In Vancouver now, the leaves are very full in the West End. The weather’s been cool, with some rain, but on sunny days there’s that familiar intense play of light and shade, especially when you cycle on Haro or on Cardero in and out of the shade of horse chestnut and oak trees, and have to be very careful that car drivers see you at junctions. In the park, azaleas and rhododendrons are now in flower, with the fallen blossoms gathering at the foot of each tree in perfect circles. They makes me think of the wild azaleas on the mountainside walking in Tohoku, where I was earlier in the month.

I flew to Tokyo for a holiday with a Singapore friend in early May. I’ve always thought of the city as bare and treeless, but we somehow discovered green spaces. One morning we went to the Meiji Shrine, walking from the station along curving avenues of tall trees. In the afternoon we hoped to go to the Museum of Modern Art, but it was closed, and so we walked through the Imperial Palace East Gardens, past fortified gateways, walls of huge stone blocks, each a different size,  and wooden guardhouses. On the last day we went to the National Garden, and walked around it in an anticlockwise direction, passing through the Mother and Child Woods, then the Japanese Garden, and the more formal European-style garden at the far end of the park. Even where we stayed, at a hotel in Ikebukuro, there were smaller spaces of green. We visited the campus of Rikkyo University, walking through red brick courtyards designed by American architects in the early years of the twentieth century. We also made our way through the maze of lanes to the Jiyu Gakuen Myonichikan, the girl’s school that Frank Lloyd Wright designed. In Japan, there’s always a strange dissonance for me. I can often read thekanji, but I can’t pronounce them, and so I can recognise and partly decode place names. The girl’s school in kanji is 自由学園明日館, with character phrases for freedom, campus, and the future. On the subway in Tokyo, I’d read and remember the station’s name in kanji, see it in romanisation, and then begin to try to sound it out in hiragana when that system of writing was displayed. Five years ago, preparing for a trip, I’d more or less got hiragana and katakana, the two phonetic writing systems used in Japanese,  down pat. Katakana are used for foreign words, mostly from English, and so it was often possible guess the meaning of a word in this script by sounding it out. This time I’d forgotten most of what I’d learned, but when standing on those long journeys across the city, I’d try to commit hiragana in the station names to memory.

Ater a couple of days we took the shinkansen north to Hachinohe, where our walking trip began. We followed the coastline south, taking in parts of the Michinoku Trail, established to lure visitors back to the region devastated by the tsunami of 2011. We passed through a variety of landscapes. Hachinohe was a port city with traces of heavy industry: from a display in the museum, complete with a rather mangy looking stuffed penguin from South Georgia, we learned that it once had been a whaling town. The first stretch of the walk southwards down the coast was flat, and parts almost had the feeling of an English beach resort. We visited the Kabushima Shrine, and were engulfed by noisy clouds of nesting seagulls as we tiptoed our way between the nests. On subsequent days the landscape grey wilder, a Pacific coast very much like trails on the west coast of Vancouver Island, with forests of pine and cedar, and steep ascents and descents to cross sharply-angled creeks. The difference was the presence of humans in the landscape. Even on the wildest coasts, there were fishing harbours, with breakwaters constructed out of massive concrete blocks the same slate grey colour as the rocks, so they looked strangely in harmony with the landscape. Human presence, then, but strangely very few people. We’d descend to a harbour full of small dinghies with outboards, and then larger fishing boats, all immaculately maintained, but with no one around. At times there were also traces of the tsunami; markers of the height to which the water had come, and, at Nakanohama, a memorial park built around the ruins of a campsite.

We got quite quickly into a rhythm of walking. Dawn came very early, and we’d often get up at six, when it had already been light for an hour. Dusk came earlier than in Canada, and we fell asleep after dinner, tired after a day’s waling. At Jodogohama, on the last day, we finally got to soak in an onsen, looking out over the pine forest to the sea. Holidays like this are often too short for me: I fall into a rhythm, and then, just when the body adapts, the holiday comes to an end. 

There was something else on this trip, the culmination of changes in translation technology that have been happening over the last few years. In the last few months I’ve increasingly been using Deep Seek as a virtual assistant to help me read and to translate from Chinese. In Japan, at first, I’d use the same AI agent to devise Japanese phrases for conversation, and wait while it thought in real time and gave its usual complex explanation of alternatives and choices. This helped to break the ice in conversation, but nothing much more: I’d memorise a phrase, and then my interlocutor, delighted with my stumbling attempts at Japanese, would respond with a long and to me incomprehensible reply. On this holiday I quickly learnt shortcuts: speaking into the translation function on my phone, and having the person I was talking to read the translation, and then repeat the process in reply; using the translation function now that the phone automatically used OCR to read menus and signs, and seeing them morph into English. It wasn’t perfect, but it was immensely useable, and technology will only get better. It struck me that we were on the cusp of another profound change in the nature of travel. The first was in the late1990s, with the popularisation of the internet. Not only could you find out potentially unlimited information about where you were, but you could also maintain everyday connections conversations with friends and family: very different from the 1980s, when you had to rely on letters sent poste restante, and occasional expensive international phone calls. Now the screen of language was breaking down, with huge potential in terms of communication, but also losses.

On our trip we met two American women of our age, travelling together. They’d learned Japanese as undergraduate students on exchange from California, forty years previously. Now they were relearning what they had forgotten, travelling together, making conversation with shopkeepers and the staff in an izakaya we ate in one night in Kuji. The experience they’d had in the early 1980s, cut off from America in Tokyo, could not now be repeated: even language immersion programmes might be threatened in an age of instantaneous translation. Yet there’s also something lost her in terms of being culturally unmoored, and having to enter and live in a world of others. 

And on the trails, of course, we were alone with each other, following climbs and descents, the bear bell jingling on my backpack, the sea grey, and the fresh green of the hillsides scarred with the red of azaleas.