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.

THIS WEEK’S GUEST

Ryan Knighton is an author and Afar contributing writing whose stories consistently find the textures, flavors, and human stories that sighted travelers walk past. A former English teacher in South Korea, he brings a slow, sensory approach to Japan travel and beyond—listening to sushi chefs talk about their knives, walking earthquake fracture lines with his feet, and finding the people who hold a place together.

IN THIS EPISODE

What blind travel in Japan actually looks like: why guides, sushi chefs, and strangers become the mediators of a place, and what it feels like to walk an earthquake fracture line with your feet instead of seeing it with your eyes

Why Ryan chose the Noto Peninsula for his Japan travel debut: a remote, earthquake-prone coastal community with striking geographic parallels to his own home—and a story of post-disaster recovery he felt compelled to witness in person

The food that made the trip: Tokyo-style sushi whose origins trace directly to a 1923 earthquake, Japanese barracuda, Noto sea salt gelato at 10 a.m. in a parking lot, and a tuna described by his wife as looking like a ruby

The scene that didn't make the final cut: a couple walking home after the earthquake on a newly exposed seabed—15 feet of ocean floor lifted overnight, scattered with octopus and abalone, with kids too excited about sea creatures to be scared

How kintsugi—the Japanese art of repairing broken objects with gold—became the metaphor that unlocked the entire story, and why it took a gold leaf factory on day one to understand what Noto was actually about

LINKS & RESOURCES

Ryan's Afar story on Noto, Japan

Walk Japan

Wajima, Ishikawa Prefecture

Somamichi Restaurant

2024 Noto Peninsula Earthquake — background

CHAPTER MARKERS

00:00:00 Introduction

00:02:00 Japan Travel on Foot and Without Sight

00:05:00 The Ethics of Disaster Tourism

00:07:00 Food as Craft, Craft as Place

00:10:00 The Scene That Didn't Make the Cut

00:12:00 Walking the Fracture Line

00:14:00 Mr. Squid and the Spirit of Noto

00:16:00 Kintsugi as Metaphor

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