Out of Eden Walk: An eerie walk through Japanese ghost towns
National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek’s walks through the countryside of Japan have been unexpectedly lonely. That’s because he’s been trekking through a region undergoing depopulation. Host Marco Werman speaks with Salopek about his all-too-rare encounters with people on this stretch of his journey, as well as the difference between traveling through natural landscapes that are uninhabited and traveling through towns that once thrummed with life, gone quiet.
For over a decade now, National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek has been walking across the continents of this planet, retracing the historical footpath of human migration.
Salopek often writes about his encounters with people he’s met along the way, and documents it all in the Out of Eden Walk project. Currently, though, Salopek is in rural Japan, where he’s exploring largely abandoned towns.
“This is kind of rolling hill country,” Salopek told The World. “It has grape vineyards, orchards of pears and a lot of traditional Japanese buildings. It’s made out of wood and, kind of, a paper product, sliding doors, and the floors are made out of tatami, a woven grass mat on the floor.”
Japan is facing a demographic crisis: a shrinking and aging population. So, Salopek is now walking through what can be best described as ghost towns, and he said the experience has been surprising, even for his Japanese walking companion.
“When we first met, my walking partner is a documentary photographer, a very accomplished one named Soichiro Koriyama. I noticed that he was starting to take pictures of everybody we met. And I said, ‘Soichi, what are you doing? You’re just taking portraits of people we’re passing, passersby.’ And he said, ‘Yes, I must take a picture of everybody we pass.’ And I say, ‘This is going to be too difficult. You’re going to have an archive swamped by thousands of portraits.’ As it turns out, it’s the opposite problem. We see very few people. In some cases, only two or three a day.”
Marco Werman: What was it like to see these towns as you’re walking alongside them? How did that change your perspective?
Paul Salopek: Along this global walk, I’ve been walking for more than a decade, I’ve passed through wildernesses. I’ve passed through big deserts in Saudi Arabia. I passed through big steppes, you know, grasslands in Central Asia, which is where you expect not to see people, right? So, you sort of plan for, kind of, wilderness trekking, kind of expeditionary stuff. You think about carrying food, a tent. You think about where’s the next shelter, where’s the next food supply. Marco, I’m having to think that way here in one of the most developed countries in the world, one of the biggest economies in the world, a post-industrial country, where I have to kind of think like a backpacker, because there are no shops very often. We have to walk 40 kilometers, like 25 miles. That’s a long way on foot to find even a convenience store. So, it’s been surreal.
And yet, there in these abandoned areas, you find a 7-Eleven.
This is like the saving grace, as Soichi would call out. We’re looking on Google, and this is another eerie thing: Google … it doesn’t show the emptiness. It shows towns and villages, hamlets, roads and railroads. It looks like a webbing of humanity. But when you’re actually on foot through it, it’s silent. There’s kudzu growing over the bus stops. The shops are closed. The post offices are closed. You can walk down the middle of fairly large streets because there’s no traffic. And when a 7-Eleven comes up, wow, that’s “Bonanza” time.
As I read your dispatch from this part of your journey, Paul, I got the feeling that the sort of loss of community happening in these places in Japan really had a, kind of, personal impact on you. Would you mind talking about that?
Yeah, a couple of things happened. As you know, this project, even though it’s called the Out of Eden Walk, even though it is about walking, about slow journalism, it’s built on people. My motto, my kind of tagline, is that “people are my destination.” So, I must admit that, as beautiful as rural Japan is, as gracious as the people were that we met, the absence of people generally made it rather hard to report my stories. If there are no people on the horizon, what do I write about? So, it was a bit melancholic. And then at the same time, recently, a friend of mine died, far away in Europe. And I was dealing with this grief in a silent, almost a museum exhibit landscape, which only exacerbated the loss. And you put your finger on it, it’s a sense of loss of community, whether it’s somebody you love or whether it’s your neighbors, the village that you live in. … There was a kind of the ringing of absences over these last few months.
A Jizu statue stands guard outside a nearly abandoned village in Yamaguchi prefecture. The shrines are protectors of children and travelers — both in short supply today in Japan’s countryside.Soichiro Koriyama/National Geographic, Out of Eden Walk
I’m really sorry to hear about your friend, my condolences.
Thank you.
Walking across continents for years and years, Paul, I mean, you meet people as you go. I mean, as you say, that’s kind of what fuels the journalism and those connections with them. But being the only one on that journey is you, I wonder what you have learned about being alone with yourself, which for a lot of people is not a comfortable space.
This is something, of course, that I get asked a lot, and what I do have to remind my readers, Marco, is that I’m almost never alone. I’m almost always walking with a local person. I call them my walking partners. This alleviates loneliness, of course, but it also makes the journey much more rewarding and enriching because a shared journey is much, much, much more affirming than just taking a solo walk, at least for me. So yes, you do have to have a bit of fortitude if you’re gonna try to set out walking across continents. You have to be a bit self-reliant. You have to havein-theatre resources to get through scrapes. But always having somebody who you can rely on and they rely on you, really makes this journey worthwhile. So, it is really not that lonely of a journey, except lately in Japan, where, again, I was always walking with Soichi or another walking partner. But still, even my Japanese walking partners are kind of scratching their heads and saying, “You know what? Even we didn’t know it was this desolate.”
Where to next, Paul?
Well about four or five more days of walking into very, very populated Japan, and so there’ll be a lot of 7-Elevens along the way to Yokohama Harbor, where I’ll be hopefully jumping on a cargo ship in about a week and then sailing to North America for the American phase of the journey.
Parts of this interview have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Writer and National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek has embarked on a 24,000-mile storytelling trek across the world called the “Out of Eden Walk.” The National Geographic Society, committed to illuminating and protecting the wonders of our world, has funded Salopek and the project since 2013. Explore the project here. Follow the journey on X at @PaulSalopek, @outofedenwalk and also at @InsideNatGeo.
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