S5, E46: Five Questions for the Man Who Walked a Fault Line in Japan by Feel

This kind of Japan travel doesn’t show up in guidebooks. In January 2024, a major earthquake struck the Noto Peninsula, lifting the seabed 15 feet into the air and exposing an ocean floor that locals walked across—harvesting octopus and abalone—to get home.

This week on Unpacked, Five Questions, host and Afar executive editor Katherine LaGrave is joined by Afar contributing writer Ryan Knighton, who recently wrote a feature about traveling along the peninsula. Ryan, who is blind, visited Noto two years after the earthquake on a slow walking tour, drawn by the parallels between this remote coastal peninsula and his own earthquake-prone home on Vancouver Island.

What he found was a place not broken, but mid-repair—and a Japanese art form that made sense of everything.

Walking Japan’s Noto Peninsula, One Year After the Earthquake

In January 2024, a magnitude-7.5 earthquake reshaped Japan’s Noto Peninsula, lifting sections of the seabed 15 feet into the air and leaving fishing villages, lacquer studios, and centuries-old food traditions to rebuild. On this episode of Unpacked, Five Questions, host and Afar executive editor Katherine LaGrave talks with Afar contributing writer Ryan Knighton, who is blind, about his first trip to Japan: a slow, guided walking tour along Noto’s earthquake-scarred coast. They discuss what it means to travel to a place still recovering, the food that defined the trip, and how kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold, became the key to understanding a region putting itself back together.

Topics discussed in this episode

• Why a first-time visitor to Japan chose the remote, earthquake-prone Noto Peninsula, and why a slow Walk Japan walking tour felt like the right way to see it
• What it feels like to travel to a place still in active recovery, and why where your travel money goes matters
• The food of Noto and Kanazawa: Tokyo-style sushi’s surprising origin in a 1923 earthquake, Japanese barracuda, and sweet potato gelato at 10 a.m.
• What it’s like, as a blind traveler, to walk an earthquake fracture line and feel 15 feet of uplifted seabed underfoot
• How kintsugi, the art of repairing broken pottery with gold, became a metaphor for a region rebuilding itself one small effort at a time

Frequently asked questions

Where is the Noto Peninsula in Japan?

Noto Peninsula is a roughly 100-kilometer stretch of coastline that juts into the Sea of Japan from northern Ishikawa Prefecture, on Japan’s western coast. Its gateway city is Kanazawa, about 2.5 hours from Tokyo by shinkansen.

Is the Noto Peninsula safe to visit after the 2024 earthquake?

Yes. Roads, restaurants, and accommodations across much of Noto have reopened, and tour operators like Walk Japan designed itineraries specifically to direct travel spending toward the region’s recovery.

What is a Walk Japan walking tour?

Walk Japan runs guided, moderately paced walking tours across Japan. Its Onsen Gastronomy: Noto itinerary is a multi-day trip from Kanazawa to Wakura Onsen combining light walking with the region’s cuisine, hot springs, and craft traditions, including Wajima lacquerware.

What food should you try in Noto and Kanazawa?

Highlights include Tokyo-style sushi, Japanese barracuda, Noto sea salt gelato, and tuna prepared by local sushi chefs known for their exceptional knife craft. Kanazawa is also famous for its gold leaf.

What is kintsugi?

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold-dusted lacquer, so the repair becomes part of the object’s history rather than a flaw to hide. In this episode, Ryan Knighton uses it as a metaphor for how a place and its people rebuild after a disaster.

People, places, and resources in this episode

• Ryan Knighton — Afar contributing writer, memoirist, and screenwriter
• “Far From the Crowds, Japan’s Noto Peninsula Is a Dream for Seafood and Sake Devotees” — read Ryan’s story
• Walk Japan — Onsen Gastronomy: Noto walking tour
• Follow Ryan: Instagram · Bluesky

Full transcript

Katherine LaGrave: Welcome to Unpacked Five Questions, a podcast that takes you behind the scenes of one great travel story. I’m Katherine LaGrave, executive editor at Afar. I’ve loved magazines since I was a kid, and not just the stories in the magazine, the stories about how those stories got made to now, decades later. That’s the purpose of this whole podcast, speaking with writers and photographers who have an ear for incredible travel experiences and turn them into stories. Ryan Knighton is one of those people and an Afar contributing writer. Ryan is a memoirist, screenwriter, and surfer. He’s also blind, and for his latest afar story, he traveled to Noto, a remote peninsula on Japan’s western coast that was devastated by a powerful earthquake in January 2024.

