May 18, 2024
Miya (Nagoya) → Narumi → Chiryu → Okazaki
30.1, 37,434 steps
On days like this, where the walking is bleak and the sun is endless and nobody is feeding you good energy, I think through silly things. OK — I am ruler of the world, benevolent and munificent. Everyone has the basics covered, healthcare and shelter, etc. Billionaires (or trillionaires or whatever) do not exist because of progressive taxation and smart laws around corporate governance and because the education system is so enlightened, the government so efficient, that folks are desperate to feed back excess earnings into the system. No one can imagine wanting to hold a billion bucks in capital on their own. BUT! We do this thing, it’s called the Random Billionaires Club (RBC). Every year, 200 people around the world are randomly selected to receive a billion dollars. There is a team to support them. They have to spend it all within ten years (Brewster’s Millions style). They can reject it or lean into it. There are almost no rules for how they can spend it. (They can’t make weapons or deliberately harm people.) Here is what I think: I think we would be surprised. I think a program like this would deliver so much delight in utterly unpredictable ways. I think the folks today who have the most money self-select in weird and weirdly common (and sort of boring) ways. And I think the abject lack of self-selection for the Random Billionaires Club would be its core strength. Half the recipients would be women. Most would be in India or China. What would the cobbler in Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf is full of cobblers, right?) do with a billion dollars? A coffee farmer in Ethiopia?
Why am I thinking about this? Because I would take a small sliver of that billion and make this road magnificent and accessible again. I’d line it with pines and I’d create a fund to maintain those pines. I’d seed it with little onigiri shops every few kilometers using fresh local ingredients. I’d restart some of the old inns. I’d have vending machines with absolutely delicious coffee. The ichi-ri-zuka would not be rare, but rather abundant, and turned into tiny parks. There would be seating! So much seating! Covered seating! I would repave the sidewalks of these roads, make them out of that magical track material that kinda bounces. I would make these walk so enticing that the road would be overflowing with people, children, animals. Everyone would say hello because everyone would have just eaten something mind blowing and slept somewhere fabulous and had something cool and refreshing to drink. Folks would clamber to live along the Tōkaidō. Real-estate on the road would boom but prices would be capped to keep the shops interesting, so it didn't just turn into a Duane Reade Walk. And just behind it, there'd be an abundance of totally affordable and classicly-proportioned, well-ventilated homes. Healthcare costs would plummet in these towns because so much walking — even in the crushing summer months; those pines!!! — would be happening. There’d be health and happiness. Baby- and love-making galore. Cars would be relegated to other roads, but the walking would be so good that no one would want to drive. I’d seed this all and believe in it and, heck, learn a ton spending just a small amount of that billion.
This is why the Random Billionaires Club would be so powerful — because we all contain exquisitely odd obsessions. And almost never do the cultivations of those obsessions — obsessions literary or artistic or musical or philosophical or scientific or walk-related — lead one to a billion dollars. But here it’d be — maybe — plopped on your lap. A billion dollars. What do you love? How would you amplify it? What are you going to do? (That’s a real question for you all — I’d love to read your answers.)
Basically: I walked the stretch as it stands today so you never have to. Bobbing consciousness. Piston legs. One step two steps three steps CARBS. Salt pellets. Gels. “Cheese” sticks. Burning globe of death. No shade. Endless cars. Nobody returning my hellos.
Today was a full Pachinko Road kind of day. The post-towns were Narumi and Chiryu. A so-called intermediate post-town, Arimatsu, “known nation-wide for its indigo tie-dyed cloth” (so says the Book of John) brought some of that indigo coloring to the road. It was there I met a pug named Isabelle. Isabelle wasn’t sure about me, but she sniffed and sniffed once more and I got the OK and with it a very welcome animal therapy session was had.
To be honest, Narumi and Chiryu were so compact, I hardly even noticed that I passed through them. And in the grand ratio of kilometers today, they barely made a dent. Their main streets comprised some 1-2 kilometers of my total 31 kilometer, seven-and-a-half hour walk today.
I passed a place called Gorilla Burger that looked like this:
When I stopped to buy water (more water, always more water, four liters+ today) these construction workers walking on scaffolding overhead, hidden by privacy curtains often put up around homes being worked on.
There was a lot of this:
Which felt archeological. And since this is my second time walking the route, I could compare scenes from 2020 to today.
2020:
2024:
Here was an apartment block I saw last time and photographed it once again (some of the same stuff being hung out to dry; I bet they never imagined thousands of people inspecting their laundry):
 
I only looked at what I shot four years ago when I sat down to write this. It’s interesting to note the eye going to the same places in slightly different ways.
One of the most “exciting” things I saw was this group of trainees learning how to operate a winch:
I saw a few people doing chores in curiously-lit garages here and there, but I was so defeated by the heat (30 Celsius) and crushing sun that I couldn’t muster the energy to engage.
There was a small stretch of matsu-namiki — pine lined road — about ten kilometers north of Okazaki, my destination for today. The beauty of the pines conspired to make them all the more heartbreaking. This kicked off the Billionaires Club thinking. Why did we lose this?! My heart breaking into a thousand scorched pieces. And the shade! My lord, the shade was so heavenly, so genuinely cool, so restorative, I almost couldn’t bear to leave their shadow. This is how it used to be, like this, the road, the old roads, lined with these pines, hulking mile markers every ri, ticking off your luxuriously-sheltered journey through bustling towns selling all sorts of snacks and tea and other delights. Billionaires Club REVIVAL. You, walking atop dirt roads, your feet in waraji straw sandals. Easy — EASY! If you brought an Edo person on the walk I did today, they’d slap you in the face.
Today, nothing for sale. No open shops. No tea to be purchased or offered up to me, the melting walker. No shade outside of those few hundred meters of pines. Just bobbing consciousness in the swelter. Piston legs. They arrived, my walking legs. Today was the first day they felt like they were here. Truly here. How do walking legs feel? Like tree trunks. Like machines capable of violence attached to your waist, their energy used benevolently to propel your floating consciousness forward.
I said hello to so many people today and so few acknowledged even that I was alive. Parents always say hello, and with a crisp alacrity. The more toddler-like the child by their side, the more happy they are to say hello. Hello! I yell and a beautiful Hello! is volleyed back, one assumes the parent wanting to model generosity of spirit and kindness and the power of greetings to the child. They are Book of Johnning. Of those middle-aged, walking without children? Almost nothing. Where did it go? The generosity? The desire to be a positive archetype?
I have to restrain myself from photographing every corrugated building I see. It patinas so well. The aluminum or tin or whatever it is. It’s one of my favorite materials out in these industrial zones, and I find myself wishing all the new pre-fab homes were clad in it, too.
A rare tableau today: An elegant tiny wall, an old pine, a well-weathered corrugated shed:
OK. My buddy David has arrived in this old castle town of Okazaki. I don’t let anyone walk with me during these walks … except David. He joined for two days on my first Nakasendō walk and then a day on my Tōkaidō walk in 2020 and he’s joining for a day on this one. I’m grateful for his 23-years of friendship. Last time, we walked this very same cursed stretch of road I did today, together, and so in memory it’s not nearly as bad as it was alone. Tomorrow, we walk together from here to Toyohashi. I don’t remember that stretch either, but at least I know I’ll be with someone who knows how to shoot back a Hello! with the best of them. And if you gave David a billion bucks, absolutely — without a doubt — fabulous and fascinating things would result.
More soon,
C
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