---
title: 'Japan Travel Notes — Learning to Be with Time Through Wood, Fire, and Gaps'
ShowRssButtonInSectionTermList: true
date: 2025-12-15T00:00:00+08:00
draft: false
showtoc: true
tocopen: false
type: posts
author: ["Xinwei Xiong"]
keywords: ['Japan travel', 'Mount Fuji', 'Hakone', 'Tokyo', 'Kansai', 'autumn leaves', 'Wakayama', 'Kumano Kodo', 'Nara', 'Kyoto', 'travel essay']
tags: ['Travel', 'Japan', 'Self-Discovery', 'Adventure', 'Exploration']
categories: ["Travel"]
description: 'Summer and autumn 2025, two trips to Japan. From Hakone and Mount Fuji to Kansai autumn leaves, from Kumano Kodo to Kyoto ancient temples. A place where I learned to be with time through wood, fire, and gaps.'
tldr:
  - "Japan maintains relationships with time through deliberate impermanence: wood burns, gardens change, metal oxidizes, creating renewal rather than preservation."
  - "Solitude on ancient trails and small towns reveals patterns in personal decision-making, showing how details slip despite correct direction, leaving acceptance rather than anxiety."
  - "Objects, structures, and spaces develop unique character through human touch: Kaikado caddies remember hands, Hōryū-ji columns hold 1,400 years through millimeter tolerances, gardens yield to sight."
---

> *July 2025, Hakone · Mount Fuji · Tokyo, 10 days*
> *November–December 2025, Kansai autumn — Wakayama · Kumano · Nara · Kyoto, 15 days*

---

It's March 2026. I'm sitting in a café in Siem Reap writing this.

Two kilometers outside the window is Angkor Wat — those sandstone corridors, each stone hundreds of years old, the whole complex like it's wrestling with time through volume, through weight, through stone that will never rot.

The two trips I want to write about are a completely opposite answer. Japan is a place that learned to be with time through wood, through fire, through gaps.

---

## Prophecy and Ordinary Days

Before I went to Japan, I came across a post.

A prophetic manga published in 1999 had something written on the back cover: "The true great disaster will come in July 2025." The internet narrowed it further to July 5th — Japan would be destroyed by a tsunami. I didn't think too hard about it; I booked my flights around that date. Not entirely out of morbid curiosity — more genuinely wanting to know: what does a nation that has long accepted "the next disaster will come" actually do on the eve of a supposed apocalypse?

July 5, 2025. Nagoya. Sunny, 33 degrees. The subway was on time. The convenience store had just rolled out a new round of breakfast onigiri. Masked commuters walked forward at a steady pace, no one looking up at the sky. Japan had not been destroyed, and no one seemed particularly relieved that it hadn't.

I spent the afternoon drifting through FLIGHT OF DREAMS at the airport. A retired Boeing 787 sat there, its livery faded, deep scuff marks along the window frames, repurposed into an exhibition space you could walk through. No signs of restoration anywhere — the wear was just wear, the cracks were just cracks. The placard beside it said nothing in particular, as if this plane had always belonged here, as if it had every right to wear every year it had been flown right there on its surface.

I stared at those scuff marks for a long time. I thought of what a friend had said before I left: *You'll love Japan. They have a different relationship with old things.*

---

## Mount Omuro: The Mountain That Disappears Every Year

Mount Omuro, July 7th, afternoon.

The wind at the summit was strong enough that I couldn't stand without gripping the gondola handrail. The sky was a pressing lead-grey, but the slopes were a deep, saturated green — from base to rim, almost perfectly curved, like a bowl carefully turned upside down on the ground.

On the way up, a placard said something like: this mountain is burned every spring, a ritual that has continued for seven hundred years.

Seven hundred years. Burned once a year.

My instinct was: what's left? Then I understood — burning is precisely what keeps it this way. Without burning, undergrowth would take over and the silhouette would blur. After burning, grass grows back from the ash, the arc remains, the colors actually renew. That perfect bowl shape is the accumulation of seven hundred years of deliberate destruction.