Noto is a place shaped by its relationship to the sea, with fishing villages, centuries old traditions and a food culture deeply connected to the surrounding waters. But Ryan’s story isn’t simply about what was lost in the earthquake or even what’s being rebuilt. It’s about what it means to experience a place that’s changing and what you notice when you can’t rely on sight to take it in. I sat down with Ryan to learn what drew him to Noto and what the Peninsula and the people he met there revealed to him along the way.

Hi Ryan, thanks so much for speaking with me this morning. It’s always so nice to chat with you.

Ryan Knighton: Nice to chat with you as always.

Katherine: So today we’re here to discuss your story about Noto, Japan. And to start, I wondered you’d never been to Japan before. So what initially drew you to the Noto Peninsula? And why did you feel like this was the right time to tell the story?

Ryan: You know what’s funny? You know, you and I had talked and I said I’d never been to Japan, but I actually realized I had been for like 12 hours.

Katherine: Never mind. Take the question back. 24 hours? No, no.

Ryan: But Tracy and I actually used to live in South Korea. We lived in Pusan, and so to renew our visas when we were, you know, students teaching over there, we had to go over to Fukuoka. The one thing I do remember was the lines in the sidewalks for blind people everywhere that you could follow with your cane. Like you put your cane in this little trench and you whip around, it guides you everywhere. And I remember thinking, oh my God, this is what the future feels like. This place is the future. I’ve always had a kind of feeling of like, oh, I always wanted to go there and spend some time because it just felt like, oh, this is a place that really considers design and considers people moving in a landscape. And Noto came up for me, well, sort of a couple ways. I was talking to Walk Japan, and part of it was because I really wanted to walk somewhere. I hadn’t done kind of a walking oriented trip before, which seems ironic as a blind person because I don’t drive, but it felt like, oh, this is something I really want to do. I want to take a slow trip that has sort of a smaller scale that way.

And secondly, I was really fascinated with the story of the earthquake and the tsunami over there 2 years ago, in part because Tracy and I live on an island that is in a very heavy earthquake potential tsunami zone as well. I was interested in going over and just seeing what it was like on the other side of one of those on a coastal community when I was doing the research. One of the things that fascinated me about Noto was how similar it was to where I live in Canada. Like I live on a peninsula more or less that sticks off Vancouver Island on the West Coast, sort of like the head of a hammerhead shark. And Noto is a peninsula that sticks out again on the west coast of Japan, but sticks out into the sea in a similar way, uh, and sort of behaves in a similar way with its tectonics and its waters. It was equally remote to here. There’s sort of like a single road out into the peninsula, like there is here, which makes you really vulnerable if that road is broken in any way or damaged in some kind of way. So anyway, it just felt like, oh, I can kind of go there and see a kindred place that’s going through something really different and also experience a culture I’ve never traveled through. It was so attractive for those reasons.

Katherine: And you mentioned pretty early on in the story, you addressed some of the uneasiness, let’s call it, you feel going to a place that is in active recovery. How did you navigate that feeling as you moved through the trip?

Ryan: You know, you kind of had that feeling of like, is this voyeurism, you know, going to a place that is still in a recovery mode and you want to be respectful. But as I say in the article, and as you and I discussed too, like it’s really important where your travel money goes, especially in the world right now. And, and what that money can, can be directed towards. So it felt like it’s also like a place that is inviting you to come. Despite its recovery, because people coming will help and encourage and make that recovery even more possible. I felt like I was wrestling with a bunch of feelings that in some ways were not mine to wrestle with because I’d already been invited, and I’d already been encouraged to come and shown the ways that taking a walking tour through that area can really help the people that are still living there and have lived there for a long time and are going to continue to live there. The unease went away quite quickly when I got there, and I realized how welcomed I was and how how helpful it was to have tourists returning again.

Katherine: And place is super important to any story, but I feel like it’s really important to this story because place appears in craft and food, in the idea that people can’t and don’t want to just pick up and move, because it would so significantly change the food and craft traditions that are present in place. You know, in the story you visit a soy sauce factory, a sake brewery, an award winning gelato shop. You have this epic lunch at restaurant called Somamichi and so much more. I’m curious what your favorite taste was from the trip.

