New Self-guided Tour: Salt Road Wayfarer

Each day is an intensive series of presentations, workshops and discussions. However, in what has become a time-honoured and essential fashion, each evening we make sure to reinvigorate ourselves by relaxing in onsen hot spring baths, enjoying great food and singing our karaoke hearts out.

Our seminars are a vital element behind the continued success of Walk Japan. They are a time for us to reflect, share, learn, find support and be inspired. They also allow us to reinforce our bonds with each other and remind ourselves of the collective effort that underpins our tours and Community Initiatives.

Since the spring, we have been kept continuously busy preparing logs for shiitake mushroom cultivation, working on our forthcoming community garden, planting and then weeding a record number of rice paddies, cutting great swathes of grass aside the paddies and beyond, tending to our market gardens, and preparing the grounds of our guest house for a stream of visitors including the British Ambassador to Japan. Of course, we have also been welcoming tour participants who see what we do, school students, interns and volunteers who all help out rice planting and with other tasks. But it is not all hard work. Most recently, we have been enjoying a bumper crop of blueberries, the latest fruit of our labours, and views over our verdant fields including some planted out with sunflowers.

The sharp-eyed amongst our readership will have noticed a change to Community Initiatives as the new title for our regenerative activities in Japan. Our original term, Community Project, is strongly identified with the appreciable progress we have made in reviving a village on the Kunisaki Peninsula in Kyushu. In reality, however, we have been working since Walk Japan’s founding in 1992 with many local, mostly rural communities across Japan helping them to sustain themselves and find new vigour.

For over two decades, we have been farming, taking care of woodlands, reviving akiya vacant properties, creating local employment and encouraging migration to the Kunisaki Peninsula. However, our commitment and effort is, in practice, to the wider Japanese community and extends far beyond a single location or project.

Simply stated, we have always been doing this through our tours by maximising local economic benefit and generating much sought-after publicity. We provide long-term, predictable revenue streams that, concomitantly, open up the possibilities of new local investment, and lend our long experience and expertise in both small-group tourism and rural regeneration to assist sensitive regional development.

Community has always been an essential part of Walk Japan both as a concept and in practice. And so, we have settled on the term Community Initiatives to better reflect the scope of our endeavours.  

English language tuition is part of our Community Initiatives and we are pleased to welcome Derek to lead our English Enrichment Programme. Classes for younger students have ranged over subjects from insects and animals to items of clothing, while older students have been studying the water cycle, including recording precipitation. They are now preparing to share their findings in English with us.

Derek will soon begin classes at the local kindergarten, and also for our Japanese colleagues and other locals interested in studying together.

Last year, Walk Japan was named Responsible Business of the Year at the British Business Awards, which is hosted by the British Chamber of Commerce in Japan. This was in recognition of our achievements in revitalising rural communities, expanding sustainable farming and promoting inclusive governance. As a follow up, at the chamber’s 2027 awards pre-launch event in early July, Paul Christie, our CEO, gave a PechaKucha talk providing insights into his 40 year career in Japan and Walk Japan’s Community Initiatives.

‘This is only the beginning. Not just for Walk Japan, but Japan as well, when it comes to travel.’ 

Paul Christie

At the Kyushu Tourism Promotion Convention, Paul was joined on stage by his wife Mihoko Christie, President & Representative Director of The Japan Travel Company, Walk Japan’s in-country operations subsidiary, to provide the keynote address in Japanese on tourism and regional revitalisation. Paul also gave a presentation at Beppu University, focusing on the challenges facing rural communities and the role tourism can play in supporting them.