Island Monarchy Hiking

Thoughts about hiking in the UK and Japan

Walking in the UK and Japan

Earlier this year, I went back to the UK for a couple of months, for the first time since the start of the pandemic. In the intervening years, the British have discovered the delights of Halloumi cheese and how to pull meat.

Lurking at the back of my mind since since my visit has been the idea of comparing walking in the UK and Japan. They’re both island countries, but how do they differ? How is the landscape different? What does walking or hiking mean in both countries?

The Cheshire Plain with the Pennines in the distance

Leaves

I grew up in Cheshire, a flattish landscape of lush green fields edged with hawthorn hedging, sandy-bottomed brooks and twisted oaks. Japan has oaks too — the one I see most often is the Ring-Cupped Oak, its acorns are longer and thinner, lacking the pleasing roundness of the English variety. The Japanese oaks are evergreen, the English ones deciduous, which brings us to the smell. What I really noticed hiking in an English winter was the smell of slowly rotting leaf matter. Many more leaves fall in England, onto a damp ground, where they slowly moulder away with a deeply satisfying softness. In Japan, the leaves remain, curled and crispy, covering the forest floor, a hiding place for beetles and the dreaded mukade centipede. Footfalls in an English forest are a soft clump, in a Japanese forest they are a scratchy rustle.

Rising from the Cheshire plain is a sandstone outcrop — Alderley Edge. It’s riddled with copper mines and covered with beech trees. Hundreds of years of falling leaves slowly disintegrating have created a soil that’s not really like soil, but like the contents of so many soggy split tea-bags.

Discoloured sandstone of Alderley Edge

Woodland in Japan is confined to the slopes. If you see woodland on a flat plain, it’s either a shrine or a park. This stark difference between slope and flat is a hallmark of the Japanese landscape. From the Cheshire plain, the landscape shift is gradual as you climb the slopes of the Pennines. Hawthorn hedge gradually gives way to patchy hawthorn and gorse, then the hawthorn disappears altogether, with only dry-stone wall and wind-blown gorse remaining. Hanging woods spread across the slopes of English hills, but they don’t start with the clarity of the Japanese forest. In Japan, flat is field and slope is forest, and that’s that.

Stone

The softly-dimpled sandstone of Cheshire rises to the grimly-grey gritstone of the Dark Peak, but with both, the edges are rounded, smoothed away by geological time. Outcroppings of rock in the Japanese forest are sharp-edged tetrahedrons that are still falling away with an alarming recentness. Beyond the Dark Peak lies the White Peak, rolling hills of pale limestone, criss-crossed with dry-stone walls, where streams disappear into hidden caves. In England, the underlying stone affects the houses above — many old houses and public buildings, and even newer ones too, are made of stone. The result is a constant, shifting, clear sense of place from the geology. Blackened-pink sandstone in Cheshire, gloomy-grey gritstone in the Dark Peak, pale limestone topped with dark slate in the White Peak, and farther east, pale limestone topped with the cheerful orange of pantiles, with their hints of the Mediterranean.

Smoothed gritstone and the beginning of the Dark Peak

In Japan the local materials used for construction don’t seem to vary that much, the same kinds of trees, the same kind of mud to fill in the walls, the same kind of tiles, so houses pretty much look the same from area to area. Stone is used for retaining walls, in a diamond-pattern, and almost invariably granite. It’s also used for marker posts and the boundary fences of shrines. Once however, from a train rattling across the Kyushu landscape, I noticed the local kura storehouses were made of stone.

Mud

A lot of walking in England involves avoiding mud, or when unavoidable, just squidging through it, and hoping your boots don’t get sucked off. And yes, you need boots. In Japan, I can happily use hiking sandals most of the time, mud is a rarity, confined to the recently-flooded rice fields and patches near mountain streams. Water generally sits in pools on the firm surface, hence the use of geta in Japan in times gone by. Try using geta in England, and you will end up shoeless with two broken ankles.

Stick your geta in that!

Rights of Way

In Japan, hiking trails are more in the North American style. I’ve never been hiking in North America, but from what I’ve seen and heard about it, trails tend to be routes through forest or other wilderness, with a clear trailhead and a single path.

Hiking routes in the UK tend to be a connected collection of rights of way; routes across farmland and wilderness that were gradually established by people walking (or riding) the shortest path from village to market town. Over time, these rights of way have become almost sacred. Re-routing them seems to be incredibly difficult. This sometimes leads to some bizarre situations: paths chop across the corners of fields, through people’s gardens, and even across their patio and past their kitchen windows.

One incident from walking while I was back in England exemplifies this: I was walking from Blythe Bridge to Uttoxeter in Staffordshire one extremely wet day; I crossed the end of a trotter-churned pig field (image geta in that!), crossed a lane and came to a horse paddock. Never in the history of horsedom have two horses been happier about seeing human company. I was probably the first human they’d seen that miserably damp day. The only problem was that in their happiness, they hung their big horsey heads over the stile (a plank of wood poked through a lowered piece of fence so that a human can cross with a moderate probability of injury, but an animal can’t without a very high chance of injury), completely blocking my way across the corner of their paddock. To entice them away from the stile, I walked along the fence. they cheerfully followed me. I walked back to the stile. They cheerfully followed me, and once again stuck their big horsey heads over the stile.

I gave up on crossing the few metres of their paddock, and instead decided to go over the fence into the neighbouring garden, which I would have to enter anyway. Nobody was watching from the windows of the attached house. One leg over the fence, I swung the other over, and simultaneously the wet slippery sole of my already fence-planted foot shot off the wet wood. It could have been a ball-crushing moment, but my momentum was enough to carry me over the fence in a kind of roll, without my crotch making contact with the fence top.

Walking through people’s gardens is incredibly awkward, but being able to really walk through fields brings you that little bit closer to nature, and provides a greater variety of landscapes to walk through. Sometimes hiking in Japan can seem like endless forest, and although forest bathing is supposed to be a big thing here, I kind of like bathing in the bright sunshine and skylarks of the open fields too.

Who Hikes,When, and Wearing What?

Hiking in the UK is solidly middle-class activity. This is true in Japan too. More working-class activities in Japan are things like fishing, barbequeing and going to see baseball games. The hiking equipment stores in Kobe are mostly located amongst Ferrari and Aston Martin showrooms. These are what I call the fashion hiking stores — big brand names like Montbell that have reasonably good equipment, but they’re more for looking good. The proper hiking stores that sell tough, useful equipment are in old, end-of-Showa-Era shopping centres with cheaper rents.

The fashionable female hiker in Japan wears Montbell hiking tights with shorts, a brightly-coloured jacket, two expensive walking poles, and a wide-brim hat. The men wear similar, but with hiking trousers in place of the tights and shorts. In the UK, there is a wider variety of hiking clothing, with the more serious hiker tucking their trouser-legs into their socks and perhaps wearing gaiters. In both countries, it’s compulsory to greet hikers going the other way.

Not quite DALL E3, not quite… (Image generated using Microsoft Bing Copilot)

Hiking is a lot more seasonal in Japan. Most hiking takes place in autumn, with the changing leaves. Spring is another popular time, with the weather not too hot and not too cold. The heat and humidity of Japanese summers rules out hiking for most people (not me). Winter doesn’t seem a popular time to hike, although I think it’s a great time! The moderateness of the weather in the UK seems to make hiking more of a year-round activity.

Public Transport and Hiking

Japan’s superior public transport makes it much easier to hike between two train stations. It was possible to hike between train stations in England, but farther afield, the unreliability of the service (frequent cancellations) meant returning home post-hike was stressful.