Hike, Bike & Kayak Japan’s Michinoku Coastal Trail

Overview

Over 42 million people visited Japan last year. Almost none of them came to Tohoku.

Eight days on the best hikes and sections of the Michinoku Coastal Trail — a 1,000 kilometer trail on Japan’s northern Pacific coast. I’ve been traveling to Japan since 2007. This is the Japan I keep going back for.

I see where everyone is going, and then I turn around and go the other way. That’s been my travel style for 20 years, and this itinerary is the best chance I’ve had to show you what it actually looks like.

We hike the trail, bike it, and kayak off it. Some sections run through pitch-black hand-carved tunnels you cross by flashlight. Most nights we’re in small family-run ryokans with an onsen to sink into at the end of the day. One night is spent eating fireside on a headland where the grass runs right down to the edge of the Pacific. And the food: tuna a few hours off the boat at one of Japan’s largest fish markets, sake poured by the brewer who rebuilt his brewery after it was destroyed, a kaiseki meal we learn to cook ourselves, and one exquisite dinner on a clifftop.

Why the Tohoku Coast?

On March 11, 2011, a 49-foot tsunami hit this coastline.

The trail was built afterward, on purpose, to bring people and their money back to towns that had lost almost everything. So hiking it isn’t incidental to the recovery — it is the recovery.

You’ll meet people who lived through that morning and chose to stay. We’ll visit Arahama Elementary School, still standing exactly as the water left it, and the Iwate Tsunami Memorial, where the guides tell you where they were that day.

Highlights:

• Hike, ebike, and kayak eight days of the Michinoku Coastal Trail — Japan’s newest long trail traversing up the Pacific coast
• Carry an MCT trail passport and collect stamps all week, to the final stamp at Kabushima Shrine
• Go to see autumn color, in the one part of Japan that doesn’t fill up for it.
• The Kesennuma Brewers Table — a sake pairing dinner created by a brewer who rebuilt after the tsunami
• Chef Ito at L’Oreole Tanohata — French trained, Sanriku ingredients, perched on the trail above the ocean
• Tour the Kesennuma fish market, one of Japan’s largest, then try seafood for breakfast
• Sea kayaking at Jodogahama, and a blowhole that fires 100 feet up when the swell is right
• Hand-carved tunnels hiked by flashlight hearing incredible stories of survival
• A fireside dinner on the Tanesashi coastal lawn — nothing between you and the Pacific
• Onsen almost every night
• Cocktails with Jin at his tiny Sendai shot bar — Japanese bartending is a craft and a sport
• 7 to 12 people. That’s the whole group.

Who I built this for

People who are done with the crowded ‘must-see’ Japan on the postcards. People who’d rather hike to a fishing village of forty people than queue for a temple. Adventurous eaters — we eat Japanese food every day, much of it out of the water that morning. People who’ll get naked in an onsen because that’s the rule, and who are fine being the only foreigners in the room. (Men’s and women’s baths are always separate — but no, there’s no swimsuit option.)

If you’ve hiked the Camino or the Kumano Kodo, you already know what you’re signing up for: you carry an MCT trail passport all week and collect stamps section by section. The last one goes in at Kabushima Shrine, right before the farewell dinner.

Why not do it yourself?

You could, and I’ve written an article on how. But navigating the trail with almost no English signage is a lot to sort out from a laptop, the best sections are hard to link without a car, and the best things here aren’t bookable at all: the fisherman who takes us out through his oyster rafts, the Brewers Table, Kaiseki cooking classes with locals, the fireside dinner, the cocktails with locals, and the stories you’ll hear from local survivors.