Some of my earliest memories are of Okinawa, Japan; my dad was an Air Force weather forecaster and my mom and I joined him there when I was a toddler. I
don't remember much but I do remember. Maybe this is why I've gravitated towards Japan at least a little. When I worked at the University of Kansas I took a
course focused on the Tokaido Road, a cultural pilgrimage followed by many Japanese thru the 19th Century. "Shanks Mare" is a great book written about that
journey; this maybe another:
QUOTE
THE ANCIENT TOKAIDO
It was the morning of our last sleep in seiyo-jin beds. I dreamed that I was still dreaming in Lindaroxa’s Court. O-Owre-san shook my four-poster and begged me to consider the matter-of-factness of rolling out from my mosquito netting and taking a bite of cold breakfast. The sensuous breeze of the East, which comes for a brief hour with the first light of the sun, was blowing the curtains back from the window. I was willing to consider the getting up and the eating of the breakfast and I was willing to call both endeavours matter-of-fact, but the imagination that it was to be the first day on the highroad belonged to no such mere negativity of living.
I began packing and was inspired to improvise a wonderful ballad. It was concerned with the beginning of trails. O-Owre-san was busy and was uninterested in my stanzas. He might very well have served genius by taking them down. The all-inclusiveness embraced, I remember, a master picture of cold dawn in the Rockies, with[27] pack ponies snorting, biting, and bucking; and I sang blithely of every other sort of first morning start, embroidering the memories of their roaring language and their unpackable dunnage. But in Japan one does not roar—or one roars alone—and I had known just what was going into my rucksack for weeks.
Our route was to be the famed Tokaido, that ancient road running between the great capitals of the West and the East, from Kyoto to Tokyo. We were to find its first stretch at the turn to the left when we should cross the bridge over the Kamo-Gawa. This river cuts Kyoto between two long rows of houses built on piles and overhanging its waters. In summer the stream is most domesticated and gives, charitably, a large area of its dry bed as a pleasure ground for fêtes, but when the snows are melting back in the hills in the days of spring and blossoms, it becomes temperamental and the peasants say that it has drunk unwisely of saké. It is then that the water winks rakishly and splashes the tips of its waves at pretty geishas, who come to scatter cherry petals on the current. But we saw only the summer domesticity on our June morning. A school of children were wading in the shallow current, fishing with nets. Their kimonos were tied high above[28] their sturdy fat legs. We leaned over the rail and they squinted back into the sun at us and called out good-morning. Then we stepped off the bridge and our boots were on the long road that leads to Tokyo.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/53327/53327...-h.htm#Page_157
