Jodogahama Beach – was said to have been named by a Buddhist monk who thought its beach (hama) resembled paradise (jodo).Credit: Alamy
In Japan, Fudai is famously the town that survived. When the tsunami of March 2011 struck, the wall of water that bore down on the coastal settlement of 2600 residents was more than 23 metres high – about the height of a seven-storey building – but it slammed into a concrete floodgate built against great opposition by a far-sighted mayor in the 1970s.
As other towns along the Tohoku coast were all but obliterated, with 400,000 homes destroyed and almost 20,000 people killed, Fudai lost not a single house or life.
The floodgates at Fudai that saved the town from destruction in the 2011 tsunami.Credit: Alamy
A decade and a half or so on from the tsunami generated by Japan’s largest recorded earthquake, Fudai is suitably the start of the most beautiful and dramatic section of the Michinoku Coastal Trail, a 1000-kilometre coastal hiking path built in the hope of enticing visitors back into the region.
Amid the inevitable scars that remain along the coast, it’s a trail of immense beauty, isolation, sumptuous seafood and unexpected openness about the terror and trauma of the tsunami.
Taking flight
I’ve come to Tohoku, a region encompassing the six northernmost prefectures on Honshu, Japan’s main island, to spend a week on foot along the Michinoku Coastal Trail. Hiking at the head of our Walk Japan group of 11 international hikers is guide Yo Murakami.
“‘Here is nowhere.’ And yet it’s so clearly not.” ...Michinoku Coastal Trail.
“Like the writer,” he says of his surname, and suitably, this chronicle also begins with birds.
The Michinoku Coastal Trail’s northern trailhead is Kabushima Shrine, sat atop a small peninsula at the edge of Hachinohe, the far-northern city that’s home to Japan’s largest market. The Shinto shrine doubles as a national natural monument, seasonally home to up to 40,000 black-tailed gulls nesting in the peninsula’s grassy slopes – such numbers that the shrine provides umbrellas to visitors as protection from bird droppings during the nesting season.
Kabushima Shrine, Hachinohe.Credit: Alamy
It’s from here that we, too, take flight on one of Japan’s longest and newest hiking paths. The Michinoku Coastal Trail opened in 2019, just months before the COVID-19 pandemic closed Japan to the world, so even now, there’s limited awareness of its presence among local residents. Guided by markers painted onto fishing buoys, we set out across tiny bays where old women squat at the tide line, gathering kelp and watching us pass with puzzled looks.
“What are you doing here?” one woman asks with genuine curiosity. “Here is nowhere.” And yet, it’s so clearly not.
Though the trail was built on the stories of the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and the immense waves that followed, the coastline south of Hachinohe is as beautiful as it is battered. Along the Tanesashi Coast, cliffs fray into fingers of rock that reach far into the ocean, and waves pound ashore like a heartbeat.
On this first day alone, we’ll climb to a World War II observation post with a grandstand view over cliffs, beaches and a lighthouse, walk the length of a four-kilometre beach with sea spray washing over us like a mist, weave among the twisted trunks of a century-old pine grove and finish our day beside the Tanesashi Natural Lawn, a band of coastal grass that resembles a Scottish links golf course.
Hiking through the Yodo Pine Grove near Tanesashi Natural Lawn.
Already it’s a coast I’d happily hike for the scenery alone, and yet Fudai, where this little-visited coastline truly turns on the charm, is still a day away.
The death of optimism
It can take up to two months to walk the Michinoku trail in its entirety. In a week, we take a more multi-faceted journey, hopping between stages in taxis, buses and the Sanriku railway, a line so badly damaged by the tsunami that it took eight years to get trains running again.
On the third morning of our hike, we arrive by taxi in Fudai where, immediately south, the long Kitayamazaki Cape is lined with cliffs that tower up to 200 metres above the Pacific Ocean. For two days, we’ll hike atop, beneath and even through these cliffs, reaching their apex at a lookout high above looping sea arches and sharp-tipped sea stacks in a scene worthy of the Great Ocean Road.
Beyond the lookout, the trail enters its most challenging and exhilarating stage, descending steeply to sea level, where the way is seemingly blocked by cliffs. Donning helmets and head torches, we advance through hand-cut tunnels connecting a series of hidden beaches where the ocean thunders ashore even on a benign day.
Guiding us for a day along the cape is Takuro Kusuda, who was leading a clean-up on one of these very beaches when the earthquake hit. With its shock waves absorbed by the sand, the group barely noticed the shake, but when rocks began falling from the cliffs, they feared the worst. Frantically scaling the cliffs, they watched as a 20-metre-high wave rolled towards them.
“It was like watching a movie,” Takuro says. “It didn’t feel real.”
Today, Takuro is the head of a nonprofit organisation promoting tourism around Kitayamazaki Cape. Bear bells hang from his backpack, chiming in our presence as we rise back into the forest, where trees and trailside seats are clawed and chewed by the bears that are often sighted by hikers.
Tall stories … hikers on the Michinoku Coastal Trail.
