06/12/2025
✍️ “Migita guesthouse is all but invisible on the internet. It advertises, if you can call it that, by word of mouth. It accepts only cash. This is why my friend Soichiro Koriyama and I could lodge there. We are walking across Japan. Outside the country’s big cities and throbbing tourist zones, accommodation is astonishingly tight. Koriyama swiped through all the usual hotel apps. Not one vacancy appeared in Shunan, population 140,000. Undaunted, he began cold-calling local businesses. This turfed up a phone number. ‘It’s an old lady,’ he hissed excitedly, holding a palm over his iPhone the way actors do with rotary phones in black-and-white Kurosawa films. ‘She can take us for a night. Even two!’
The Migita ryokan is one of those wormholes into an alternate universe that you occasionally stumble across in unlikely geographies across the continents. Like the defunct pension in downtown Khartoum out of which the owners, three Greek brothers, once ran logistics, going back to the ’50s, for every major archaeological, humanitarian, and secret diplomatic mission in turbulent Sudan. (Needed emergency cash? Ask manager Thanasis Pagoulatos, and if he liked your story, he might yank open the heavy door of the family safe in the back room.) Or the basement dive in blacked-out Osijek, in wartime Croatia, behind whose door with its speakeasy spyhole lay a secret geometry of candles, wine bottles, and bowls of goulash, all strategically arrayed on long tables to accommodate the muddy, stomping combat boots of drunk tabletop dancers of both sexes. Or Madame Heba’s place on Zamalek island in the muddy Nile of Cairo. The Paleolithic lift had a caged door, and the Anglo-Egyptian lobby—her living room, really—had a metal detector against concealed pistols. But Heba’s mint tabouleh disarmed everyone.
Migita ryokan is such a looking-glass portal.
Its 30 simple rooms are arrayed organically, asymmetrically, one might even say evasively, like chambers in an ant’s nest. To reach them you must crouch through a maze of dark and crooked corridors with squeaking floorboards that defeat both sleep and skulking ninjas. The futon pillows are stuffed with rice husks. The room doors slide open and closed with a tired shhhhhh. Walls of rice paper oblige you to whisper in any case. Huge and gnarled tree trunks harvested from a vanished cherry orchard prop up a tiled roof. Tatami mats comprise the furniture.
‘Young Japanese don’t come here,’ huffs Yamana. ‘They don’t like sharing toilets.’
She gestures out a window to an alleyway. What she is really pointing to is how the view is warped and whorled through handmade glass.“
— Paul Salopek
🔗 Read the full text of “Yoshiko’s Place” here: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/yoshikos-place/
📍 Shunan, Japan
34°3′5″N 131°48′38″E
Photo 1: Yoshiko Yamana’s Migita ryokan was built more than a century ago. Photo 2: Yoshiko Yamana bought the derelict Migita ryokan, which housed navy officers during World War II, in 1965. Photo 3: Yoshiko Yamama prepares dinner for guests.
📷 Photos by Soichiro Koriyama.
🥾 Out of Eden Walk is a 38,000-kilometer walk across the world in the footsteps of our ancestors.