Ryan: Oh man, I ate so much stuff. Like I am probably on Tuna Embargo for the rest of my life from 1 week in Japan. And I have to say, like, I, I’m with Anthony Bourdain, who I think I remember saying, if he had one thing to choose for a last meal, it would be toro nigiri. And I am a big tuna fan. And the tuna I had there was spectacular, but there were things that I’d never even had before. I had Japanese barracuda, which was a really lovely light fish, you know, it was all it was all fish. Of course, part of it is also just the circumstance in which you eat. It even makes it so much better. Like, I didn’t get to write about this, but I learned like that style of sushi, of eating at the bar in front of the chef, which originates in Tokyo, was dispersed globally by an earthquake because in the early part of the twentieth century, there had been like around 1911, there was a big earthquake in Tokyo, and there was a style of sushi in Tokyo at the time, which is what we mostly know now. The style of sushi prior from, say, out of Kyoto, was you would ferment the rice with the fish, and a lot of rice was just thrown away. It was there to actually add flavor in the fermentation, but it was sort of like a mushy porridge from it, the Tokyo style of sushi. They accelerated the process by adding red vinegar and getting that tanginess in the rice. But then the rice and the fermentation was much faster. And so the sort of quick sushi.

So when they had this earthquake in Tokyo, there were a lot of sushi chefs out of work. And so they moved around the country and they took that style of sushi with them. And that’s why it sort of dispersed and spread around, which is weird given, you know, the trip I did about earthquakes and tsunamis to begin with. And you see how it just as you say, it shapes craft, place and what happens in places. I do remember I had this Tokyo style sushi in Noto itself, and the chef brought out this tuna loin, and Tracy described it to me as looking like a ruby. Like she said, it almost looks cartoony. It’s so reddish pink, and I don’t think I’ve ever tasted tuna. That formidably tuna ish, for lack of a better descriptor. And when it was cut, you know, the sushi chef was telling me about his knives because I’m always interested in people’s craft and the materials they use. And he was talking about how sushi chefs only sharpen one side of their knives. So that way you have a flat 90-degree angle on one side for the clean cut. I love it when people tell you about their craft and they are so inside it that way, and things that I wouldn’t have thought about. And that’s part of the pleasure of eating food for me too, is also learning stuff while I’m doing it.

Katherine: And Japan is such an excellent place for that. I mean, I came into this conversation wanting ice cream. And so I was thinking about your gelato in the parking lot at 10 a.m.. Oh, yeah. You wrote that? Although it was 10 o’clock in the morning. I inhaled 2 sweet potato cones in the parking lot before climbing back into the bus. So this is a tiny place, right? And he has, yeah, a number of flavors that are informed by Noto.

Ryan: Yes. And they continue. He changes them all the time. But like there was Noto sea salt is is really coveted. So you’d want to just featured sea salt itself. I had a sweet potato cone. I had 2 of those, I should say 2. I was not alone. The people we were traveling with, there was about 8 or 9 of us. I think everybody had 2 at 10 in the morning, which is, I think, a testimony, because it wasn’t just my own gluttony.

Katherine: After the break, Ryan shares why this remote corner of Japan is worth seeking out.

Was there a source or a scene that didn’t make the final cut that you want to talk about?

Ryan: You know what’s funny is there are stories I learned a lot through hearing a lot of stories from people like, you know, because we worked together that often when I go to places. I end up writing about the people who are guiding me, the people who I encounter because they mediate the world to me as a blind traveler. And so I get very into people’s stories. And I wouldn’t say there’s a scene that I cut. They’re definitely, probably are some. But I do remember this moment of talking to a couple at dinner who were locals in Wajima, where Momiji is, and where a lot of the really heavy earthquake damage itself was not the tsunami, but the seabed itself had lifted like 15 feet up into the air and stayed there. And I remember we were having dinner in a restaurant in Wajima, and we just watched a demonstration of the lacquer technique of the craftsmen there. So they were making lacquer bowls and polishing. And I think as we ate, they were polishing the whole time. I’ve never seen so much elbow grease as they polish and polish and polish these bowls. But we were talking to this couple and they were local, and they were talking about when the earthquake had happened and they were coming home from Kanazawa to Wajima, and you couldn’t drive through the road because it had been so buckled and damaged and mudslides and other things. So they had to walk the last forever, how long, and they were walking with their son, I think it was, and they explained to me, they describe the road that we had driven in on. You know, you couldn’t pass through it. So everybody went out onto the beach itself to walk around all the mess. And they said, you know, that beach didn’t exist the night before because it was 15 feet of seabed lifted up into the air.