According to Takuro, this region has traditionally seen few foreign tourists, though the Coastal Trail has started to change that, with an estimated 70 per cent of its hikers coming from abroad.
“At first, local people were a bit confronted,” he says. “A lot of them hadn’t seen foreign tourists before. Now the trail is getting promoted, the variety of people walking it is growing, and that’s giving the local people joy. The inns and hotels are benefiting, and I’m hoping there’ll be more opportunities for locals to get income from hikers.”
One such hotel is the Ragaso, a 10-storey complex set behind a maze of breakwaters at Kitayamazaki Cape’s southern edge. Standing isolated beside the trail, it’s a primary base for hikers, and it’s our tatami-floored home for the two nights we spend along the cape.
As we indulge in a now-customary seafood banquet in the hotel’s fifth-floor restaurant, I’m struck by this coast’s curious existence, where the ocean is both a friend and mortal enemy. Fishing is Tohoku’s major industry, and our plates each night hold a bounty of sashimi, clams, abalone, sea snails, octopus and swordfish heads, but it’s also a destructive force.
Tsunamis strike this coast with regularity – about one every 40 years in recent times – while earthquakes continually rumble under the skin of the earth. In the week before I arrived in Hachinohe, five quakes of between 3.8 and 5.1 magnitude were recorded. It is just another Tohoku week.
“Along this trip, I think there’s usually about a 50 per cent chance of feeling an earthquake,” Yo says.
The tsunami was generated by the world’s fourth-largest earthquake since 1900. Yasuko Miura was serving lunch to guests in the Hotel Ragaso when it struck, and the 79-year-old remains the restaurant hostess 14 years on. As we eat, she recounts her experience of the day, her eyes filling with tears as she speaks.
“I’d seen previous tsunamis, and in those, I could see the actual waves coming in, but this one was more like a huge wall of water,” she says. The wave barrelled over the breakwaters, hitting the hotel three storeys up.
“I thought I was going to die,” Yasuko says.
While the hotel stood firm against the power of the sea, the surrounding villages and valleys were all but wiped out. Residents fled to higher ground after the shake, but the wave didn’t arrive for another 45 minutes. Many returned to their homes ahead of the wave, thinking the danger had passed.
“They thought it was okay to go back and get their money from their homes,” she says. “They all went back, and they all got washed away. There are two lessons: use a bank – don’t keep money at home – and don’t be optimistic.”
Mayhem and miracles
All along the Tohoku coast, signs mark the frightening heights of the tsunami – five metres up the steps at Kabushima Shrine, through to 23.6 metres at the Fudai floodgate – but evidence of the disaster is most confronting south of Kitayamazaki Cape. It was here that the tsunami hit hardest, washing more than eight kilometres up the valley behind the city of Rikuzentakata.
The lingering scar tissue takes many forms, from the seawalls and floodgates that now shield cities and towns like medieval fortifications to a memorial constructed around an eight-tonne concrete breakwater tetrapod carried 200 metres inland by the wave just a few minutes walk from the Hotel Ragaso.
Apartment block in Rikuzentakata destroyed in the 2011 tsunami. A marker on the top floor notes the height of the wave.
The most sobering reminders are around hard-hit Rikuzentakata, near the southern finish of our hike. About 80 per cent of Rikuzentakata’s homes were destroyed in the tsunami, and one in 14 of its 24,000 residents was killed. To safeguard against future tsunamis, the city was rebuilt on rock fill, 10 metres higher than pre-tsunami levels.
To reach Rikuzentakata, we turn off the coast for two days, hiking across the sort of wide, claw-like peninsulas that give the Iwate (“rock hand”) prefecture its name.
Our trails now are pathways once used by samurai lords, walking to Tokyo on flimsy rice-straw sandals to pay taxes to the emperor. Our own journey in hiking boots is far more comfortable, our steps softened by autumnal leaf litter as we climb gradually over the spines of the peninsulas and down to a restorative night in a waterside onsen hotel.
In the foothills behind Rikuzentakata, the cedar-shaded grounds of the 500-year-old Fumonji Temple are dotted with 500 “rakans” – expressive stone figures carved by family members to commemorate loved ones lost in the tsunami. But the wave’s legacy is most keenly felt on the city’s once-famous shoreline, where a grove of 70,000 pine trees was recognised as one of the “100 Landscapes of Japan”, an official inventory of the country’s most beautiful natural sites.
The moving Iwate Tsunami Memorial Museum.
The tsunami hit with such force that just one of these pines was left standing. Today, the so-called Miracle Pine forms the centrepiece of the moving Iwate Tsunami Memorial Museum. Exhibitions detail the causes and mechanics of a tsunami, while a seven-minute video provides a graphic account of the wave and its aftermath, including vision of Rikuzentakata, where the few surviving buildings resembled a brutal war zone.
Behind the museum is the barren ground once covered by the forest, with paths leading to the Miracle Pine and the crumpled youth hostel in front that spared it from the wave.
