Peaceful walk through a nice place

This weekend was verrrrrrrry quiet. After several successive weekends of traveling, socializing, attending seminars, drinking, riding buses, and getting home late sunday nights, Hong and I decided to take it easy. She took the train out to visit me, and we spent literally all day Saturday inside the house, watching the collection of videos left here by the great English teachers of the past.

On Sunday we ventured outside for a 3-hour walk. It was great. There is a beautiful cluster of houses and rice fields right outside my window which I admire daily, but for some reason I never explored it. My curiosity got the better of me, and Hong and I walked through the most charming, traditional-looking places for hours, literally right out my back door.


The Nakasendo that I have mentioned previously indeed goes right by my house, and we followed it for quite a while, at first without realizing it. That's the great part about it. It just turns up where you least expect it. I had been looking at this view (↑) every day for a month before I realized that this was the ancient road from Kyoto to Tokyo. To me, it just looked like the back of an auto repair shop, but I guess my sense of history was not properly attuned.

Out in the fields, the roads were very small, and there were small water channels on either side. The houses were low, squat, and wooden, and there were beautiful green rice fields pretty much as far as the eye could see. The fields here take my breath away. They are so neat and tidy. There were hardly any people around, which I liked. I suppose isn't surprising given the heat, but it felt like we were the only people in the whole area. It was kind of nice. When we would run into someone else, it was kind of startling, having your fantasy jolted back to reality. The people seemed highly surprised to see us walking around.
I really let my imagination run wild, and I felt like I was in a different time, even a different world. It felt so foreign and so not of this time. The whole thing was a "pinch me, I'm in Japan" moment. Sometimes it's easy to forget where you are.

I sometimes cannot believe how ancient this place is. Or any place, really. On the land that we use every day and build our houses, schools, shopping centers, and interstates on, humans have been living for thousands of years. In California, our modern house sits on land that was wilderness 20 years ago. Did Native Americans hunt in our backyard? When was the last time the extinct volcano nearby erupted? Here in my little corner of Japan, I wonder if this place has always looked like this. These houses look so old, but I know they cannot be more than 100 years old at the most. But they are sitting on an ancient route, and look very much like it must have 100 or 200 or 300 years ago (except for the shiny Toyotas and Mitsubishis). Some are brand new. And right next to these fields is a large, four-lane road with Toyota dealerships, ATMS, and restaurants. I'm sure that that road probably follows an older route. Who knows how long people have been traveling this way? So cool.