Where is the self? An 'intellectual travel' guide through the heart of Japan

The first in a Meadow Mind series on intellectual travel, including a reading list and walking syllabus on Japan's philosophy of the self

The Poet Basho Traveling, Source

The Kumano Kodo is a 1,000-year-old pilgrimage route that still winds through Japan, with hot-spring hotels (onsen) waiting along the way for when pilgrims can’t take another step.

While hiking the Nakahechi sub-section back in 2024, my fiance and I often stumbled across stone monuments (kuhi) inscribed with haiku, many of which commemorated works by the legendary poet, Matsuo Bashō, who walked these trails hundreds of years before us.

Bashō was an itinerant poet famous during the Edo Period for his travels across Japan and the hokku (or the poetic form from which modern haiku originates) he created along the journey. He had his own way of describing the instinct for learning through travel which drives this itinerary.

Learn of the pine from the pine, he told his students, and of the bamboo from the bamboo. By this he meant entering the pine, giving up the standpoint of the observer until the gap between you and the thing closes and splash!, the poem arrives on its own.

Principally a theory of writing, it can also serve as a guide for how one comes to know anything worth knowing, a place included.

in the stillness—
sinking into the rocks,
is the cicadas’ cry

The first in a series on intellectual travel

Conventional travel advice seems to keep us at arms length, as tourists passing through a template of experiences to consume.

If I google “travel to [insert destination]”, I’ll find a checklist of sights I’m ‘supposed’ to see. The endless TikTok travel recs will make me feel like that list should be as long as possible, lest I risk missing something, anything. I’ve tried working my way through such a checklist many times and am always left feeling harassed, like a student assigned homework over the summer.

Now when I travel, I try to do the things I already enjoy at home, like long hikes and sprawling dinners, shopping, and wasting time at coffee shops. This is the surest way to the heart of a place, both because you have a better chance of meeting real people doing real things, but also because the place, even through the same activities, is always so fascinatingly different from home.

In characteristic Meadow Mind fashion, this also usually involves learning: working through a place’s literature, philosophy, and history until I start to see the shape of how it thinks, and can cross-reference that with my embodied experience of it.

I’ve been planning trips this way for years. It only recently occurred to me that the outputs, like the reading lists and routes built around ideas, might be worth sharing.

So: each installment takes a place I’ve actually been and routes it through its own intellectual tradition. A syllabus you walk as well as read.

This one begins in the mountains south of Osaka.

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Self-Portrait of Danjuro VII in a Shibaraku Performance (Source)

The guiding question: what and where is the self?

I chose this question as the central theme for a Japanese travel itinerary: what is the self? Does it exist? If so, how is it constituted? What is its relationship to others, to objects, or to machines? Is it clearly defined or co-created with its environment?

The Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō proposed an answer to these questions in the form of ningen sonzai, or human nature or existence. The ordinary Japanese word for “person,” ningen, carries within it the character for “between”; Watsuji argued that a human being is never first an isolated individual who later joins a society, but is constituted from the start in the betweenness of relations. The bounded, sovereign self that so much of Western philosophy treats as bedrock feels, here, like one option among several, and perhaps not the obvious one.

These are sentiments rooted in and echoed throughout Japanese philosophical and literary traditions, which the reading list and recommended Osaka → Kiee → Kyoto → Tokyo route below traverse in both mind and body. Through the kōans of Zen Buddhism, the haiku of Bashō, and the surrealist dissolution of the self in modern art, we gain insight, however slight, into one of Japan’s most fundamental conceptual cores.

And before you read on, I want to hear where you land. Where do you think the self ends? At your skin? At the edge of your attention? Somewhere further out, in the people and tools and places you’re bound up with? Leave it in the comments!

A reading list across four traditions

The itinerary and reading list below cover four philosophical and literary traditions, each with its own account of the self but all in conversation with each other. Read before you go, in this order. Each section sets up the next, especially since I find that fiction lands harder once you’ve read the philosophy.

Shinto, animism, and techno-animism

“Japan has been described as a land of Shinto-infused ‘techno-animism’… that resolutely ignores boundaries between human, animal, spiritual and mechanical beings.” (“Techno-Animism in Japan”, Casper Bruun Jensen & Anders Blok)

Shintō, Japan’s indigenous spiritual tradition, treats gods or spirits — kami — as inhabiting natural features, objects, and phenomena, and treats the line between animate and inanimate as porous. The medieval tsukumogami tradition pushed this to household tools, which were said to acquire a spirit of their own once they reached a hundred years of age. Anthropologists use the term techno-animism for the readiness of that same disposition to greet machines and robots as bearers of presence. This is the baseline the later traditions argue with: personhood is not assumed to stop at the edge of the body.