The gondola ride to the summit takes about five minutes. Nobody spoke. The wind was loud. I wasn't thinking anything particularly deep — just: this mountain is unlike any mountain I know. It seemed deliberately *maintained*, but the method of maintenance was letting it disappear once a year.

---

## Miho no Matsubara: The Real Thing Beyond the Symbol

Miho no Matsubara, July 6th, evening.

I took a bus from Shizuoka city to the last stop, then walked a dirt path covered with pine needles toward the sea. The trees were old, their trunks grey-white, branches jutting out low enough that you had to duck. The air smelled of rotting pine resin — humid, thick, sticking in the throat.

The moment I stepped out of the pine grove, I saw the sea.

Mount Fuji was right there, at the line where sea meets sky, its silhouette so sharp it looked artificial — like someone had cut it out and pasted it against a sunset backdrop. Waves came in and retreated. The sand was black. The shadow of the pine grove cut across the beach at an angle. A few egrets moved slowly along the shore.

This scene has been painted for centuries, photographed billions of times, long since become a symbol. I didn't expect standing there to feel heavier than any photograph. Not because it was more beautiful, but because the sound of the wave pulling back, the smell of rotting pine needles, the way black sand softly gave way underfoot — none of that could be carried in any photograph.

I stayed until it was completely dark, and missed the last bus.

---

## Mount Fuji: Goraikou

July 9th–10th, Mount Fuji.

We left Gotemba at 2 AM. The flashlight's beam lit only the gravel path one meter ahead. Looking up: nothing. Looking down: occasionally a chain of flashlight dots moving slowly upward along the mountainside.

The temperature at the summit was near zero. The wind came sideways — not downward, just pressing directly into the face. Plant the pole, stabilize your feet, take a step up, breathe twice, another step. A few people were crouched by the path, wool hats pulled down, faces buried in their knees — hard to tell if they were exhausted or frozen through.

Goraikou. Sunrise.

I can't describe the color sequence of those few minutes — the orange and red were layered together, not separate, then gold seeped up from beneath the clouds, and finally blue. Everyone on the mountain stopped. No one took photos, no one spoke. We just stood and watched.

The woman beside me was an elderly Japanese woman in a white mountaineering jacket. She stood with her eyes closed, hands pressed together in prayer.

---

## Kawaguchiko: Nonbee

Kawaguchiko, evening of July 11th, at Nonbee.

The old man was seventy, slightly stooped. When we walked in he gestured for us to sit, then produced a menu with Chinese annotations — handwritten in his own careful, slightly trembling characters.

The skewers arrived — local chicken, skin crisp, fat drawn out by the charcoal, with a lightly charred sweetness. The grandmother was in the kitchen, never came out, but occasionally you could hear the sound of a spatula.

Midway through the meal the old man came and sat beside us. Using the handful of English words he knew, gestures, and my translation app opened on the table, we talked in fragments. He said when he worked in Tokyo he felt like a spare part. Here, forty years, he remembers every regular customer — which dish they loved, when they brought a new girlfriend, when they started coming alone, talking less, drinking more.

When the bill came, we all thought there had been a mistake. The old man waved it off. No mistake.

---

## Tokyo: The Wordless Agreement in the Elevator

Tokyo, last night, somewhere near Kabukicho.

I was staying in a DVD shop's rest capsule — eight hours, just big enough to lie down. In the elevator I ran into a Japanese businessman: suit, tie askew, hair a bit disheveled, clearly had a few drinks. Neither of us spoke. We both stared at the floor numbers.

The doors opened. We both stepped aside simultaneously, both extended a hand — the same "after you" gesture.

Then we both froze for a second. Then both laughed at the same time.

He went first. Looked back at me, gave a small nod, and walked away. That was it.

---

## Kumano Kodo: The State of Solitude

The second trip to Japan, deep autumn, entering from Wakayama.

