This book describes visits I made from 2017 to 2019 to ten "hidden places" in Japan. These included not only remote hamlets in Akita and Tottori prefectures, but some easily accessible places that have nevertheless been overlooked and forgotten. I was seeking the Japan I have loved since I was a child.

In my book Dogs and Demons (2001) I predicted that as Japan's countryside continued to be ravaged by poorly planned public works and littered with concrete and garish signage, this would have a detrimental effect on foreign travelers, who would be repelled by the ugliness they saw. I was completely wrong. Foreign visitors have mostly overlooked it all. It's because visitors to Japan come in search of beauty, and naturally enough focus on the beautiful. And they have no way of knowing how drastic the changes have been.

That's not the case with the Japanese. There are many who feel the same sorrow at what has overtaken their country as I do. They're seeking the beautiful Japan which is increasingly hard to find, but which they know must still be there. This book was written for them and was originally published in Japanese in December 2020 under the title Nippon junrei [Japan pilgrimage]. After it came out, a number of foreign friends asked me if it could be translated into English. This book is that translation, but while I aimed to stay close to the original, I ended up making additions here and there. Sometimes it was to clarify the meaning for people who don't live in Japan, and other times because the work of translation sparked new thoughts. A few of these changes are significant expansions on the Japanese book--and now I wish I could go back and rewrite it to include them.

Even with these revisions, my way of approaching things in this book is not how I would normally have written in English, and at times the rhyme and rhythm of things may sound a bit odd to foreign readers. More unsettling than this, however, will likely be the sense of the fragility of the landscapes I describe.

This is not a full description of the places I visited. That's the role of guidebooks. Instead, I focus on one or two particular points that draw my interest--the line of a temple roof, the shape of a rice paddy or a mountainside covered with primeval trees. It's such details that take us to a deeper place.

Even many Japanese would no longer be aware, for example, that the shape of rice paddies has changed in recent decades. Once you know that, you start to look at rice paddies differently. This book is an exploration of not only forgotten places, but forgotten details.

A few years ago, I read an account by a foreign writer in which he walked the Kumano Pilgrimage, a series of ancient trails through the forests of the Kii Peninsula, imagining how this scenery must have pleased the great print artist Hiroshige. No matter that Hiroshige never came near the site of this pilgrimage. More critically, the industrial cedar plantations that now cover the Kumano route look nothing like the forests of the Edo period.

Suppose we wanted to ask ourselves what really is wonderful about the Kumano Pilgrimage. If the romance does not lie in Hiroshige or in cedar plantations, then where and what is it?

In Hidden Japan, I try to return to where the romance is really to be found. Secluded hamlets like something out of an old ink painting do still exist, as do temples and shrines in remote areas that survived the wars that wiped out old Kyoto and Edo and the tourist frenzy of recent years. Haunted woods old enough to have enchanted Hiroshige and Basho still stand. These places have their own real stories to tell, more magical than we could have dreamed.