Reading List:

• “The Record of Tool Specters” (Tsukumogami ki): A medieval fable on how objects acquire spirit.

• Osamu Tezuka, Astro Boy: Japanese manga and anime that follows a powerful robot boy with emotions who fights for justice and robot rights.

The Zen non-self and poetry practice of haikai

“To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things.” (Dōgen, "Genjōkōan," trans. Kazuaki Tanahashi, 1985)

The Buddhist doctrine of non-self (muga) holds that there is no permanent, independent self underlying experience. Founder Dōgen Zenji brought Zen’s largest sect Sōtō Zen from China to Japan in the 13th century, and in his foundational work, Genjōkōan, proposed that to study the self is to forget it, and that this forgetting is realized through all things.

The poetic tradition of Haikai developed in close contact with Zen, giving birth to the modern form of haiku. Its most famous poet from the Edo Period, Matsuo Bashō trained in Zen meditation under the priest Butchō. Its discipline of direct attention to a concrete object, and the concomitant dissolution of the observer into his/her environment, is considered by many as Zen practice carried into poetry.

Reading List:

• Dōgen, “Genjōkōan” (from the Shōbōgenzō): Dōgen’s foundational Sōtō Zen essay on studying the self in order to forget it.

• Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Oku no Hosomichi): His travel diary of a journey on foot through northern Japan, weaving haikai into the prose.

The Kyoto School of philosophy

To experience means to know facts just as they are, to know in accordance with facts by completely relinquishing one’s own fabrications … by pure I am referring to the state of experience just as it is without the least addition of deliberative discrimination. (Nishida, An Inquiry into the Good, 3)

The Kyoto School, centered on Nishida Kitarō and his successors at Kyoto University in the early twentieth century, set out to state Buddhist philosophical commitments in the vocabulary of Western philosophy. Nishida's An Inquiry into the Good (1911) begins from what he calls pure experience (junsui keiken), a mode of experience he places before the split into subject and object. His later work develops the concept of basho, "place" or "field," a logic in which particulars are located rather than merely described by predicates. This is the systematic treatment of what the earlier traditions expressed in religious and poetic terms.

Reading List:

• Nishida Kitarō, An Inquiry into the Good (excerpt): an account of pure experience before the perceiving subject and perceived object split into two.

The I-novel

“Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.” (Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human)

As a Japanese literary tradition staunchly rooted in the self, the I-novel (shishōsetsu) serves as an intellectual counterbalance to the traditions above. This confessional autobiographical form became central to modern Japanese fiction in the early twentieth century, narrating events close to the author’s own life with sustained attention to interior states. Where the other three traditions decenter the self, the I-novel presents the world through a single, exposed subjectivity, often marked by shame, alienation, and disappointment.

Reading List:

• Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human, and Shiga Naoya, “At Kinosaki”: classic examples of the I-novel structure, one long and one short

• Mizumura Minae, An I-Novel: a contemporary, bilingual reworking of the form

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The route: Osaka to Tokyo

Osaka → Kii Peninsula (Hongū → Koguchi → Nachisan) → Kyoto (+Uji) → Tokyo

We start on foot among mountain shrines on the Kumano Kodo, where the animist intuition that a waterfall can carry a soul is still practiced. We then move through Uji and Kyoto for Zen and the Kyoto School, sitting zazen in a working monastery and walking the canal path a philosopher walked in reflection. Then you end in Tokyo, where the very same question shows up again in digital art and in androids asking what is a human being? One of these in Kyoto will even deliver you a Buddhist sermon.

Four traditions, one question, asked first among mountain shrines and last in a Tokyo museum where a robot asks it back to you. That’s the whole argument of the trip: a place can teach you something a book alone can’t, and a book can teach you something the place alone can’t. Put them together and it doesn’t get any better than that.

You don’t have to book a single flight for the reading list to change how you see the edges of your own self. But if you do want to walk it, the details are below, including the eleven-day route, the exact onsens and ryokans I stayed in, the trail I’d tell you to skip, and other details I wish I’d had.

• The route: an 11–12 day trip that runs from the Kii Peninsula (the mountainous region south of Osaka) northeast to Tokyo. Each stop connects to one of the four traditions in the reading list above.

• Flying In: into Kansai Airport (Osaka) and out of Tokyo so you don’t have to backtrack.

• Transportation: Get a rental car at Kansai Airport for the first leg. Drive the Kii Peninsula, and then drop it off in Kyoto, with everything after that by train.

  • Remember that the Japanese drive on the left side of the road! You need an International Driving Permit alongside your home license, plus an ETC card for expressway tolls or LOTS of change. Don’t be the dummy caught at the toll-booth. If this sounds like too much, you can always plan to navigate to the Kii Peninsula via train or bus.

