The feed of updates to I Love Wasting Ink
Nine kilometres from the nearest shop, on a road that carries perhaps forty vehicles a day, at the point where the valley narrows and the phone signal goes, there is a vending machine. It is lit. It is stocked. The coin mechanism works and the hot drinks are hot. I have walked past hundreds of these and I still cannot entirely get over them.
There is a version of this trip where I carry nothing but the phone. It is a good camera. It is a genuinely good camera, and I want to be honest about that before I say anything else, because the case I am about to make is not a case about image quality and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.
Uwajima, Ehime → Hōkyō Pass → Yoshida, Ehime Map data © OpenStreetMap · Open map in Gaia GPS → 📍 Uwajima, Ehime Out before the shops opened, past the fish market where three men were hosing down a floor that already looked clean. The road climbs almost immediately and then pretends not to, which is the particular cruelty of the coast here — you gain two hundred metres without ever once feeling…
Beyond its reputation for beer and chocolate, Belgium harbors an often-overlooked artistic and architectural heritage spanning medieval Flemish masters to Art Nouveau masterpieces, particularly in Brussels and Antwerp. The country’s dense network of canals, cycling infrastructure, and compact medieval town centers makes it one of Europe’s most navigable places on foot or by bicycle, and its…
Belgian beer and chocolate are legendary for good reason: the country has elevated both to forms of folk art and scientific precision. Belgian brewers have perfected styles ranging from crisp Pils beers to complex Trappist ales brewed by monks in isolated abbeys, each with centuries of tradition embedded in their recipes. The chocolate culture, meanwhile, traces back to the 17th century and the…
Belgium is a small but geographically strategic country nestled between France, Germany, and the Netherlands, serving as a cultural crossroads where Flemish and Walloon traditions intersect in complex and sometimes contentious ways. The country’s linguistic divide—Dutch in Flanders to the north and French in Wallonia to the south—has shaped its politics, infrastructure, and daily life for…
Close-up of a weathered stone statue of a shaven-headed figure with closed eyes and a serene, slightly downturned mouth. [!info] Here’s a callout title Here’s a callout block. It supports Markdown , etc.
In January and February 2019, I walked 500 kilometers across Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four main islands.
I’m writing to let you know I’m shutting down the Data Reduction 9K blog, which I began writing in spring of this year and haven’t updated since May. I had the idea that I’d document the process of going through seven years of walking notes as a way to prepare for writing a book about the journey , but this turned out to be a classic case of doing everything except the actual work. So I’m going to…
Who first had the idea of folding red-hot iron, and discovered that when the red-hot iron is mixed with burning charcoal the result will be carbonised steel? Was it because they lived next door to a volcano? I met Willie Jones on the afternoon of the 172 nd day of my walk around Japan, a day before I walked out of Sapporo, where he had been living for forty four years — over a quarter of the…
It’s been a while since I last wrote , and the project has had its fair share of setbacks and distractions, some of them very productive, others not so much. The mess in the kitchen
Peter here, the guy who’s no longer walking around Japan but sitting on a succession of very low Japanese chairs in Sapporo thinking about writing about walking around Japan. I hope your spring is going as well as it can. The snow in Sapporo is largely gone, if you look closely enough there are tiny new leaves on the birches and the willows, and some of the cranes, I suppose, are back in Siberia.
Early on in Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones , a book about China at the turn of the century, the author has a drink in Beijing with Imre Galambos , a scholar of ancient Chinese texts: In his dissertation, Galambos notes that centuries of historians have been obsessed with the tale of the book-burning [during the reign of Qin Shihuang, the first Chinese emperor], but they have ignored “the quiet but…
Two things I’ve learned since my previous post : A chicken dinner from May 2017 made me realize the utter impossibility of what I’m trying to do here. Why is a really dumb thing to ask about anything worth doing.
On the morning of April 13, 2017 , I walked out of my friend Sahar Ghavidel’s house in the southern Japanese city of Kagoshima, pushed my bike a few blocks down the street and left it in the parking lot of a dormitory for another friend, ate a breakfast sized for a wrestler at the cafeteria of Kagoshima University, then walked out of the city with a rucksack on my back, walked on, and didn’t stop.…
There’s a good chance you haven’t heard from me since October 2023 , when I was walking around Japan . The last letter you read on this mailing list I wrote from a convenience store in Goshogawara, a town in a region of north-eastern Japan called Tsugaru. There, the gangs of schoolchildren swinging by to get their breakfasts were treated to the sight of a middle-aged European guy typing on a small…
A good day to you all from aboard the Blue Luminous , floating somewhere on the black waters of the Straits of Tsugaru (home to bluefin tuna, American nuclear submarines, and deranged long-distance swimmers), about to head into the bay and towards Aomori City. My walk around Hokkaido is over. Six years and some weeks after landing at its southern tip in 2017 , at the youngish and foolish age of…
“Around Japan?” Ms. Chioko asked, in English, after we had both finished our ice creams and coffees. She had spotted me from the window, a woman from Tokyo who for some odd reason decided to spend a month of her life bumming around the northern tip of Hokkaido. She had done crazier things: 40 years before, she traveled for three years around Australia. “Yes,” I said.