As I look over the eerie emptiness, I’m belatedly struck by the full scale of the disaster. I’ve heard so many human stories across this hike, but it’s the sight of this ghostly tree – now dead itself but immortalised in concrete – that’s somehow the most poignant testimonial of all.
Walk to paradise
Takuro Kusuda estimates that only about 120 people have hiked the Michinoku Coastal Trail in its entirety. Ryunosuke Matsushita is likely one of the few to have done it twice. In 2021, he walked the trail in 50 days. A year later, he turned around and walked it in the opposite direction.
“I’m a guide here, so the second time, I wanted to add a bit extra,” he says. “I wanted to go the opposite way, to stretch my skills as a guide.”
We meet Ryunosuke at the Tsunami Memorial Park Nakanohama, near his adopted hometown of Miyako, where the mangled remains of a campground have been preserved as a monument to the ocean’s brutality. He will join Yo in guiding us for a day along a section of coastline he describes as his favourite on the trail. Just eight kilometres in length, it will be our shortest walking day and our final day along the coast before crossing the peninsulas, but one with the most alluring finish of all.
“We’re going to paradise”... Jodogahama Beach.
“We’re going to paradise,” Ryunsoke announces, alluding to the fact that our destination this day – Jodogahama Beach – was said to have been named by a Buddhist monk who thought its beach (hama) resembled paradise (jodo).
Near the memorial park, we set out walking from a blowhole that provides a measure of the ocean’s everyday power, shooting water up to 30 metres into the air, though not in this day’s flat seas. It will be another rollercoasting walk down to beaches and fishing villages and up onto clifftops where tall cedars and bamboo grow side by side.
In some villages, headstones detail the tsunami’s local death toll, while one village crouches behind an imposing new seawall designed to hold back its natural foe. At the base of the 15-metre-high wall, Ryunsoke pops open a door, and we step through onto the stony beach lined with wooden fishing boats. As we sit and eat lunch on the stones, I ask Ryunsoke if he might ever hike the trail a third time.
“I’d like to, if I can,” he says. “There’s a Fukushima Coastal Trail (a 200-kilometre path, opened in 2023, at Michinoku’s southern end), and I’d like to do them together. I might do it three or four times.”
Late in the day, we approach Jodogahama Beach, descending through a sprawling graveyard with monuments reminding passersby of other tragic tsunamis in 1896 and 1933. Tunnelling again through cliffs, we emerge onto the white-stone wonder of Jodogahama.
One of Japan’s designated “Places of Scenic Beauty”, the beach is naturally paved in chalk-white rhyolite stones, and its translucent waters are split by an island-like peninsula that runs like a natural seawall on this coast now so full of artificial seawalls.
Some of the most disturbing vision of the tsunami was filmed in Miyako, just five kilometres away, but this lagoon-like bay, set beneath white cliffs, is the epitome of peace. It’s a reminder that even as this region’s memories and stories of devastation fade, its natural splendour will remain. It might be an imperfect paradise, but somehow, it feels as though the scars have only added to Tohoku’s sense of beauty.
FIVE OTHER TOHOKU EXPERIENCES
Ryusendo Cave
Descend into one of Japan’s most impressive limestone caves, with subterranean lakes up to 100 metres deep.
Tashirojima
The so-called Cat Island, where the feline population exceeds the human count by four to one.
Lake Towada
Honshu’s largest caldera lake, famed for some of Japan’s brightest autumn colours through Oirase Gorge.
Kakunodate
The “Little Kyoto of Tohoku” has a well-preserved samurai district and springtime cherry flowers.
Great East Japan Earthquake and Nuclear Disaster Memorial Museum
In coastal Futaba, detailing Fukushima’s earthquake story and the damage to its nuclear power plant.
THE DETAILS
HIKE
Walk Japan’s nine-day Michinoku Coastal Trail trip from $4800. Includes all meals, luggage transfers and accommodation in a mix of family-run inns and larger hotels. Trips run from April to June and September to November, starting in Hachinohe and finishing in Kesennuma. See walkjapan.com
PREPARE
Walking days cover between eight and 11 kilometres. Trails are generally well-formed, with some possible scrambling and ladder climbs along the foot of the Kitayamazaki Cliffs.
FLY
Japan Airlines flies direct daily to Tokyo Haneda from Sydney and to Tokyo Narita from Melbourne every day except Thursdays. See jal.co.jp
TRAIN
Shinkansen trains connect Tokyo to Hachinohe, taking about three hours. See global.jr-central.co.jp/en
SAFETY
Tsunami danger and evacuation zones are well marked along the trail. Walking guided, you’ll be directed what to do in event of an earthquake or tremor, but if you feel a tremor it’s important to head immediately for higher ground. The 2011 tsunami took about 30 minutes to hit the Tohoku coast, so wait for an official all-clear to be announced before returning to lower levels (warnings and advisories are posted on the Japan Meteorological Agency website).
See also smartraveller.gov.au/destinations/asia/Japan.
MORE
japan.travel/en/au; michinokutrail.com
The writer travelled courtesy of Walk Japan.