Tadashi Nagase-the globe trotter
Saturday, 4 August 2007
Do you consider yourself an adventurer?
I have on one occasion been asked to give myself the title of "adventurer" when I have given talks about my experiences. But no, I have never called myself an adventurer of my own accord. I never intend to set out on adventures, and as far as I am concerned, I am just an ordinary person who wants to travel the world by himself on foot. When people ask me, I just say I am a walking traveller.
The reason I stick to travelling on foot is that you can meet more people that way. The whole point of travelling is that you can come into contact with the people who actually live in the places you visit, and with landscapes you have never seen before. However you look at it, you are bound to make more contact like that when you are travelling on foot. Travelling by bicycle or motorbike, or even by car or by train, can be very enjoyable, but when you compare them to travelling on foot, your chances of coming into contact with people are that much fewer. Travelling on foot takes time and is tough going physically, but the benefits in terms of the people and places that you encounter are enormous. Travelling on foot means walking, camping outside, and then walking again-as you go on, you feel as if you are gradually becoming part of the landscape you are visiting. Travellers are undoubtedly foreign from the point of view of the local people in the places you visit, but I think you find the least resistance to being accepted when you travel on foot. The impression local people get of travellers who zip through on a tour bus is completely different to their impression of those who arrive slowly on foot.
So why do you pull a handcart behind you when you travel?
People often ask me that. I've been accused of just trying to stand out, or of just wanting to do something different, but that really is not my intention at all. The only reason I pull a handcart behind me is that I want to carry my possessions by myself. If I could, I would like to simply throw everything into a rucksack and travel a little more inconspicuously. However, there are a great many places in the world where that just isn't possible.
If you can get to the next town in a single day's walk, then you don't need a handcart. But if you are going to walk for several days in an uninhabited area, cooking for yourself and sleeping in the open, you need a lot of luggage. For example, if you are going to walk in a desert in intense heat, you need at least 40 litres of water. If you don't have a plentiful supply of water, you won't come out of the desert alive. Add to that the food and other everyday supplies you need, and the total weight comes to over 100 kilogrammes. There is no way you can walk with all that weight in a rucksack, so you need a cart of some kind--which is why I chose to travel with a handcart. There is something rather basic and down-to-earth about a handcart, which I felt suited me rather well. The handcart itself weighs about 80 kilogrammes, and by the time it is loaded up with everything I need, it is nearly 200 kilogrammes, but that can't be helped if I am to stick to my style of travelling on foot.
As heavy as that! How far can you go in one hour?
Once you finally manage to get a 200-kilogram cart moving, it builds up plenty of momentum, so it is quite easy to keep it going. On a flat road with a good, hard surface I can do about five kilometres an hour--so if I walk for eight hours a day, that's a basic pace of 40 kilometres in a clay.
The really tough going is in areas of desert, as the wheels get bogged down in the sand and you can't get them out. When that happens, I lay down a board and pull the cart along on top of the board. I can only pull the cart for the length of the board, and then I have to put it in front of the cart again and repeat the process. When I'm doing this, if I can manage 200 metre in half an hour I count that as pretty good going. Even worse than that is getting stuck in a quagmire in the jungle. There is no way to get the cart out when it is loaded up with luggage, so I have to unload everything and drag the cart out. There have been times when I have had to keep doing that over and over again, and it has taken far longer than I would ever have imagined just to go a few metres.
Over the course of 30 years you have walked 4o,ooo kilometres, which is the same distance as circling the globe. Was that your goal from the start?
It did dawn on me that I had in fact circled the globe, but to be honest it was the result of just continually plodding on, putting one foot in front of another.
The thing that got me travelling like that was when I was a first-year student at university, and I spent the summer vacation going round the coast of the Japanese archipelago on a bicycle. In total, I travelled 7,500 kilometres in 50 days. The next year, I decided to try going down the centre of Japan. When I measured the distance, it was 3,200 kilometres, which was less than half the distance involved in going round the edge of the islands. Then, I decided to leave the bicycle behind and walk it instead. When I decided to take the same luggage as I had loaded on my bicycle to circle the country, it was just too heavy to carry, so I loaded everything into a handcart, which is what I have done ever since. I walked down the length of the country in 70 days, and during that time I started to think that next time I would like to experience walking somewhere other than Japan.