Leg 1: Osaka → Kii Peninsula (4 days / 3 nights)

This leg covers the Shinto and animist material. You’ll walk part of the Kumano Kodo, a network of ancient pilgrimage trails, and stay at hot spring hotels (onsens) along its main route (the Nakahechi). You’ll also engage in ancient rituals at Japan’s tallest single-drop waterfall, Nachi Falls, still worshipped as a kami today. Get around by rental car plus one long day on foot.

Day 1: Hongū and Yunomine

• Drive from Kansai Airport to Hongū (about 3.5–4 hours on mountain roads).

• Visit Kumano Hongū Taisha, one of the three great Kumano shrines, and its giant standalone torii gate at Ōyunohara.

• Soak at Yunomine Onsen. Its small Tsuboyu bath is the only hot spring in the world you can bathe in that’s registered as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. If its busy, there are other baths a few steps away that you can use while you wait.

• Stay: Minshuku Yunotaniso. Homey and serves a delicious, authentic Japanese dinner called kaiseki. Many lodging packages also include breakfast and lunch in the form of a bento box for the hike.

Day 2: Hongū to Koguchi (a full-day hike)

• Hike the Kogumotori-goe, the trail section from the Ukegawa trailhead near Hongū over a forested mountain pass to the village of Koguchi.

• Distance/time: about 13 km, 5.5 hours. This is a real mountain hike, and the high point is the Hyakken-gura lookout over the Kii peaks.

• Stay: Takata Green Land. Outdoor hot springs near Koguchi with delicious food. They arrange a very accessible bus to pick up hikers in Koguchi so you don’t have to walk to Takata on foot.

Day 3: Nachisan (the waterfall)

• Take the bus from Koguchi back to Hongū and pick up the car.

• Drive to the Nachisan area and see:

  • Kumano Nachi Taisha: the third grand shrine.

  • Nachi Falls: Japan’s tallest single-drop waterfall, worshipped as a kami (a Shinto god or spirit).

  • Seiganto-ji: the temple next to the falls, reached by the Daimon-zaka stone stairway. The photo-ops are insane.

• Stay: Mitaki Sanso. If you go outside from the hotel, you can see the waterfall. Food is AMAZING. Note that this is the only accommodation on Nachi-san so book 6 months in advance if you can.

• Skip the hard hike: the trail from Koguchi to Nachi (the Ogumotori-goe) is the toughest section of the whole route, about 14.5 km, 7–8 hours, starting with an 800 m climb locals call the “body-breaking slope.” Busing back and driving, as above, lets you see Nachi without it.

Day 4: Drive to Kyoto

• About 4–4.5 hours from the coast. Return the car in Kyoto.

Tips (from having done it):

• Ryokans and onsens book up fast so make sure to book all three lodgings months ahead through the amazing online resource, kumano-travel.com. You can also take advantage of their daily luggage-forwarding service if you want to walk light.

• Carry lunch and water on the hike since there are no shops on the trail. The stone paths get slippery in rain, which the peninsula gets a lot.

• Tsuboyu takes only a few bathers at a time, first-come, so go early. Make sure to familiarize yourself with onsen etiquette and check restrictions ahead of time if you have tattoos.

• Want a shorter walk? Swap the Day 2 hike for Hosshinmon-ōji → Hongū: about 7.5 km, 2–3 hours, mostly downhill.

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Leg 2: Kii Peninsula → Kyoto (5 days / 4 nights)

This is the rest-and-reflect leg, covering Zen Buddhism and the Kyoto School (a group of philosophers based at Kyoto University in the early 1900s). You’ll spend a night inside a working Zen monastery, attend a Buddhist sermon delivered by a robot, and walk a canal-side path a famous philosopher used for reflection. You’ve returned the rental car in Kyoto, so this leg runs entirely on local trains.

Day 1: Uji (the temple stay)

• From Kyoto Station, take the JR Nara line to Uji (about 16 minutes). This is where you head after arriving from the Kii Peninsula.

• Spend the day and night at Kōshō-ji, a Zen monastery founded in 1233 by Dōgen, the monk who wrote the “Genjōkōan” on your reading list. It’s the oldest Sōtō Zen monastery in Japan.

• Sit zazen (seated meditation) and try sutra copying (tracing a Buddhist scripture by hand) alongside the monks.

• Stay: Kōshō-ji itself. The overnight, called a shukubō (temple lodging), is a simple room in the monastery with meals and the monks’ early-morning routine included. Spots are limited, so book well ahead.

Days 2–5: Kyoto (Higashiyama)

• Check out of the temple, take the train back into Kyoto, and settle into a base in Higashiyama, the district on the city’s east side where both remaining activities sit.

