After a long trip, the first thing you tell people when you get home might not be about the bed you slept in or the communal breakfast in the hotel lobby, but hospitality does make a big difference in how you experience a place — whether it’s a spare bed in a stranger’s house or just someone taking the time to show you around.
National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek knows this.
For over 12 years, he’s been tracing the path of human migration on his Out of Eden Walk, a trip that spans multiple continents and offers different welcomed experiences.
Marco Werman: Paul, welcome back. Let’s start with the hospitality that greeted you recently at a traditional guest house in Japan. Tell us more about that place and the woman who runs it. Paul Salopek: Marco, we were walking, me and my Japanese walking partner, a fellow journalist, into an industrial city called Shunan, on the main island. It was getting late in the day, and as is sometimes the case in Japan … we couldn’t find any lodging. In desperation, my friend Soichiro called businesses to say, “So, you know any place in your neighborhood?” And that’s how we turfed up the Migita guesthouse, which is kind of invisible online and run by an 84-year-old woman named Yoshiko.
Yoshiko Yamana, 84, runs Migita ryokan, or guesthouse, along with a handful of helpers who, like the plates and teacups, have rendered service for decades. Soichiro Koriyama/National Geographic, Out of Eden Walk
Wow, so an industrial neighborhood. Describe this guest house. What does it look like? It looked like any other building except once you got inside, through a doorway made out of paper, you knew that you were entering a more traditional setting, something that was quite old, well, even a time portal if you will into a maze of corridors that were darkened and clearly built a long time ago, because it was quite small. I had to stoop over to find my room.
Yoshiko Yamana’s Migita ryokan was built more than a century ago. Soichiro Koriyama/National Geographic, Out of Eden Walk
Yeah, and so Yoshiko, what was she like? What is the origin story of her and this guesthouse? Well, as a fellow storyteller, Marco, you bump into people who your storyteller’s radar blinks on, and you say, okay, here’s a person that you might pass on the sidewalk, not even notice, right? She’s quite petite. She’s got an elfin kind of aura about her … smiling, friendly, super polite … but she’s had a very hard life. She grew up in a small village near this city during World War II. She remembered the B-29 bombers flying overhead en route to Tokyo. Her father disappeared into a POW camp in Manchuria and didn’t come back from the war until four years later — a ghost of his former self. The thing about this generation of Japanese is that they’re often quite reserved about sharing personal details. What I could gather from bits and pieces is that she was basically forced into a forced marriage, which didn’t work, and she left after six months … scandalizing her village, and had to leave. So, she came to the city and somehow opened up this ryokan, the Migita Ryokan in Shunan.
I know Japan is not unique in this hospitality. You’ve often stayed with strangers who welcomed you into their homes. Did you feel like a guest in Yoshika’s home more than a customer at an inn? It seems like this isn’t just transactional for her. This is true. I think this is partly what keeps her in the business for so long, for decades. She opened the Migita guesthouse in 1965. So it’s been going on for over 60-plus years. Once you step into a space that a person has been managing for that long, even if it’s a commercial space, you are stepping into their home. It’s like being in the house of your grandmother. And she’s very, very warm and very, very friendly and like a lot of people who’ve had very difficult lives, extremely compassionate, right? Also minimizing her own suffering a lot. I would question her about her girlhood and early life. She would just laugh and throw back her head in a guffaw and clap whenever it got to a tough spot.
Water-worked hands: “My neighbors joke about me,” says 84-year-old Yoshiko Yamana. “They say I’ll still be here washing sheets in 30 years.” Soichiro Koriyama/National Geographic, Out of Eden Walk
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