I graduated from a university at the age of 22 and headed off to walk across Australia. I crossed Australia, from Sydney on the east coast to Perth on the west coast, in 100 days. I had to contend with a lot of difficulties on that particular journey, not least the intense heat, but I managed to walk all 4,200 kilometres across the Australian continent, which was an enormous boost to my self-confidence.
Then, when I was 26 I turned my attention to the African continent. The big plan was to leave Mombasa in Kenya on the Indian Ocean side and walk to Douala in Cameroon on the Atlantic side, head north from there across the Sahara and right through Algeria, hop on a boat to Marseille and then walk to Paris. It turned out to be far more difficult than I ever imagined. I was struck down with malaria twice, and I had wounds to my ankles that got infected in eight places. Then there was the diarrhea, a bad rash, which I never found the cause of, and some particularly vicious insect bites. The local people kept telling me they wouldn't be surprised if I was eaten by wild animals while I was sleeping outside, that a defenseless traveller was a target for thieves, and that what I was doing was almost suicidal.
Why do you go to such extremes?
I don't really know. While I'm travelling, I keep walking along thinking how hard it is, and plenty of times I have thought I just want to give up and go home. So when my handcart was stolen, to be honest, I just jumped for joy when I realised that I could stop, that I didn't have to walk tomorrow, the feeling of release brought tears to my eyes. This was in a town called Kano in Nigeria, before I reached the Sahara desert. Emotionally, and physically, I was a complete wreck, having walked 6,700 kilometres in 216 days, and my journey was brought to an abrupt end. I didn't feel even the slightest bit disappointed, though all I felt was elation.
But the strange thing is that as the day for me to head back to Japan neared, I started to feel that despite the fact I had suffered so much I desperately wished I had made it to the end. When I left Africa, I swore I would return one day. When I got back to Japan, I only remembered the good parts. I felt more and more that I wanted to walk Africa again soon.
I didn't set foot in Africa after that for six years, though. I saved money, working as a high school teacher, and I used my vacations during that period to walk in Korea, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan in preparation for Africa. I wasn't sure what to do, though--whether to continue my job as a teacher, or to pack in a steady job and continue travelling. My family and my girlfriend at the time were against me going to Africa, but I didn't much like the idea of being a teacher until the end of my life. I chose a life in which I didn't know how things would turn out.
When I went back for a second attempt at Africa, I didn't start from Kano, where my cart had been stolen six years previously--I set out again from my original starting point in Mombasa. It took a year to cross Africa and make it to Paris, and when I arrived I felt I had finally finished the job I first set out to do. It was a journey of 11,100 kilometres, of which 99.9 per cent of my memories are just sheer hard slog. But there were instants of unbelievable landscapes and the warmth of the people I met. They may only be the tiniest fraction of the time I spent overall, but I felt it was worth making the whole journey just for those brief moments.
From then onward, I have just kept saving up money and then travelling. I walked around several regions of Asia, walked the length of the South American continent-which worked out to around 8,800 kilometres-and before I realised it I had turned 50. During this time I also got married and had children, but my style of travelling on foot with a handcart in tow hasn't changed one bit.
How do you raise the funds for your travels?
My main source of income is from lectures and talks, but as I don't have a steady job my financial situation is rather shaky. As well as the funds for my journeys, I also have to earn enough to pay the bills for my family's everyday expenses, so I am permanently strapped for cash. I haven't even been able to pay the rent on more than one occasion.
I would be more than happy to have someone sponsor me, but unfortunately I haven't had any sweet deals like that drop into my lap yet. I should probably make the effort to draw up a plan and then use it to go out and gather in some financial support, but that somehow doesn't appeal to me. I suppose I tend to be rather passive when it comes to selling myself.