• Kōdai-ji: attend a sermon delivered by Mindar, an android built to represent Kannon, the Buddhist deity of compassion. The 25-minute sermon on the Heart Sutra runs about twice daily on Saturdays and Sundays, with English subtitles projected on the wall. Reserve ahead; it’s free. The temple’s own claim is that they didn’t dress a robot up as Kannon, but that Kannon has taken the form of a robot.

• Philosopher’s Path (Tetsugaku-no-michi): a walking path along a canal, named after the philosopher Nishida Kitarō, who walked it while thinking. Two temples, Ginkaku-ji and Nanzen-ji, sit at either end. Bonus points if you go during cherry blossom season.

  • Optional: Shōren-in, another Kyoto temple, unveiled an AI robot monk called “Buddharoid” in early 2026 that holds real conversations. It’s still being tested, so check whether the public can see it before planning around it.

• Stay: Kyoto Ryokan Gion Sano. A well-reviewed, family-run ryokan (traditional inn) a short walk from Kōdai-ji, with tatami-mat rooms and futon bedding. Small and popular, so book early.

  • Other options: for a splurge, Park Hyatt Kyoto (right beside Kōdai-ji, with pagoda views) or The Hotel Seiryu Kyoto Kiyomizu (a luxury hotel in a converted 1930s schoolhouse); for modern mid-range, Hotel Legasta Higashiyama Sanjo; for budget, Ryokan Hostel Gion.

Tips:

• Reserve Mindar’s session in advance and double-check the Saturday/Sunday schedule, which changes.

• Book the Kōshō-ji temple stay well ahead given that it’s a working monastery with limited space.

• Walk the Philosopher’s Path early in the morning to beat the crowds.

• Stay in Higashiyama so Kōdai-ji is walkable; the Philosopher’s Path is a short bus ride north.

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Leg 3: Kyoto → Tokyo (4 days / 3 nights)

This leg covers the I-novel and the modern version of the same questions about the self, asked here through digital art and robotics. Get around on Tokyo’s trains with a Suica or Pasmo tap card.

Getting there: Kyoto → Tokyo on the Shinkansen (bullet train), about 2 hours 15 minutes. The travel day still leaves you an afternoon.

Days 1–3: Tokyo

Group the two Akihabara stops together on one day, and give Odaiba (Miraikan) and teamLab their own slots.

• teamLab Borderless, in Azabudai Hills: a digital art museum with no set path, where projected light, water, and creatures move between rooms and react to where you stand. (The alternative, teamLab Planets in Toyosu, is the version where you wade through knee-deep water.)

• Miraikan (the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation), in Odaiba: a science museum with lifelike androids built by roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro. The android Otonaroid is built around the questions “what is life?” and “what is a human being?”, and you can operate Otonaroid yourself. (Ishiguro also built Mindar, the android in Kyoto.)

• Kanda Myōjin (Kanda Shrine), by Akihabara: a 1,300-year-old Shinto shrine next to Tokyo’s electronics district that blesses gadgets. Buy the IT-protection amulet (an omamori, or charm), shaped like a microchip and costing about ¥1,000, meant to guard your devices against viruses and crashes.

• Jimbōchō: Tokyo’s used-book district, the largest in the world. Hunt for secondhand copies of I-novels and other Japanese literature from the reading list.

• Stay: Nohga Hotel Akihabara: a well-designed hotel in the Akihabara district, walkable to Kanda Myōjin and Jimbōchō, with the Hibiya subway line running straight to teamLab. Odaiba is the only stop that needs a transfer.

  • Other options: Sakura Cross Hotel Akihabara (roomier, apartment-style) or the Akihabara Washington Hotel (right at the station); or, if you’d rather have the easiest run to Odaiba, base at Shimbashi/Shiodome, where The Royal Park Hotel Tokyo Shiodome sits on the Yurikamome line that runs to Miraikan.

Tips:

• teamLab uses timed tickets that sell out so buy ahead, and put your bags in the lockers before the entry gate (there are none past it).

• Miraikan is closed Tuesdays, and specific androids sometimes go offline for maintenance, so confirm availability before you go.

• Getting to each stop from Akihabara: Kanda Myōjin is a 7-minute walk; Jimbōchō is a 15-minute walk or one subway stop; teamLab is direct on the Hibiya line to Kamiyacho; Miraikan is the Yamanote line to Shimbashi, then the Yurikamome line.

• Jimbōchō is best on a weekday.

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Four traditions, one question, asked first among mountain shrines and last in a Tokyo museum where a robot asks it back to you. That’s the argument of the trip: that a place can teach you something a book alone can’t, and a book can teach you something the place alone can’t. When you combine them, it doesn’t get any better than that.

Let me know if you have any questions about the readings or travel itinerary below, and your thoughts on this style of post!