Getting by on the Generosity of Strangers in Japan

Marco Werman: Paul, welcome back. Let’s start with the hospitality that greeted you recently at a traditional guest house in Japan. Tell us more about that place and the woman who runs it. 

Paul Salopek: Marco, we were walking, me and my Japanese walking partner, a fellow journalist, into an industrial city called Shunan, on the main island. It was getting late in the day, and as is sometimes the case in Japan … we couldn’t find any lodging. In desperation, my friend Soichiro called businesses to say, “So, you know any place in your neighborhood?” And that’s how we turfed up the Migita guesthouse, which is kind of invisible online and run by an 84-year-old woman named Yoshiko. 

Wow, so an industrial neighborhood. Describe this guest house. What does it look like? 

It looked like any other building except once you got inside, through a doorway made out of paper, you knew that you were entering a more traditional setting, something that was quite old, well, even a time portal if you will into a maze of corridors that were darkened and clearly built a long time ago, because it was quite small. I had to stoop over to find my room.

Yeah, and so Yoshiko, what was she like? What is the origin story of her and this guesthouse? 

Well, as a fellow storyteller, Marco, you bump into people who your storyteller’s radar blinks on, and you say, okay, here’s a person that you might pass on the sidewalk, not even notice, right? She’s quite petite. She’s got an elfin kind of aura about her … smiling, friendly, super polite … but she’s had a very hard life. She grew up in a small village near this city during World War II. She remembered the B-29 bombers flying overhead en route to Tokyo. Her father disappeared into a POW camp in Manchuria and didn’t come back from the war until four years later — a ghost of his former self. The thing about this generation of Japanese is that they’re often quite reserved about sharing personal details. What I could gather from bits and pieces is that she was basically forced into a forced marriage, which didn’t work, and she left after six months … scandalizing her village, and had to leave. So, she came to the city and somehow opened up this ryokan, the Migita Ryokan in Shunan.

I know Japan is not unique in this hospitality. You’ve often stayed with strangers who welcomed you into their homes. Did you feel like a guest in Yoshika’s home more than a customer at an inn? It seems like this isn’t just transactional for her. 

This is true. I think this is partly what keeps her in the business for so long, for decades. She opened the Migita guesthouse in 1965. So it’s been going on for over 60-plus years. Once you step into a space that a person has been managing for that long, even if it’s a commercial space, you are stepping into their home. It’s like being in the house of your grandmother. And she’s very, very warm and very, very friendly and like a lot of people who’ve had very difficult lives, extremely compassionate, right? Also minimizing her own suffering a lot. I would question her about her girlhood and early life. She would just laugh and throw back her head in a guffaw and clap whenever it got to a tough spot. 

Your story about Yoshiko made me really curious about the hospitality you’ve encountered elsewhere on your Out of Eden Walk. How did this version of hospitality compare with what you’ve experienced elsewhere? 

It was of a kind. So, my project depends a lot on chance and serendipity, so I can’t really plan ahead. I rely on — in the moment — acts of compassion, right? And I wouldn’t be talking to you today if this didn’t happen over and over like a daily miracle. I’ve been admitted to shepherds’ huts, I’ve been admitted to big palaces, I’ve been admitted to even caves, inhabited caves. So, I think this, for me, is an affirmation. The energy that keeps me going is finding people who share, not only their stories, but also a cup of tea and maybe a place to rest your head.

Does any particular place stand out for that sense of warmth and welcome we all anticipate when we think hospitality? 

I’ve been asked this before, and I’ve got to say it’s, you know, there’s a lot of bad news in the world, Marco. But I’m happy to report that the vast majority, the staggering majority of the human population, above 90%, across cultures, borders, languages and ideologies, is hospitable. That said, there is a distinction, maybe a little bit economically, that is not surprising, a bit of a banal observation, that the people who have the least are often the most hospitable, right, because they know suffering and they can recognize it in others. 

Have you had any surprises or cultural missteps anywhere on your travels relating to unfamiliar hospitality traditions? 

I’m sure all the time. And I’m sure many of my hosts were probably too polite to point out how many thousands of faux pas I was making [laughs]. That’s compassion for the clumsy dumbbell who’s kind of staggering through your doorway with a backpack on and sweaty and smelly and with dirty clothes, right? Something about Japan that stands out is that I think the traditions of human interactions and hospitality in the case of this conversation are even more extremely codified, more highly refined and developed. So, for example, when coming into somebody’s house, you take your shoes off, of course, and everybody knows that I took my shoes off. But sometimes, in some homes, you put your shoes in a certain place, you know, to the left and not to the right. So, I’ve had hosts or hostesses kind of very quietly, when they think I’m not looking, take my shoes and move them. So, there’s even a kind of microgeography to hospitality. 

Paul, I’m guessing that after being on the road so long, you think differently today about hospitality than maybe you used to.

Yeah, I do, but it’s been a lifelong thing, Marco. I left the United States when I was five and a half and moved to another culture. And so, kind of growing up within different cultures, as a minority of one, you become sensitive to this. And what I say often, the mantra of my project is, I’m not walking to a place — geographically I’m walking to the tip of South America on the Out of Eden Walk — but what I’m walking to every single day is other people. People are my destination, because I know from a lifelong experience even, Marco, similar to you as a war correspondent, that there’s goodness there, and you just have to look for it.