I’m going on a walk. On September 15, I will leave Wakkanai, Hokkaido, for the third and final stage of my walk around all of Japan , a journey I started in 2017 and continued in 2022 . Come and join me on my longest walk ever, which you can also support if you become a member of Walk Forever Club, my new membership program. What?
A quick reminder that this coming Monday, on July 17 at 7 PM JST, I will be speaking about my past — and future! — long walks in Japan for Informasia, a lecture series on many things Japan and Asia. You are all welcome to join on Zoom. Please note that it’s 7 PM in Japan. For most of you that will be either midday (Europe) or very early morning (US). Use this link to see the exact time for your…
My apologies for the extended radio silence. If you were wondering whether this mailing list is still active, it is. But I haven’t sent anything since September 29 of last year , when I was sitting, with an ice pack on my useless right foot, in my friend Joan Anderson’s dining room in Shinjuku, Tokyo, after an abandoned walk across Hokkaido . Sitting with rather more useful left and right feet in…
The third post from Human Again , my series of dispatches from a walk in northern Japan, is now online . Tl;dr: It is about the volcano Rishiri.
The second post from Human Again , my series of dispatches from a walk in northern Japan, is now online . Tl;dr: I walk the entire Japanese coastline of the Sea of Okhotsk and come very close to a head-on collision with an owl (on a parallel mailing list, an owl writes: WTF‽). Also: cows, rain, prison towns, an old film by Werner Herzog, crafty birds.
Hello from the southern shore of the Sea of Okhotsk, a few days’ walk from the La Pérouse Strait, which separates Hokkaido from Sakhalin and will mark the point where I turn south. The first post from Human Again , my series of dispatches from the road, is now online . Most of this first post was written at the Erdős Mathematics Café in Monbetsu, Hokkaido, an after-school refuge run by a wonderful…
I dreamed of walking back, under wedges of red-crowned cranes returning from the north, along the rice harvests of Tōhoku under azure autumnal skies […] On August 21, 2017 , five years and a day ago, I reached the easternmost end of Japan after four months of walking. My brother Gabor Orosz had joined me a month earlier for this last part of my journey across Japan. Together, we walked across all…
“Walk forever?” a shopkeeper named Mr. Takamori asked me on the evening of July 18, 2017 , in the village of Jōbōji, in north-east Japan. I wasn’t, not then, I was only walking from one end of Japan to the other, which isn’t forever, but I can’t say his question hasn’t remained with me ever since. Five years later, in the endless, pale blue light of a summer day in Estonia, I keep thinking…
On an afternoon in August 2017, a few days after I had walked from one end of Japan to the other , I met Timothy Harris, an Englishman of many trades — actor, director, translator, editor, diction coach — who has lived in Japan since the 1970s. His friend Alan Booth, who had passed away in 1993, wrote the book The Roads to Sata , about a walk from another end of Japan to the other, which had…
In my last letter I mentioned that I would write in March about the next parts of These Walking Dreams , my visual field diary about a long walk in Japan. What I didn’t know then and we all know now is that while I was busy planning the launch of my website, the President of Russia was equally busy planning the invasion of Ukraine. This calls for a change of plans and I need your help. I have…
If you’re reading this letter, you likely had something to do with that book I wrote three years ago, the one about a short walk in Japan called The Wilds of Shikoku . Perhaps you supported its fundraising campaign on Indiegogo , bought a copy in my webshop on Gumroad , or came to one of my book-launches in Hamburg, Budapest , or Tokyo . All of it happened in the last year before the Coronavirus…
One year ago I flew through the night due east, mad with life and terrified, to walk through the mountains of Shikoku and write a book about it. I landed in the Mediterranean sunshine of Nagoya, then traveled into the mountains of Gifu, where the snow fell through the night in slow motion. In the small hours of the morning I woke, drenched with sweat, my heart racing, my room in the attic dark and…
The PDF edition of The Wilds of Shikoku is almost done. There will be two versions, a text-only one meant for printing, and another with the photographs and the maps, for reading on a screen. The former is done, the latter will be finished by next week, and they will be released together. There will be a reading in Tokyo tomorrow evening, on 11/14 at 7pm, at the bar Good Heavens in Shimokitazawa,…