Day two of Kumano Kodo was solo. Just me.

The forest was dense. The stone steps were mossy, wet, with a give to them — each footfall sank slightly, the foot slid forward a little, requiring a deliberate slowing down. Sunlight filtered through gaps in the canopy — not rays, but fragments — falling on the moss, on the stone shrines at the path's edge, on the decomposing pine needles.

No signal. Water and some dried food in my pack. The only sounds were wind, and occasionally birds.

After about two hours of walking, something kept circling in my mind — I couldn't name it, just something wanting to surface but not quite surfacing. This feeling persisted until I sat down on a large rock and ate a little, when I realized: this was a state I hadn't been in for a long time. No decisions to make. No one to reply to. No need to keep walking, no need to stop.

Later I took the wrong bus and got stranded alone in Gojo, a small mountain town, waiting for the last bus. It was 4 PM, the sun already tilting. One street in the whole town. The white backlight of a vending machine glowed particularly bright in the dimming afternoon. I bought a can of hot coffee and sat on the steps beside it to wait.

Cold. Probably under ten degrees. I hadn't brought enough layers.

In the two hours that followed I thought more than I had in all those hours on the ancient road. I thought about why I'd missed that bus, why I always miscalculate time at some critical juncture, whether this habit extends beyond travel, how I approach a lot of things — the direction is usually right, but some detail slips, and then you're alone in some unexpected small town, waiting.

The vending machine hummed steadily. The sky went completely dark. The town's streetlights came on — old-fashioned warm yellow, casting long shadows on the ground. I felt okay. Not anxious. Just a little cold, a little hungry.

---

## Nara: Deer That Don't Fear

In Nara, the deer genuinely don't fear people.

Not the trained kind of unafraid. The kind that has never considered you a threat. A deer walked over and pressed its nose directly against my camera lens to sniff, then turned and walked away without looking back.

The Great Buddha of Tōdai-ji — the moment I walked in I felt physically compressed. The scale, the metallic light, and the way it sits there — generous, indifferent, as if it predates this entire era.

But Hōryū-ji stayed with me longer.

The first thing I noticed walking in was the columns. They have entasis — a slight swelling in the middle, tapering at both ends. The shape carries the force downward; it looks elastic, alive. The wood is old, gone grey, but the grain is extraordinarily clear, like skin — as if you stretched out your hand and touched it, you'd feel warmth.

1,400 years. Japan is earthquake country. Entirely timber-framed, with mortise-and-tenon tolerances held to the millimeter. Not a single nail. The structure carries itself, and those tiny margins between tenon and mortise absorb the shaking — never snapping, never collapsing — for 1,400 years.

Liang Sicheng spent a long time here. He said China had searched for decades for Tang-dynasty timber structures and found not a single pillar — then found them in Japan. The country that preserved them had carried this tradition away from elsewhere, then guarded it with a kind of careful reverence, never daring to change it.

Hōryū-ji has no grand narrative. No grandeur, no overwhelming scale. Just those columns, those bracketed eaves, the shadows in the courtyard stretched long by afternoon sun. Quiet. As if it has nothing to prove.

---

## Kyoto: Gardens and Light

At Ryōan-ji in Kyoto — I arrived in the afternoon, many visitors, but everyone was quiet.

The karesansui garden: 15 stones, white gravel, and nothing else. No matter how you look, you can never see all 15 — one is always hidden. This isn't an angle problem; it's a design problem. Human vision has blind spots. You will never see the whole. That is what this garden is saying.

I sat on the outer corridor for about half an hour.

The gravel has patterns — raked by monks in waves, very regular. But near the stones, the lines curve around naturally — not a hard turn, but the kind of turn that already knows to yield.

At Sanjūsangen-dō, a thousand Thousand-Armed Kannon stand in a long line. I went in the morning; the light came through high lateral windows, falling on those gilded figures in layers — close ones clear, far ones softening, extending to where sight dissolves. The floorboards held a smell of wood absorbing centuries of humidity and footsteps — thick, heavy.

