Cozy Journey
(居ごこちのよい旅)
I have decided to compile my travel essay "Goody! in the magazine "COYOTE" for about two years from 2005. As the subtitle of the book says, "Make your own map on foot," the purpose of this series was to create a map of your own while walking around your favorite city. The maps of a trip are not bought, but made by walking around by yourself. I thought how happy I would be if I could get a number of such maps that are only for me.
I visited the city without using guidebooks or the Internet, and with little information about the trip, I spent days walking around a small area that could be covered in an hour, drawing maps and writing down what I saw, felt, heard, encountered, and observed. Shingo Wakagi, a photographer who walked with us, similarly took photographs of what he saw with his own eyes. It is not easy to put into words the relationship between the text and the photographs. This is because the photographs are not there to supplement or explain the text depicted. Rather, the writer used the text to depict images and scenes, while the photographer used the camera to capture the experience of his own eyes. The city of a traveler's destination is represented in different ways by the two authors in "Good Day! The day is spent at breakfast and dinner together.
The only thing that determines how we spend our day is the time we have breakfast together. The rest of the day is free. They could read, sleep, go shopping, or meet friends without interfering with each other in any way. However, most of the time we spent the day walking together. We made a list of cafes, bookstores, galleries, etc., and visited all of them, even the most obscure ones. They loved taking the time to find the obscure stores and places. But the greater pleasure was in exploring the older neighborhoods of the city. Avoiding the newer, busier areas, they walked along the less popular side streets and lanes, marveling at the faded posters and signs on the walls and the old, nameless buildings, and peering into the lives of the people who lived in those areas. In this way, the two of us walked through the city as if we were in love with it.
Once you step out the door, you are on a journey. When you think about it, you realize that life is made up of journeys. Whether it is far or near has nothing to do with whether it is a journey or not. We must always be conscious of walking, seeing, hearing, feeling, encountering, and observing. This is also the basis for devising ways to enrich our daily lives. If there are two types of travel, the only difference between them is the difference between traveling in space and traveling in time. I believe that the articles summarized here encompass both types of travel.
What is the pleasure of travel? If you move to an unknown place, even for a moment, there is always a sparkle in the air. You have to pick up those sparkles as beautiful things and collect them one by one by yourself. We hope that the beauty of such a small sparkle will reach the readers of this book. The title was changed from "Goody! and changed the title to "A Cozy Journey," which is what the two of us always used to say.
It is said that fewer young people are going on trips. I would like to conclude with a word of advice: "Do not travel when you are young, but travel when you are old. If you do not travel in your youth, what will you talk about in your old age?