So you had this fully exposed seabed that was newly there beside the road like a beach, and people were walking it to get around and they said, you know, it was octopus and abalone. And it’s like the entire seabed had just been lifted up and was still sitting there. They said it was hard to get home because the kids everywhere were just so excited to see all these sea creatures. You know, there was no water or electricity for a while and nobody knew how long. And so people were also harvesting. They were just foraging off that newly exposed seabed. Just these moments that, you know, I don’t know, even as a fiction writer, if I would have thought of that as a consequence and as sort of the way people had to deal with their environment in the immediate after such a difficult moment and such a catastrophic thing.

Katherine: And as far as an altered landscape, you include in your story this moment where you walk along the earthquake fracture line. It’s it’s so vivid to me. And you write that it’s not a moment that you will soon forget.

Ryan: How come it’s not very often that you. that you get to feel, you know it doing me like there’s certain sensations. It’s like a bell you can’t unring. Mhm. We were standing in this parking lot by the beach in Wajima, and one of the travelers that was with us on the walking tour, guy named Giles, who was from Manx. He said, you know, there was this big fracture line that ran straight through this parking lot. And he said, do you want to feel it? And he put my hand on it, and the concrete had buckled up maybe a foot or two up into the air, into the perfect apex, like a tent. I said, how far does it go? And he said, oh, you can feel for yourself. And he helped me up onto it, and I just walked it like a tightrope. And I gave up after a while because it was just too far to keep going.

Katherine: Mhm.

Ryan: To feel the evidence of an earthquake’s power. Like to buckle that much concrete in that consistent line all the way down there, and you feel it’s like, oh, the earth is folding here like paper under that pressure. It’s something to see it. And it’s another thing when you’re blind, it’s just a rumor you’re told, but then you actually feel it in your feet when you’re walking along it. It makes it just so much more tangible, literally. You know, the power of that, that kind of thing.

Katherine: And place is constantly changing. You know, the photo today would be so different from the photo you visited. I’m curious if you returned to Noto, let’s say 5 years from now, what would you most want to revisit?

Ryan: I would love to go back to Noto to eat all the food again. I just I love the coastline. I love the seafood you get from living so close to the coastline. But you know, that’s an easy answer. But here’s the thing I would say I would love to go back to Noto itself to the town of Noto, and I would love to hang out and spend more time with a man I called Mr. Squid in the article Mr. Squid was this, or I should say it was. But at the time of the earthquake, he was responsible for the emergency shelter and evacuating and stuff. And as I write, he wore this squid on his head when we met him, and it was to remind people of the bounty of the ocean and the good things that come from living beside the ocean, not just the danger of it. And he said, you know, and it has always stuck with me. He’s like, smiles are smiles are hard to find in difficult times. And so anything to, to kind of give that he felt was worthy. And so he started wearing this sort of squid facsimile on his head. And kids still recognize him and point at him. And we didn’t get to spend long with him because he sort of presented, you know, the town to us in a way, and presented the squid industry and sort of gave us a talk, but he just seemed like that’s the kind of person you want to go and have a meal with, because the generosity of spirit, to think that way in a catastrophe to like, how do I make sure kids feel that there is hope and I’ll just put a squid on my head. That guy just has stuck with me ever since that trip, because I think that’s a kind of resilience and a kind of character that is emblematic of not just himself, but of the people around him and their attachment to that place and their commitment to it. It’s so easy to say after something difficult like this happens, like, why don’t you just move away? But people are very attached to their homes and that’s why they call it home. It’s a different thing than a house. It’s not just a place to live. Anyway, I’d like to hang out with Mr. Squid, and everybody should go find Mr. Squid.

Katherine: Great answer.

Ryan: And find the Mr. Squid in yourself.

