The road that was already there

Crossing Japan by bicycle along a four-hundred-year-old road, in the season when everything begins again

Two souls. One vision. One road.

Some journeys are not made to see new places, but to stop crossing them distractedly. This one comes from the meeting of Willy Mulonia, who knows roads with his soul and legs, and Andrea Bariselli, who studies them with his mind. On one side the effort, the navigation, the logistics of an expedition. On the other, neuroscience and the work on attention. Together we imagined journeys in which body and mind work on the same material.

The Nakasendo

Between Kyoto and Tokyo there is a road four centuries old.

It is called the Nakasendo, the route through the central mountains. In the Edo period it was one of the country’s five great highways: sixty-nine post stations between the imperial capital and the seat of power. Merchants walked it, and pilgrims, monks, feudal lords with their processions. We will meet it on the second stage and find it again crossing the Kiso valley.

In the Atacama there was nothing to see and we learned to subtract. In Mongolia there was no track, and we made the track ourselves. In Morocco everything was a doorway. Here the road already exists, walked by millions of feet before ours. We are not explorers: we are the last in a very long line.

And the question changes. It is no longer what we will discover. It is what we add to something that was already there.

May

We go in May, and that is not a detail.

By mid-May the cherry blossoms have been gone for six weeks. What we will find is something less photographed and more violent: the Japanese call it shinryoku, new green, the acid green of leaves two weeks old. On the passes above a thousand metres there will still be snow. In the valleys it will be rice-planting season, and for a few weeks the countryside of Gifu and Nagano becomes a mosaic of flooded paddies reflecting the sky, with people bent over inside them, planting by hand what they will eat in autumn.

The road is four hundred years old. The leaves are two weeks old. We will ride through this for ten days.

Fuji

Towards the end, on an ordinary stage, Mount Fuji will appear.

We have seen it ten thousand times already. Hokusai made thirty-six views of it, then a hundred more, and it has been perhaps the most photographed mountain in history ever since. Faced with something it recognises, the brain does something odd: it stops looking. The predictions already in memory are enough, and attention switches off. It is the same mechanism that lets us cross our own city without seeing it. Arriving there by bicycle after nine days of effort may be the only way we have of outwitting it.

Where it ends

The bikes stop at Kawasaki, on the edge of Tokyo. You do not ride into the centre, and that is not a compromise: the Nakasendo also stopped at the edge, and the last of its sixty-nine stations stood outside Edo. You entered on foot, the next day.

Not a desert, not a steppe, not an earthen ksar: the largest urban area on the planet. In every other journey the city was the fall, the return to life as it was. Here the city is the destination, as it was for those who walked this road four centuries ago. This journey will not ask us to hate the place we come from. It will ask something harder: to go back there different.

The rhythm of the day

Rewild Your Mind does not add activities to the journey. It changes the way we cross it. Each day moves in three movements.

The seed. Before getting on the bike, a short text. Not an assignment, and it asks for no answer: it is something to think about while riding. In ten hours in the saddle, a thought has time to do its own work.

The crossing. The day itself. Nobody asks anything of anyone. We ride, and the body does the work.

The integration. After dinner we sit in a circle for about forty-five minutes. People speak in turn, nobody interrupts, nobody comments on what someone else has said. Anyone who does not feel like speaking passes, and passing counts as much as speaking. This is not therapy and it is not a sharing group: it is a space with precise rules, and the rules are what make it safe.

At the start each participant receives a leather notebook, empty. Then, every day, a card: the morning text, the evening question, a reading. The cards are pasted inside, and next to them goes whatever turns up — a ticket, a stamp collected along the road, a photograph. By the end of the journey no two notebooks look alike, and it is the only thing anyone takes home besides tired legs. What is written there belongs to whoever writes it: nobody reads it and nobody asks.

All that is needed is a pen you like.

What we will experience

Ten stages from Kyoto to Kawasaki, over nine hundred kilometres and almost eleven thousand metres of climbing through Kyoto, Shiga, Gifu, Nagano, Yamanashi and Kanagawa. A group of eight.

A rest day in Takayama, halfway, before the two hardest stages. Nights in authentic ryokan, with hot baths and dinner served on the floor, and nights in mountain hotels.

The thatched roofs of Shirakawago, which the village re-thatches collectively every thirty years.

The field of Sekigahara, where on a single day in 1600 it was decided who would govern Japan for two and a half centuries, and over which we will ride.

The evenings in a circle, which are the part of the journey no photograph manages to bring home.

An invitation

This journey is hard, and the inner work takes nothing away from the physical side: it is added to it.

It is for those who want to cross Japan with their body instead of watching it through a window. For those who find evenings in a group more interesting than awkward. For those who accept that a journey can change something without promising in advance what.

It is not a cultural tour with a bike as transport, and it is not a clinical support programme.

In mid-May 1689 a man left his house and set out north on foot. His name was Matsuo Bashō, and from that journey came Oku no Hosomichi. He wrote that the months and days are travellers of eternity, and that the passing years are travellers too.

We will ride through, three hundred and thirty-eight years later, in the same week of the year.

The road, meanwhile, has stayed where it was.