To be honest, with no money and a family to feed I do sometimes worry about what is going to happen in the future. Even so, while the worry is always there I have still come this far, somehow or other managing to continue my travels. If I can manage to do that, I am sure it will all work out in the end. My wife is wonderful if I haven't travelled anywhere for a while she asks me, "Isn't about time yon started to feel like walking again?"
What does travelling mean to you?
Ultimately, travelling is all about getting to know yourself. There have been plenty of times when I have faced a crisis, and a degree of emotion that surprises even me has welled up, driving me into action to overcome the crisis. Sometimes I scream and cry on my own, it's too tough, it's too hard, I want to give up and go home, I'm lonely-but even so, I've always just kept on walking. The reason I kept travelling like that was because the feeling was so strong that I wanted to find the part of me that even I didn't know. Also, travelling makes me think of all sorts of things. For example, one time when I was walking across the former Zaire (present day Democratic Republic of Congo), in a village I saw a family gathered together by the light of the moon in the garden in front of their house, sitting round in a circle. The garden was their kitchen and their dining room. They had a fire burning, and were making something. The family was simply enjoying a happy time together. It made me wonder whether happiness is living in a building with air conditioning, or whether it was living naturally, with few possessions.
Compared to Africa, Japan has a great many material things. But the people go to offices every day, and do the same sort of work, day in day out. Then they go home, and everyone watches the same things on television, and everyone gets the same information. From the point of view of the individual human being, in a society like this everyone must be terribly isolated psychologically. If you look at the way those people in Africa live, they have no cars or even electricity, but they do have nature, and you can see the intimacy in their relations with each other. The people seem happy. Life in Africa moves according to the sun and the moon-in Japan, everyone rushes around, living their lives by the clock. There are a great many things in Japan that they don't have in Africa, but there are plenty of things in Africa that we don't have in Japan. I don't know who is happier, but I do think you shouldn't look at anything from the perspective of a single set of values. My feeling is that you can find happiness as a human being by finding a lifestyle that suits you. I want to look for that happiness in my own way, by continuing to travel.
What sort of travels would you like to do in the future?
It's always good to go to places you have never visited before, but I also find it interesting to walk again in places I visited a long time ago. Two years ago, I retraced the route I took long ago down the length of Japan to commemorate having walked the equivalent of once round the globe. Visiting again after 30 years, I was surprised how everything had changed completely. First of all, the number of tunnels had increased phenomenally. Thirty years previously, I could wind my way slowly over mountain passes, but now tunnels link places by the shortest possible route. Even if you try, to avoid tunnels and head for the mountain passes, there are many places where the roads have been closed and you can no longer get through. If you have no choice but to go through a tunnel, it is extremely dangerous when you are pulling a handcart-I was nearly run down by a truck on many occasions. I felt Japan has become very much a society centered on the vehicle. Wherever you go there are bypasses, and along the sides of the roads there are shops and restaurants belonging to nationwide chains. The scenery along the main roads is becoming just the same wherever you go.
Also, the individual shops and small, cheap diners are quickly disappearing. Long ago, when I went into places like that many different people would talk to me, "Where are you headed?" they would ask, "Tough work!" they would exclaim. Or they would give me something to keep me going on my journey. Now those small, individually-run places have sadly been replaced by characterless convenience stores and restaurant chains, and the opportunities to chat about different things have vanished. It seems to me that there are very, very few places remaining where you can actually come into contact with people. I realised how Japan had lost so much as a result of the relentless pursuit of efficiency, comfort and convenience over the 30 years since my first journey.
Is the same change happening around the world?
I think it is particularly striking in Japan, but the same sort of things are probably happening everywhere. In Japan, though, it is the big cities and main roads that have changed a great deal. Once you get away from the cities and main roads, you can still come across scenery that has hardly changed since olden times. I'm sure it is the same in other countries. The cities of Africa or South America are changing rapidly, but I expect the people living in the villages and forests are still going about their lives the way they always have. Even so, it is certainly true that the forces carrying out this massive development are starting to bring pressure on these people and their lifestvles.