Katherine: Yes, And I do love that about your story that, you know, you certainly foreground the earthquake in many ways, but really it’s a consideration, as you said, of home and of this specific place. And it’s a really good reminder that places are so dynamic and there’s so, so much more than headlines. Right?

Ryan: It seems to me too, like doing a walking tour is also a way of really bringing you closer to the feeling of home in a place than driving through it or stopping in it. There’s something about the slow pace, about the measure of the human foot versus the tire. It felt like we were coming in more respectfully and more quietly to really sort of appreciate this place and try to come to understand how it actually works. You know, between the people, its crafts, its products, and its landscape. I felt like the pairing of the walking tour with that experience of the post-disaster place was the perfect way to do it.

Katherine: You mentioned craft, and you use kintsugi, which is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery as a metaphor throughout the story. With this in mind, for your last question, I have a bit of a brain bender for you. Um, so you start the piece with this story about a broken vase with kintsugi. So was Noto teaching you about kintsugi, or do you think Kintsugi was teaching you how to understand Noto?

Ryan: Was Noto teaching me how to understand kintsugi or was kintsugi teaching me how to understand Noto? Uh. Huh. That’s interesting. I think in writing it, Kintsugi taught me how to understand Noto. How do I explain this? It goes back to this idea of the relationship between a physical place and the crafts the people do there. And suddenly, you know, I’d heard of Kintsugi before, like, I think Tracy has a book here that she had sort of patched together, you know, in sort of the, the lesser version of Kintsugi, you know, sort of the more mass produced version of it. You get kits for it. So it wasn’t like a new idea, but seeing it everywhere, it’s all around in Noto there you realize things break often and it’s difficult to replace them. And also there’s a value to things to keep them, to preserve them, and to not think of them as diminished, but as building character in a way.

When I was writing about the Hakuza gold leaf factory at the beginning. It just occurred to me right away, like this made sense of everything we’d seen. This made sense as a metaphor for how people reconstruct after a catastrophe. Kintsugi is a microcosm of that idea that it takes a lot of little bits of gold to hold this thing together, and that can be the people, that can be the crafts, that can be the tourists. But it takes a lot of small efforts to hold a big thing together. And I don’t think I would have come to understand that if I hadn’t written that opening scene in the Gold Leaf Factory and realized, oh, this, this was the first thing we did on the trip. And it staged the whole idea for the rest of the trip. To me, you know, when you just have a very clean understanding of something that you didn’t before. And it’s like Kintsugi made a deeper sense to me after that. It wasn’t just a cool craft, it actually had a deeper meaning to it. And I don’t think it was me just projecting it. It’s all around you there. You see people doing it all the time.

Katherine: And it was so different from anything we discussed before you went on the trip is the idea of what the story could be. It was so cool to read that first scene and then see how everything came together.

Ryan: Isn’t that always the sign of a good trip? When you think you know what you’re going to write about before you go, and you come back and you’re not going to write about that.

Katherine: I think so.

Ryan: I always think it’s like that means something happened, you know, something changed along the way. And that means you were surprised by something. It means you were brought to something you didn’t expect. Not just a place, but a way of thinking about the world. Your own experience of something. I’m always happiest when I come home, and the article I thought I was going to write isn’t the one I end up writing. Those to me, are always the signs of the best trips. I know I was definitely up there as one of the best trips I’ve done.

Katherine: Glad to hear that.

Listener, thank you for tuning in to this episode of Unpacked: Five Questions. In the show notes, you’ll find a link to Ryan’s story along with his social media handles. Join me in September for another episode that takes you behind the scenes with one of our award winning feature writers. I’ll be speaking with Bonnie Tsui, who recently traveled from her home state of California to hit the waves in Cornwall, England.

Ready for more interviews with travel writers? Visit Afar.com, and be sure to follow us on Instagram and TikTok. We are @AfarMedia. If you enjoyed today’s exploration, I hope you’ll come back for more great travel stories. Subscribing always makes that easy. And be sure to rate and review the show on your favorite podcast platform. It helps other travelers find it.

This has been Unpacked: Five Questions. A production of Afar Media. The podcast is produced by Aislyn Greene, Nikki Galteland, and Katherine LaGrave. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media Podcast Network. Visit airwavemedia.com to listen and subscribe to their other fine shows like Culture Kids and The Explorers Podcast.