Quotes of the Day

Finding Shangri-la is not so difficult, but leaving it is nearly impossible. I first entered Iya Valley in 1971, at the age of 19, and today, at 52, I'm still in its thrall.

It began when, as a college student, I hitchhiked around Japan for a summer. I had partly grown up in Japan as my father, a naval officer, had been posted to the U.S. base at Yokohama in the 1960s. As a boy, I would take the train every weekend to nearby temples and beaches, and I enjoyed these adventures so much that I decided then that Japan was the place for me. But at 19, majoring in Japanese at an American university, I was having doubts. The juggernaut of Japanese industry described in my college textbooks seemed to overshadow every other aspect of the country. Aside from shipyards and car factories, what else did Japan have to offer?

The summer of 1971 was to be the test—and fate intervened immediately. On my first day back in Tokyo for the holidays, someone gave me an amulet from Kompira Shrine on the southern island of Shikoku. Intrigued, I followed the amulet, and found myself two months later in Shikoku, riding into the mountains on a motorbike with a friend, in search of a rumored "hidden valley" called Iya.

As our motorbike headed into the interior of Shikoku, we found ourselves entering a hybrid world. The towering peaks came straight out of a Chinese Sung-dynasty landscape painting, but they were draped in a feathery, vapor-shrouded foliage. Far from neat, pruned, modern Japan, the precipices felt wild, prehistoric, like something out of the age of the dinosaurs.

The Iya Gorges are, in fact, the country's deepest, and are sometimes called "Japan's Grand Canyon." The unpaved one-lane road wound along cliffs so steep that on one side there was a 60-m drop to the river, and on the other side the rock of the cliff face curved up and over the road. Finally, we emerged from the canyons and found ourselves at an ink-landscape village, with thatched cottages perched high overlooking the river. White threads of waterfalls cascaded over blue green rocks. Mists boiled up from the chasms below. I wept. Iya had claimed me.

The next year, I returned to Japan as an exchange student at a university in Tokyo, but I spent most of my time exploring Iya and the adjacent mountains. I discovered that it wasn't merely that I, as a foreigner or a modern person, found the place strange and picturesque. Iya had always affected people that way. The "lord of Awa" (the old name of the province) had written in 1830: "The spirit of the land is remote and mysterious. We call it 'Our Peach Spring of Awa.'" In classic Chinese poetry, the Peach Spring was a quaint village that the poet happened upon while taking an idle walk, only to find that it was a haunted paradise.

Iya had been a place of mystery even then, before industrialization changed the look of the country. Because of its remoteness, Iya had been a refuge for shamans fleeing the 8th century Nara overlords, for the Heike clan after it lost the battle to control Japan in the 12th century, and for 14th century mountain warriors fighting the Muromachi shogunate. That is, the losers of each age fled into Iya.

In the early '70s, however, I found this paradise deserted. Young villagers had fled for the cities, and Iya was filled with abandoned homes—one of which I bought in 1973. As a young romantic, I hearkened after Chinese nature poets and played the flute, so I named the thatched house Chiiori: "Cottage of the Flute."

Chiiori was pure yugen. It's a word associated with Noh drama, and it literally means "mysterious darkness," a world of shadows and vaguely glimpsed images. The source of heating in the winter, and of cooking year-round, in old Japanese houses is the irori hearth, a square cut in the middle of the floor in which burns an eternal campfire. It fills the house with smoke, and even at night it never completely goes out. After centuries of smoke from the irori, the inside of my cottage had turned black: black columns, black floors, black beams. The underside of the thatch is darkening, and in another 20 or 30 years it will glisten as though lacquered black. Aside from this, there is nothing save the occasional mat. Only empty floors, the irori, the smoke, and the mists outside. At night, way up another hillside just visible between the slopes of mountains curving inward like a cascade of folding fans, I can see one solitary light far across the valley.

Well, paradise is meant to be lost, and gradually I lost it. As the years passed, the poet gave way to a writer who rarely had the time to visit Chiiori. The house began to decay. By the late '80s, Japan's construction frenzy had penetrated even to Iya, and I began to fear that the numinous valley would end up encased in concrete. I visited less and less. In 1997, I moved to Bangkok. Worried that Chiiori was falling into disrepair, I invited photographer Mason Florence to join me as co-owner. Mason, who had been interested in acquiring an old thatched house, went up to Iya to see Chiiori. He took with him an old friend and adviser, and when they walked in and saw the leaking roof and rotting floors, his friend said, "Let's get out of here—fast!"

But Mason stayed, and soon a swirl of activity enveloped the house as Mason brought in carpenters and repairmen. One day we were visited by a group of Western teachers brought over by the government to teach English in schools across Japan, and soon Chiiori evolved into a sort of clubhouse for them, a place to sit around the irori and talk of environmental ideals.

The teachers were followed by tourist groups and day visitors. Eventually, young Japanese started coming as well. They're the new generation, unimpressed by the vision of "progress" that bedazzled their parents, and out of place in bureaucratized modern Japan. In 1999 we founded The Chiiori Project, which has come to be seen as symbolic of attempts across Japan to revive rural regions through alternatives to subsidized dam and road building. Today, we rent three other houses in the village, and have a staff of three Japanese and two British volunteers. Chiiori has become a move-ment. And once more, Iya is a sanctuary for those who go against the grain of their time.

Chiiori, so active again, has called me back, and I spend far more time in Iya these days than I did in the '90s. And yet, Chiiori is no longer home—it now belongs to the public. Hundreds of people visit each year. The majority come for dinner or to spend a night, simply to experience the romance of the place, while others come as volunteers to cut and carry thatch, dig ditches or build sheds. Where I had dreamed of a world of yugen, I return to Iya and now find a group of young people gathered for a jazz weekend, and—chickens! They're keeping chickens on the grounds nowadays. While I've lost my private Iya, a new generation has found it. When Kohei Watanabe, a 31-year-old advertising executive in Tokyo, visited for a corporate retreat, he remarked: "This place has shown me how to be Japanese." Although the concrete is still encroaching, Iya goes on being a "thin place," a doorway to Japan's ancient Shinto roots.

When I was still a young romantic, I imagined that I was following in the footsteps of the 5th century Chinese nature poet Xie Lingyun. His dream house was "a mysterious dwelling of the utmost emptiness, hung round with wild plants like a mist." The owner of such a house, wrote Xie, would "deduce heaven and earth and straddle the four seas" from his perch above the clouds.

These days, my thoughts in Iya have mostly to do with the volunteers, the chicken coop, how we will pay for the next thatching of the roof. But sometimes, when I'm alone on the veranda at Chiiori, or sipping tea at the cottage of my old neighbor Omo-san, the mist starts silently swirling up from the valley below—and then the world falls away. Green emptiness envelops me, and I'm back in paradise.

• Alex Kerr
• Discovering the ancient joy of a mountain refuge with no furniture