There is a reality that you can only see and only feel by walking on your own two feet. I will keep making difficult journeys, but I aim to continue putting one foot in front of another in search of those encounters when, for a fleeting moment, all the pain and hardship is blown away. —Japan +
Interview by Hisashi Kondo
I have on one occasion been asked to give myself the title of "adventurer" when I have given talks about my experiences. But no, I have never called myself an adventurer of my own accord. I never intend to set out on adventures, and as far as I am concerned, I am just an ordinary person who wants to travel the world by himself on foot. When people ask me, I just say I am a walking traveller.
The reason I stick to travelling on foot is that you can meet more people that way. The whole point of travelling is that you can come into contact with the people who actually live in the places you visit, and with landscapes you have never seen before. However you look at it, you are bound to make more contact like that when you are travelling on foot. Travelling by bicycle or motorbike, or even by car or by train, can be very enjoyable, but when you compare them to travelling on foot, your chances of coming into contact with people are that much fewer. Travelling on foot takes time and is tough going physically, but the benefits in terms of the people and places that you encounter are enormous. Travelling on foot means walking, camping outside, and then walking again-as you go on, you feel as if you are gradually becoming part of the landscape you are visiting. Travellers are undoubtedly foreign from the point of view of the local people in the places you visit, but I think you find the least resistance to being accepted when you travel on foot. The impression local people get of travellers who zip through on a tour bus is completely different to their impression of those who arrive slowly on foot.
So why do you pull a handcart behind you when you travel?
People often ask me that. I've been accused of just trying to stand out, or of just wanting to do something different, but that really is not my intention at all. The only reason I pull a handcart behind me is that I want to carry my possessions by myself. If I could, I would like to simply throw everything into a rucksack and travel a little more inconspicuously. However, there are a great many places in the world where that just isn't possible.
If you can get to the next town in a single day's walk, then you don't need a handcart. But if you are going to walk for several days in an uninhabited area, cooking for yourself and sleeping in the open, you need a lot of luggage. For example, if you are going to walk in a desert in intense heat, you need at least 40 litres of water. If you don't have a plentiful supply of water, you won't come out of the desert alive. Add to that the food and other everyday supplies you need, and the total weight comes to over 100 kilogrammes. There is no way you can walk with all that weight in a rucksack, so you need a cart of some kind--which is why I chose to travel with a handcart. There is something rather basic and down-to-earth about a handcart, which I felt suited me rather well. The handcart itself weighs about 80 kilogrammes, and by the time it is loaded up with everything I need, it is nearly 200 kilogrammes, but that can't be helped if I am to stick to my style of travelling on foot.
As heavy as that! How far can you go in one hour?
Once you finally manage to get a 200-kilogram cart moving, it builds up plenty of momentum, so it is quite easy to keep it going. On a flat road with a good, hard surface I can do about five kilometres an hour--so if I walk for eight hours a day, that's a basic pace of 40 kilometres in a clay.
The really tough going is in areas of desert, as the wheels get bogged down in the sand and you can't get them out. When that happens, I lay down a board and pull the cart along on top of the board. I can only pull the cart for the length of the board, and then I have to put it in front of the cart again and repeat the process. When I'm doing this, if I can manage 200 metre in half an hour I count that as pretty good going. Even worse than that is getting stuck in a quagmire in the jungle. There is no way to get the cart out when it is loaded up with luggage, so I have to unload everything and drag the cart out. There have been times when I have had to keep doing that over and over again, and it has taken far longer than I would ever have imagined just to go a few metres.
Over the course of 30 years you have walked 4o,ooo kilometres, which is the same distance as circling the globe. Was that your goal from the start?
It did dawn on me that I had in fact circled the globe, but to be honest it was the result of just continually plodding on, putting one foot in front of another.
The thing that got me travelling like that was when I was a first-year student at university, and I spent the summer vacation going round the coast of the Japanese archipelago on a bicycle. In total, I travelled 7,500 kilometres in 50 days. The next year, I decided to try going down the centre of Japan. When I measured the distance, it was 3,200 kilometres, which was less than half the distance involved in going round the edge of the islands. Then, I decided to leave the bicycle behind and walk it instead. When I decided to take the same luggage as I had loaded on my bicycle to circle the country, it was just too heavy to carry, so I loaded everything into a handcart, which is what I have done ever since. I walked down the length of the country in 70 days, and during that time I started to think that next time I would like to experience walking somewhere other than Japan.
