漂うように歩く - tadayou yō ni aruku
I remember wanting to come to Shirakawa-go from right after my first trip to Japan, a year ago, on a recommendation from a Youtube video. In that trip, there were no provisions for travelling much outside of Tokyo, and the customer visits, though outside of Tokyo, were trips arranged to depart on Tuesday mornings and end on Wednesday afternoons, with an overnight at a hotel booked by a Japanese teammate. There was very little room for straying from the set path, understandably.
I left Kyoto in the morning, on a train to Tsuruga then Kanazawa, to catch a bus to Shirakawa-go. The road between Kanazawa and Shirakawa-go goes through tunnels to broach the tall mountains around the Chūbu region of the main island Honshū. Before the tunnel, the scenery was as one would expect from sometime in early spring - a mild 20°C and hills turning green from the sprouting foliage in the trees. But as soon as the bus sped through the other side of the first tunnel, the scenery changed dramatically.
The imposing mountains on this side were still covered in thick snow, although it seemed like most of the snowfall was not recent. Nevertheless, the scene was mesmerizing, as if the tunnel did not only connect two sides of a hill, but two separate climate ranges altogether: crop-growing plains in summer and alpine mountains in the middle of winter. The previously-mentioned video presented Shirakawa-go as great-looking during all seasons, but I hadn’t seen yet much about how the place looks like during winter - also not like I was searching for that actively, as I was not expecting the place to be covered in snow when Spring is already here.
But I suspect not much could prepare me for the fascinating views that I ended up encountering. The thatched roof houses, or Gassho, become natural counterbalances to the white swaths of snow, and combine with the trees in the background, which are mostly already a deep shade of green. The bright blue sky and the peachy red tint of the effect of the sun sliding behind the mountains in the afternoon add to the dramatic effect.
I walked from the station to the inn that I booked, which is around 2km north and away from the historical village. Despite being on the other end, the wintry views seemingly imparted more dignity to the more contemporaneous town, and were my company and my muse in a happy long photography walk. And in walks like these, where I soak in the aesthetic experience of the external and internal landscapes, I can allow myself to easily go into meditative states.
And walks like these lead me to the sketch that I chose to remix from Carlos’s originals. The sketch, Andare a Zonzo, uses words from a specific section of the book Walkscapes: Walking As an Aesthetic Practice where there is a combinatorial explosion of variations of approaches to exploring space. The concept, illustrated by the sentence “Andare a Zonzo” in Italian, has powerful translations in other languages, such as 漂うように歩く, meaning “To walk as if drifting”.
My modifications were as follows:
- Changed the workds from the original sketch’s Portuguese edition of the book to the Englisj edition;
- Placed little Gassho houses in between the particle waves.