All one thousand faces are different, and yet all the same face. It's said that if you grieve someone lost, you can look carefully here and always find a face resembling them.

I looked for a while. I wasn't searching for anyone specific. But gazing deeper into where the figures blurred into the light, I felt something I couldn't name — a comfort that asked no questions.

---

## Kaikado: The Temperature That Remembers You

Kaikado, Kyoto, December 8th.

They serve coffee here, but the important thing is the metal tea caddies — made by this shop for 140 years. Brass or tin, the resistance of the lid closing is hand-lapped by craftsmen. Not a snap-lock, but a slow, even, resistant descent, with a faint sense of an air seal at the very end. I picked one up and closed it several times just to feel it — that resistance has warmth.

On the display shelf were several caddies used for decades. The color had deepened, uneven — where hands touched most often it was brighter, where hands rarely reached the color ran darker, with a quality of light I can't quite describe. Not the shine of new things. The glow that is grown, from within.

The person in the shop told me: every caddy leaves the workshop identical. Used for ten, twenty years, it becomes something unique to each person — depending on how you touch it, the temperature and oils in your hands. You use it. It remembers you.

The coffee was good. I've forgotten what beans, but I remember the cup — thick, with a slightly wide rim, weighty in the hand, warm.

---

## Fushimi Inari: The Color of Desire

Ten thousand torii gates at Fushimi Inari. Many donated by companies.

Walking up, the tunnel formed by two rows of red pillars extends without end. The backs of the torii are engraved with donor names and dates — corporate names, individual names, dates ranging from decades ago to recently.

What's called the sacred is here very concrete: I want to prosper, I want to succeed, I offer something, I receive protection in return.

No transcendence. No renunciation. Just desire as it actually is — direct and loud, blanketing an entire mountain.

Partway up I looked back. The red extended downward, to the treetops, to the base, and below: the city of Kyoto, lights coming on, orange.

---

## In the Broken Things, Someone Was Good

On the first trip, we missed three buses, missed a sunset, missed the hotel's last check-in time.

One companion's phone fell into a coach; they waited by the road overnight for the driver to bring the bus back the next day. Another lost a shinkansen ticket; the person who found it turned it in to lost-and-found, and he got it back. The hotel owner didn't charge the cancellation fee — instead asked if he had a place to stay, made a phone call, and a friend offered a room with a view of Mount Fuji.

All of this actually happened. Not one of it was planned.

I stood outside the hotel holding a hot coffee, the evening wind on my face, thinking: so many things went wrong today. Why does it feel fine?

Not because the outcomes were good. But because in every broken thing, there was one person who was good.

---

## National Art Center Tokyo: No Need to Keep Walking

The last day in Tokyo, at the National Art Center.

From the outside, the glass curtain wall is wave-shaped — light flows across it, and as the clouds move, the entire facade shifts subtly. Inside, the ceiling is very high; light comes through glass panels at the top, not direct but diffuse, very even, without emphasis. I don't remember what was being exhibited, but I remember the space itself — the rhythm of the corridors, the sloped walkways up and down, wide platforms at intervals where you could stop. Nothing demanding that you keep moving.

I stood on one of those platforms for a long time, looking out the window. Outside: the city, traffic, people, a cluster of buildings in the distance.

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## Stone and Wood

It's March 2026. Siem Reap. Coffee still half a cup.

Angkor Wat spent centuries disappearing into the jungle, then centuries being found again. Those sandstone bodhisattvas, the curve of their lips unchanged — an expression of not caring about anything.

Maybe both answers are right. Stone has its way, wood has its way. Neither is wrong — just different methods of passing through time.

That retired 787, the annual fire on Mount Omuro, the metal caddy at Kaikado that slowly takes on the color of whoever holds it — all saying the same thing. None of it spoken.

---
