The short trail, like other trails on the peninsula, was clearly marked and accessible to all but the most elderly tourists. In March, a friend and I hiked Yasenodangai, a bluff on the west coast, to an elevated point that looked down on the sea. Its population, at 350,000, would easily fit into one of Tokyo's wards. In fact, hardly any chain stores dot the peninsula's 840 square miles or 325-mile shoreline. On either side, though, this is a corner of 21st-century Japan with no McDonald's or Starbucks (at least not yet). On Noto's west coast, he compared the endless efforts it took to row a boat against the violent waves to the endless longing he felt for the loved one he had left behind on the east side, though, he wrote about traveling through hard roads to arrive at the calm sea of Nanao Bay. The duality between Noto's outward- and inward-looking shores shapes the way people on the peninsula live and feel, as evidenced in the writings of Otomo no Yakamochi, the eighth-century poet and statesman who was assigned there temporarily.
Maybe to make up for the months of hibernation, Noto holds festivals almost every week in July and August.Īlthough much of Japan is crowded and overdeveloped - with the equivalent of about 43 percent of the United States' population crammed into an area smaller than California - the power of the raw, unspoiled Japan still exists on the Noto Peninsula, where the population density is about half the rest of the country's. On the Noto Peninsula, about midway along the western coast of Japan, some 200 miles northwest of Tokyo, the gray gives way to flowers that bloom all over the peninsula for a few short months, and clouds part to reveal clear open skies. But in summer, the sea tempers its anger, even allowing bathers a dip in the few sandy stretches along the coastline.
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THE SEA OF JAPAN, an angry body year round, achieves full power in winter, when it drives the inhabitants along its coast indoors, makes them fortify bamboo sea walls around their villages, and blankets the area in gray desolation.
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