Four days on a mountain, a rope bridge, and a corridor with no light in it
Japan has two opposite traditions of walking, and for a long time they existed side by side.
The first belonged to the hikyaku, the couriers of the Edo period. They ran the highways in relay, carrying official documents from one post station to the next, and the whole system was built around speed. Walking was a means. With the town couriers you could even pay for it: the tighter the deadline, the higher the fee.
The second belonged to shugendō, Japan’s tradition of mountain asceticism. It fuses esoteric Buddhism with much older forms of mountain worship, and it took organized shape in the medieval period, splitting into a Tendai lineage centered on Shōgo-in and a Shingon lineage centered on Daigo-ji — the school Kūkai founded.
Its practitioners were not monks shut away in monasteries. Most lived in villages, performed prayers and healings, and went up into the mountains with the seasons. For them, walking was not preparation for practice. Walking was the practice, and arriving quickly meant nothing at all.
The same two legs, doing opposite things. I wrote about all this before going to Shikoku, and I ended by saying that I was about to visit a place where walking becomes practice, and that I would report back.
This is the report. It did not go the way I expected.
The mountain
Mount Tsurugi is 1,955 meters, the second-highest peak in Shikoku, and it is one of those shugendō mountains. A chairlift takes you to about 1,750 meters, and from there the ridge trail runs roughly 900 meters to the summit — forty minutes, steep in places, with loose stone underfoot.
At the top I had not planned to go any further. Then I saw the ridgeline running west toward Jirōgyū, covered in bamboo grass, and I wanted to keep going. So I said as much, and we changed the plan and set off for a peak two and a half kilometers away.
From a distance it looks like an easy stroll along a spine of rock. It isn’t. You lose a great deal of height coming off Tsurugi and have to win it back climbing Jirōgyū, and the round trip takes more out of you than it looks like it will. Afterwards we came down by the long route, nearly two kilometers, eighty minutes.
At the end of the day, I noticed I wasn’t tired.
The others were. The descent had gone on and on, and their strides had shortened as the trail wore at them, so we slowed down and stayed together. Same trail, same hours, same order — and fatigue arriving in completely different amounts.
This was not what I had prepared for. Before the trip I had been asking myself the questions a Rolfer asks: what have all those hours of sitting done to my hips, how much do my feet sink, how stiff have they become? A foot that has only ever walked on pavement is not ready for ground that changes under every step. And I climbed in ordinary sneakers, without boots or poles. On paper I was the least equipped person there.
I still can’t tell you why I wasn’t tired. What I can tell you is that the whole way up, nothing in me was gripping.
And I knew where that had come from.
Eyes in the soles of the feet
In July 2025 I was in Ichigaya, Tokyo, taking Phase 2 of the Advanced Rolfing Training with Ray McCall and Hiroyoshi Tahata. One of the exercises we did is called Eye of the Foot, and apparently Ray brings it to every training he teaches.
It sounds like nothing. You assume there is an eye in the sole of each foot. Then you open it, and close it, and watch what happens.
Close it, and the whole body draws in; the ground feels further away. Open it, and something releases in the pelvic floor and the diaphragm, and your relationship with gravity shifts. Do this while walking, opening and closing, and the distance between you and everything around you changes character.
What the exercise is really teaching is a way of understanding space.
Space is not nothing. It is the field where a relationship between you and an object comes into being, and it has texture. Put your attention on an object and your body does one thing; move your attention into the space between you and the object and it does something measurably different.
Extend that further, to what lies behind the space, and a wider kind of physical support arrives, along with a feeling of safety.
One person in the training described space as moist, as having density. That is the point: space is not a backdrop. It is something the body answers to.
And when your reading of space changes, so does the distribution of tone through the muscles. Open toward space and you let go. Close, and a core gathers along the inside. This isn’t relaxation as such. It is practice in finding the amount of muscular tone the situation actually calls for.
On Tsurugi, I was walking with eyes in my soles. You still look at the stones and pick your line, but you aren’t deciding with your eyes alone — you’re feeling how the sole is reading what it lands on.
Why that should spare you fatigue, I don’t know. But nothing was gripping, and when nothing is gripping the body works only where it has to, only as hard as it has to.
So the answer to the question I had asked before leaving turned out to be about something else entirely. What was ready wasn’t the stiffness of my feet or the range in my hips. It was how I was using the undersides.
The bridge
That same evening, off the mountain, we crossed the Iya vine bridge.
It is one of the three unusual bridges of Japan, an Important Tangible Folk Cultural Property: forty-five meters long, two wide, fourteen meters above the river, woven from six tons of mountain vine. From the far bank, with the gorge green around it, it is genuinely beautiful.
Then you step onto it.
