Ridgeline — 223 — February 22, 2026

Start With a Walk

Ridgeline subscribers —

I like the blue skies of early January Kanto Japan. It's usually warm, certainly in the sun. Looking out at that winter ocean heals a feral heart. Starting the year off with a mega walk is never a bad idea. Muscles, ya got 'em. Legs, they work. So, that's how this year started.

Trained to Misaki-guchi — a cute little town on the tip of the Miura Peninsula. Then from there: A bus into the village proper. (The train drops you quite a ways away from the fun.) Eight years ago a friend and I stayed at a hostel in town on December 30, and then walked the whole way back up to Kamakura. This year, us — a group of dorks — got up "early"-ish and took the train, took the bus on January 2. Nothing was open. Conbini coffee and snacks standing in the that winter light in the center of town. Then: The walk.

We walked along the coast, past some docks, and then up onto the plateau of the Peninsula proper. Misaki-guchi is quite low, relative to the rest of the Peninsula, which — like most peninsulas in Japan — is composed of a spine of crags and plateaus that slink down to the ocean on both sides.

You can mostly ippon-ura it for a big chunk of the walk. How much ippon-uraing you want to do depends on how much you want to walk. We walked thirty kilometers that day and made it to Zushi. You could easily extend another ten or twenty klicks by exploring more of the coast or the inner valleys.

Our main ippon-ura-exploration was to cut back on the north side of Koajiro Nature Preserve. Suddenly: Fields. The Peninsula is unexpectedly agrarian. Huge fields filling up the available land, ocean far in the background, Mt. Fuji poking through the atmosphere. It's a fine place to farm, I'd say.

We were hungry and hadn't really planned (“Walk?” Walk.). January 2 is a weird day in Japan — still firmly in New Years Downtime. But folks get antsy. They've been cooped up for the last few days. Maybe they went to Denny's? Probably not. The weather is fine. A walk sounds good, they say. Let's get out of this stuffy room, they say. And so: a few shops open up, anyone awake and outside — drawn to them like iron filings to little magnets.

Gyoki's was open. Run by a couple Peninsula hippies (this is a thing, the hippies of the Miura Peninsula, a kind of opting out happening, but not wanting to opt out all the way to, say, Kumamoto, where that would be a serious opt-out (the true hippies: Kyushu bound); no, Miura (like Chiba) allows for low-key ejection, while still being close enough to Tokyo to easily pop in as needed; a kind of cosplay in effect, not unlike the "surfers" of Kamakura, who mostly bob (truly, they should be called "bobbers"); free-range long-haired kids, no vaccines, that sort of thing). Banging out excellent onigiri. Perfect for a gaggle of dorks walking aimlessly north. We ate the onigiri. We drank the lemonade. We were sated and grateful. They took pictures of us and posted them on their Instagram account. Bye bye onigiri folks.

Onward. More fields. But wait! First, coffee. The unpronounceably named Syuyu was also open. Had we just eaten hippie onigiris? Yes we had. But Syuyu had coffee. We like coffee. We drank coffee. Another dork rendezvoused with us. Us dorks were multiplying. Now: Fields.

If you kinda aim for this point, you'll walk the back road between the fields. It's just sweet, this agrarian walking on a peninsula, at slight elevation, blasted with the subtle winter sunlight warmth, camera in hand, dorks dorking all around.

Soon after we merged back onto Route 134, the main costal artery going down through Hayama and beyond. We walked up it. You have to, unless you are looking to do major ippon-uraing. You end up powering through the towns as trucks and motorcycles roar past: Nagasaka, Ashiya, Akiya. Finally, you reach Hayama and feel like the end is near. It's not. Not really. We walked past Red Lobster. Considered it (in a humorous and surreal way; Red Lobster is where I used to eat with my dad when we wanted "fancy" food, when we had had enough Roy Roger’s ("fixin' bar") or Burger King) but the wait was too long (like I said, January 2: A Weird Day). We walked through the back roads of Zushi. It was about five in the evening at this point. We were starving. We had walked about thirty kilometers. Indian was open (Indian is always open; I love Indian restaurants for this). We scarfed hard. The plan was to keep walking, to walk back over the mountains, over Kotsubo, back into Kamakura proper but — torrential downpour, sleet. And, anyway, we were in an Indian food coma. Thirty kilometers was enough for us dorks. We hopped on the train one stop and that was that.

A big, sloppy, dumb, aimless walk on the start of the year is never a bad idea. It makes you feel something: in the legs and heart. You feel full at the end of it, stuffed with Indian food and the rice of hippies and the fullness of having used a body up. Whatever may be happening at large in the demented forest of our world, some sanity prevails on a little peninsula. This, at least, you can believe.

If you want to trace our route you can. Here's a .GPX file. Have fun. Eat some onigiri, drink some tea, see some fields, gaze upon a winter Fuji.

Goodbye from a chilly Santa Fe (elevation!), here to meditate. More soon,
C