Craig Mod's life in motion in a disappearing Japan

Japan Times

16-07-2025

In 'Things Become Other Things,' Craig Mod's memoir about walking across the Kii Peninsula in western Japan, he describes how pilgrimages once offered an easy way for common folk to get permission to travel the land. When communities didn't have enough money to bankroll everyone who fancied venturing to Ise Shrine or the 88 Temples of Shikoku, the wayfarers were chosen by lottery. As Mod writes, they were 'lucky schmucks, carrying the purse of their village warm in the loincloths around their navels, adopted by all.'
For the past decade or so, Mod has been working in a similar spirit. The longtime Japan resident, originally from the United States, describes himself as a writer, photographer and walker — not a vocation that you hear very often these days. He's been on some monster journeys: In 2019, he spent several months walking solo along the historic Nakasendo and Tokaido highways between Tokyo and Kyoto. But one of the places to which he's returned most often is the Kii Peninsula, home to Ise Shrine and the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage route.
Things Become Other Things, by Craig Mod. 320 pages, RANDOM HOUSE, Nonfiction.
His chronicles of these trips are a mix of tech-savvy and determinedly offline, funded through a membership program called Special Projects. He has sent daily dispatches to subscribers in the form of SMS messages, emails, photos and 4K videos with binaural audio. He has also turned his journeys into beautifully crafted fine art books, which he describes as 'looser, lighter, more on the side of poetry than classic narrative nonfiction.' Borne from that Nakasendo trip, his 2020 release 'Kissa by Kissa,' a hymn to old-school coffee shops and pizza toast, is now on its sixth edition.
'Things Become Other Things,' released by Random House in May, is Mod's first book for a wider audience. In keeping with the title, it's gone through several transitions, starting as a daily 'pop-up newsletter' that he sent while walking the Kii Peninsula in 2021. After each day on the trail, sometimes covering distances of over 40 kilometers, he'd sit in front of a laptop and spend hours editing photos and videos, and writing.
Mod isn't being hyperbolic when he calls it an 'ascetic practice.'
'That's why being alone is critical,' he says. 'If I'm with someone, that doesn't happen. But if I'm alone, 90% of the day is solitude, and then when I get to the end, it's like, 'OK, let's go.''
A longtime resident of Japan, Craig Mod describes himself as a writer, photographer and walker. |
Courtesy of Craig Mod
At a time when many countries were only just emerging from COVID-19 lockdown and Japan was still closed to overseas tourists, Mod's emails offered a vicarious escape, written in a conversational tone that slipped easily between erudite and irreverent. He was the 'lucky schmuck' who could afford to spend weeks on end roaming the countryside, hanging out in coffee shops and bantering with locals amused at this peculiar stranger in their midst.
Many of the places he visited were on their last legs, but he deliberately avoided what he calls the 'lamenting' tone of writers such as Alex Kerr, whose 'Lost Japan' (1996) and 'Dogs and Demons' (2002) were required reading around the time he first moved to Japan.
'It's way more fun to be delighted by — and sort of find the beauty of — what's left, even in these countryside towns that are very clearly going to be gone in 10 years,' he says. 'You can be very depressed about that, or you can kind of treat it like a graceful end to a certain life cycle.'
Pondering the shrinking communities and advanced decay he saw during the trip (documented in photos of shuttered main streets and nature vigorously reclaiming the landscape), Mod thought back to his childhood home: a blue-collar American town where the factories had closed, replaced by poverty, drugs and violence.
'The inspiration I've always drawn from Japan is that the lowest you can fall is not that low,' he says. 'Whereas I grew up watching people fall really, really low — frequently, and kind of hopelessly.'
During his long walks through Japan's countryside towns, Mod was reminded of his childhood home in the United States, seeing similarities (and stark differences) in the shrinking rural communities. |
Craig Mod
'Things Become Other Things' started out as a daily 'pop-up newsletter' that Mod sent while walking the Kii Peninsula in 2021. After each day on the trail, he would spend hours editing photos and videos, and writing. |
Craig Mod
His explanation for why similar levels of economic decline produce such different outcomes hinges on the Japanese term yoyū, which conveys a sense of sufficiency: enough time, enough money, enough energy. As Mod puts it, yoyū is 'the space in your heart to accept another person... another situation, another context.'
'As the economy changes in those rural areas, I think you see a kind of grace because the foundations of support are still there, right?' he continues. 'They're not losing health care. They're not losing social infrastructure... And that gives them the yoyū to be able to accept the fact that their towns are disappearing, without degrading into substance abuse or violence or whatever. The contrast being in America, there's none of that sort of protection enabled, so you have none of that excess space.'
Mod's newsletters — over 30,000 words in total — provided the raw material for the fine art edition of 'Things Become Other Things,' published by Special Projects in 2023. While working on the manuscript, he was encouraged by his editor to flesh out his remembrances of a close childhood friend, Bryan, who hadn't managed to escape the town's downward pull.
The Random House edition of the book, which significantly ups the word count, is addressed as a letter to his absent friend. Framing it this way packs an emotional punch, but also gives Mod more freedom to insert context and humorous asides ('as opposed to just bloviating personal history or whatever,' he adds).
'Things Become Other Things' doesn't include details of how to get to the places Mod visits. 'I'm very deliberately picking places that are slightly difficult to get to,' he says. |
Craig Mod
One of the book's most striking innovations is the vernacular he uses for the residents of the Kii Peninsula. In his rendering, it's a place where people say 'ain't' and 'where ya from' and 'Mama woulda loved a handsome boy like you.'
'I was spending a lot of time in North Carolina when I started doing the peninsula walks, and I immediately just was like, 'Oh yeah, they're speaking kind of like North Carolinians,'' Mod says. 'You know, that kind of sing-song component to Japanese.'
Neither edition of 'Things Become Other Things' includes details of how to get to the places Mod visits. This isn't conventional travel writing — though he does a bit of that, too. In 2023, he had a brush with celebrity after picking the northern city of Morioka for the New York Times' annual '52 Places to Go' feature. The list wasn't ranked, but many people assumed it was. Morioka's placement at No. 2 — second only to London — became a national news story.
'I'm very deliberately picking places that are slightly difficult to get to,' he says of his unorthodox choices. (He's since written about Yamaguchi and Toyama cities for the Times lists.) Mod's solution to the tourism boom that's been pushing Japanese hospitality to breaking point is to focus on the cohort of travelers who aren't just coming for the cheap yen and stuff they've seen on TikTok.
'I feel like overtourism is almost like a natural disaster,' he says. 'If you try to engage with it overly, you just drive yourself insane. It's like trying to stop an earthquake as it's happening. The more the tourism industry can focus on that 10% of hyper-curious, fully committed, deeply respecting-of-the-country people, I think there's a lot of great opportunity to be had.'
'But Omotesando is done,' he adds, referring to the heavily trafficked shopping district in central Tokyo. 'It's just done! You just have to pretend it doesn't exist anymore.'