The slats are set far apart and the Iya River shows through the gaps. The whole structure sways with each step. You place a foot, check it, grip the vine that passes for a handrail, and move.
For me there was no beauty in it whatsoever. There was only fear. I knew perfectly well that the bridge is inspected and maintained. My body was not interested in what I knew.
A few hours earlier those same soles had carried me up a mountain with nothing gripping. Same day, same body, and the reaction had inverted.
The difference is what was underneath.
On the mountain there is ground, and the ground holds you. On the bridge, the valley floor is visible between your feet, and what’s underneath is a fourteen-meter drop.
Someone in that training in Tokyo had said: space used to be something I defended against; through this work it became a place where something enjoyable might happen.
On the bridge I watched that run in reverse. Space stopped being a partner and became a threat. And when that happens the body does not open. It shuts, and it grips.
Space is something, the exercise says. The vine bridge makes the case better than any classroom could. What was under my feet was not empty. It was space with a specific quality — height — and my body responded to it the way you respond to a presence.
I had written earlier that couriers moved horizontally and mountain ascetics moved vertically. What I met on that bridge was neither. It was a vertical absence, directly beneath the soles.
The dark
On the last day we went to Zentsūji, the temple built where Kūkai is said to have been born. Pay the admission and you can walk the kaidan-meguri beneath the main hall.
You go down a flight of stairs into a darkness with no light in it at all. Not dimness — your eyes have nothing to adjust to. You could stand there an hour and see exactly as much as you did on arrival, which is nothing.
You put your left hand on the wall and follow it.
Most of the time we take in a flood of information through the eyes without noticing that we’re doing it: what’s ahead, how far the floor runs, which way the passage turns. Down there, none of that is available. What you have is the wall under your left palm, the floor arriving through your soles, whatever sound reaches you, and some internal sense of which way you’re pointed.
There is a neat way to say what is happening, and it comes straight from that exercise in Tokyo.
In the dark there is not one object to look at. There is a wall, a floor, and space. Which means that “moving your attention from objects into space” stops being a technique you choose to apply. There’s nothing else to attend to. In the training we opened the eye of the foot and closed it and compared. Down there, only the open state exists.
And I was not afraid.
Uneasy, a little. But mostly interested. Not knowing what was coming, and moving anyway, checking the wall with one hand — I could watch myself doing it while I did it.
Eleven years ago, the fear came first
I had walked in that kind of darkness before.
In February 2014 I did a Dialogue in the Dark session for the first time — fifteen minutes, guided by a blind attendant, moving from a lit room to a dim one and then into a black one with not even an exit sign burning.
Fear arrived first, immediately.
Then we did simple things, passing a ball around, crossing uneven ground hand in hand, and somewhere in there the search began: how do you use the other senses when the eyes are gone?
In April 2015 I went back for the full seventy-minute version, and the fear didn’t come. Neither did the shock.
At the time I put it down to two things. First, I had just come home from a year of travel — twenty-five countries, fifty-five cities, and in forty-nine of those cities the language on the signage was not one I could read. When you can’t read anything, sight stops being the sense you lead with. In Europe I got by on English and my ears. In South America, where English didn’t help, on gesture and posture.
Second, Rolfing training had taught me something about ma — about keeping space between yourself and another person, and treating that space as real.
There’s a passage in a book Kenichiro Mogi wrote with Dialogue in the Dark that describes the shift better than I can. Most people are frightened at first. But after about ten minutes almost everyone gives up trying to see — fine, I can’t see— and something opens. Hearing sharpens. Smell sharpens. The senses that had been running in the background come forward.
In 2014 I started in fear and worked outward from there. In 2015 the fear didn’t show up. And in 2026, under Zentsūji, I was observing from the first step: the palm, the floor, the sound, my own orientation, all of it available to be described while it was happening.
Eleven years turned the dark from something to be survived into something to be watched.
Those eleven years had things in them — basic Rolfing training, Rolf Movement certification, and then the advanced work in 2025. The dark is the same dark it was in 2014. The change was on my side of it.
The senses are the door, not the obstacle
I have spent this July and August reading Kūkai and Saichō in the original.
One of Kūkai’s works, the Shōji jissō gi, argues that sound and written character are themselves reality — not signs pointing at reality, but the thing itself.
This is why esoteric Buddhism does not treat the senses as interference. In that tradition the senses are the way in. Incense belongs to ritual for this reason. Calligraphy became an art for this reason. The mandala is a device built for the eyes.
Earlier in this series I wrote that what Kūkai carried back from China was not a philosophy but a set of procedures, tools, and ways of using a body. And that shugendō took the same thing and put it on a mountain: instead of hanging a mandala, forming mudras and reciting mantra, you walk a ridge.
That corridor under Zentsūji may be a third version of the same idea.