I graduated from a university at the age of 22 and headed off to walk across Australia. I crossed Australia, from Sydney on the east coast to Perth on the west coast, in 100 days. I had to contend with a lot of difficulties on that particular journey, not least the intense heat, but I managed to walk all 4,200 kilometres across the Australian continent, which was an enormous boost to my self-confidence.
Then, when I was 26 I turned my attention to the African continent. The big plan was to leave Mombasa in Kenya on the Indian Ocean side and walk to Douala in Cameroon on the Atlantic side, head north from there across the Sahara and right through Algeria, hop on a boat to Marseille and then walk to Paris. It turned out to be far more difficult than I ever imagined. I was struck down with malaria twice, and I had wounds to my ankles that got infected in eight places. Then there was the diarrhea, a bad rash, which I never found the cause of, and some particularly vicious insect bites. The local people kept telling me they wouldn't be surprised if I was eaten by wild animals while I was sleeping outside, that a defenseless traveller was a target for thieves, and that what I was doing was almost suicidal.
Why do you go to such extremes?
I don't really know. While I'm travelling, I keep walking along thinking how hard it is, and plenty of times I have thought I just want to give up and go home. So when my handcart was stolen, to be honest, I just jumped for joy when I realised that I could stop, that I didn't have to walk tomorrow, the feeling of release brought tears to my eyes. This was in a town called Kano in Nigeria, before I reached the Sahara desert. Emotionally, and physically, I was a complete wreck, having walked 6,700 kilometres in 216 days, and my journey was brought to an abrupt end. I didn't feel even the slightest bit disappointed, though all I felt was elation.
But the strange thing is that as the day for me to head back to Japan neared, I started to feel that despite the fact I had suffered so much I desperately wished I had made it to the end. When I left Africa, I swore I would return one day. When I got back to Japan, I only remembered the good parts. I felt more and more that I wanted to walk Africa again soon.
I didn't set foot in Africa after that for six years, though. I saved money, working as a high school teacher, and I used my vacations during that period to walk in Korea, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan in preparation for Africa. I wasn't sure what to do, though--whether to continue my job as a teacher, or to pack in a steady job and continue travelling. My family and my girlfriend at the time were against me going to Africa, but I didn't much like the idea of being a teacher until the end of my life. I chose a life in which I didn't know how things would turn out.
When I went back for a second attempt at Africa, I didn't start from Kano, where my cart had been stolen six years previously--I set out again from my original starting point in Mombasa. It took a year to cross Africa and make it to Paris, and when I arrived I felt I had finally finished the job I first set out to do. It was a journey of 11,100 kilometres, of which 99.9 per cent of my memories are just sheer hard slog. But there were instants of unbelievable landscapes and the warmth of the people I met. They may only be the tiniest fraction of the time I spent overall, but I felt it was worth making the whole journey just for those brief moments.
From then onward, I have just kept saving up money and then travelling. I walked around several regions of Asia, walked the length of the South American continent-which worked out to around 8,800 kilometres-and before I realised it I had turned 50. During this time I also got married and had children, but my style of travelling on foot with a handcart in tow hasn't changed one bit.
How do you raise the funds for your travels?
My main source of income is from lectures and talks, but as I don't have a steady job my financial situation is rather shaky. As well as the funds for my journeys, I also have to earn enough to pay the bills for my family's everyday expenses, so I am permanently strapped for cash. I haven't even been able to pay the rent on more than one occasion.
I would be more than happy to have someone sponsor me, but unfortunately I haven't had any sweet deals like that drop into my lap yet. I should probably make the effort to draw up a plan and then use it to go out and gather in some financial support, but that somehow doesn't appeal to me. I suppose I tend to be rather passive when it comes to selling myself.
To be honest, with no money and a family to feed I do sometimes worry about what is going to happen in the future. Even so, while the worry is always there I have still come this far, somehow or other managing to continue my travels. If I can manage to do that, I am sure it will all work out in the end. My wife is wonderful if I haven't travelled anywhere for a while she asks me, "Isn't about time yon started to feel like walking again?"
