops in the fields.”
Seabirds at dusk off the coast of Tanesashi © Marcus Westberg
The lichen-covered torii gate marks the entrance to Amaterasu-mioya-jinja, a Shinto shrine near Toni © Marcus Westberg
Beyond Ofunato, the trail often curved deeper inland. Occasionally it merged with ancient trading routes, where centuries of foot-traffic and daimyo processions had carved out deep holloways through the woodland. In what seemed like a transgression of Japanese mores, the book counselled that we should make a hullabaloo on blind corners to warn away black bears.
On the final day, a shorter leg around the Massaki Peninsula north of Kesennuma, we took our time. A little off-trail we found a beach where the incoming tide crashed against the black cliffs, and the run-off from the previous days’ rain cascaded from verdant gullies. The pebbles were strewn with the prismatic glint of abalone shells.
Further south, the Michinoku Trail terminated in Soma, 27 miles shy of the Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, in Fukushima, the facility whose meltdown became a central metaphor for the inevitable morality tale — of the technological powerhouse struck down by a merciless act of nature. But here on the beach the furniture of civilisation was all but invisible, the horizon, for once, completely empty. Beyond the breakers, in the shallows before the sea-floor shelved down to the deep ocean, the water gleamed.
Details
Henry Wismayer was a guest of Walk Japan (walkjapan.com). Its 10-day “self-guided Michinoku coastal wayfarer tour” includes accommodation, most meals, luggage transfers and 24-hour English language support. Running on set dates from April to November, it costs from ¥310,000 (£1,586) per person
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