Officially it is a place for forming a bond with Kūkai, and religious meaning attaches to passing through the dark and coming out. You don’t need to know any of that for something to happen to you down there — anyone can feel their own body rearranging its priorities when the light goes.
But look at how the thing is built. It removes sight in order to bring the other senses forward, holds you in that state while you feel your way along a wall, and then returns you to the light. It is a machine for turning the senses into a passage.
Shugendō, as I described it earlier, is a practice of entering the mountain, dying once, and being born again with the self changed. The mountain is treated as the country of the dead: going in is the death, the days of walking are the time spent there, and coming down is the second birth. This isn’t a metaphor to be contemplated. It’s a sequence the body is put through, and the tradition holds that it works precisely because the body is put through it.
You enter the dark, you cross a place with no light, you come out. Structurally, that is the mountain. And it sits directly beneath the spot where Kūkai was born.
The one I didn’t climb
The last place we visited was Shusshakaji, temple seventy-three on the Shikoku pilgrimage.
The story attached to it is this. At seven years old, the boy who would become Kūkai climbed Mount Gabaishi and said that if he was meant to enter the Buddhist path and save people, let the Buddha appear; and if not, he would give his body to the buddhas. Then he threw himself off the cliff.
I had meant to see the temple and end the trip there. Standing in the grounds, I wanted to go up to the Oku-no-in on the mountainside instead. Thirty minutes of steep path, and we reached the hall. The day before we had walked Tsurugi and Jirōgyū. Two days in the mountains, back to back.
And there I stopped.
Above the Oku-no-in is the sutemi no gyōba — the practice ground where the boy is said to have jumped. Getting to it means leaving the trail and going up a rock face on chains and handholds. I had watched footage beforehand: something close to vertical, where a mistake means a fall.
A gyōba is a site within a mountain set aside for a particular austerity — a cliff, a rock wall, a waterfall, a cave. What qualifies a place is exactly that it is dangerous. The body registers the danger; passing through in that state is the practice. These are not viewpoints, and they were never built for visitors.
We didn’t go up. We stood at the Oku-no-in and looked at it.
Before the trip I had written that I was going to a place where walking becomes practice. Having gone, I found that the place where it becomes practice was another few hundred meters above where I stood.
Not climbing was a decision. And the thing that made the decision was the body — the same one that had been afraid on the bridge.
There is a limit to how much of shugendō can be understood by thinking about it. But looking up at that wall I understood a little of what it would mean to start climbing. That isn’t hiking. Someone for whom walking is a means does not put a hand on that rock.
Speed was never the question
Couriers walked as a means. Ascetics walked as an end. The two coexisted in the same country, in the same century, sometimes in the same village and carried out by the same part-time men.
So which was I doing?
I wasn’t climbing Tsurugi for time. Going on to Jirōgyū wasn’t in the plan and didn’t save anybody anything; I went because I wanted to see what was further along. Climbing to the Oku-no-in wasn’t in the plan either. No step count, no record. I wanted to be up there, so I walked up there.
And the entire time, I was paying attention to how my soles were reading the ground. That is not a technique for arriving sooner.
I had written before the trip that anything which is a means gets replaced by a better means — the couriers were legislated out of existence and the work of carrying passed to wheels and engines — while anything that is an end in itself can’t be shortened by technology.
Walking with eyes in the soles turns out to belong to the second category.
Eleven years ago the dark frightened me. A year of travel later, it frightened me less. This year I walked through it taking notes. That progression isn’t an upgrade to a better method. It’s what happens when you keep doing the same thing.
We live in relationship with space
When I finished that training in Tokyo, I wrote a line I’ve thought about since:
We do not exist inside space. We exist in relationship with space.
A year later, on a mountain, a bridge and a corridor with no light in it, the sentence turned into something I could point at.
- On Tsurugi, space held me up, so nothing gripped.
- On the vine bridge, space became a thing to be defended against, so I shut.
- Under Zentsūji, space was all there was, so my hand and my soles took over the work of my eyes.
- At Shusshakaji, I looked into the space above me and stayed where I was.
One body, four responses, four days.
When I set out I thought there were two ways of walking — one that asks about speed and one that refuses the question. What I came back with is different. The difference isn’t really in the legs. It’s in what kind of relationship you end up having with the space you’re in. The couriers treated the road as something to be got through. The ascetics treated the mountain as something to be in relationship with.
Two legs can do opposite things not because legs work two ways, but because space shows up two ways.
Walking — a series in three parts
- Part 1: The Body Carved in Three Dimensions — From the “Kūkai and the Treasures of Shingon” Exhibition, Toward Shikoku
- Part 2: The Legs That Held a Country Together — Couriers (Hikyaku), Shugendō, and Two Japanese Ways of Walking
- Part 3: What My Body Learned Walking in Shikoku (this article)