What does travelling mean to you?
Ultimately, travelling is all about getting to know yourself. There have been plenty of times when I have faced a crisis, and a degree of emotion that surprises even me has welled up, driving me into action to overcome the crisis. Sometimes I scream and cry on my own, it's too tough, it's too hard, I want to give up and go home, I'm lonely-but even so, I've always just kept on walking. The reason I kept travelling like that was because the feeling was so strong that I wanted to find the part of me that even I didn't know. Also, travelling makes me think of all sorts of things. For example, one time when I was walking across the former Zaire (present day Democratic Republic of Congo), in a village I saw a family gathered together by the light of the moon in the garden in front of their house, sitting round in a circle. The garden was their kitchen and their dining room. They had a fire burning, and were making something. The family was simply enjoying a happy time together. It made me wonder whether happiness is living in a building with air conditioning, or whether it was living naturally, with few possessions.
Compared to Africa, Japan has a great many material things. But the people go to offices every day, and do the same sort of work, day in day out. Then they go home, and everyone watches the same things on television, and everyone gets the same information. From the point of view of the individual human being, in a society like this everyone must be terribly isolated psychologically. If you look at the way those people in Africa live, they have no cars or even electricity, but they do have nature, and you can see the intimacy in their relations with each other. The people seem happy. Life in Africa moves according to the sun and the moon-in Japan, everyone rushes around, living their lives by the clock. There are a great many things in Japan that they don't have in Africa, but there are plenty of things in Africa that we don't have in Japan. I don't know who is happier, but I do think you shouldn't look at anything from the perspective of a single set of values. My feeling is that you can find happiness as a human being by finding a lifestyle that suits you. I want to look for that happiness in my own way, by continuing to travel.
What sort of travels would you like to do in the future?
It's always good to go to places you have never visited before, but I also find it interesting to walk again in places I visited a long time ago. Two years ago, I retraced the route I took long ago down the length of Japan to commemorate having walked the equivalent of once round the globe. Visiting again after 30 years, I was surprised how everything had changed completely. First of all, the number of tunnels had increased phenomenally. Thirty years previously, I could wind my way slowly over mountain passes, but now tunnels link places by the shortest possible route. Even if you try, to avoid tunnels and head for the mountain passes, there are many places where the roads have been closed and you can no longer get through. If you have no choice but to go through a tunnel, it is extremely dangerous when you are pulling a handcart-I was nearly run down by a truck on many occasions. I felt Japan has become very much a society centered on the vehicle. Wherever you go there are bypasses, and along the sides of the roads there are shops and restaurants belonging to nationwide chains. The scenery along the main roads is becoming just the same wherever you go.
Also, the individual shops and small, cheap diners are quickly disappearing. Long ago, when I went into places like that many different people would talk to me, "Where are you headed?" they would ask, "Tough work!" they would exclaim. Or they would give me something to keep me going on my journey. Now those small, individually-run places have sadly been replaced by characterless convenience stores and restaurant chains, and the opportunities to chat about different things have vanished. It seems to me that there are very, very few places remaining where you can actually come into contact with people. I realised how Japan had lost so much as a result of the relentless pursuit of efficiency, comfort and convenience over the 30 years since my first journey.
Is the same change happening around the world?
I think it is particularly striking in Japan, but the same sort of things are probably happening everywhere. In Japan, though, it is the big cities and main roads that have changed a great deal. Once you get away from the cities and main roads, you can still come across scenery that has hardly changed since olden times. I'm sure it is the same in other countries. The cities of Africa or South America are changing rapidly, but I expect the people living in the villages and forests are still going about their lives the way they always have. Even so, it is certainly true that the forces carrying out this massive development are starting to bring pressure on these people and their lifestvles.
There is a reality that you can only see and only feel by walking on your own two feet. I will keep making difficult journeys, but I aim to continue putting one foot in front of another in search of those encounters when, for a fleeting moment, all the pain and hardship is blown away. —Japan +
Interview by Hisashi Kondo