Doors to manual

I like to leave boarding a plane as late as possible. I stowed my hand luggage in the overhead compartment, fastened my seat belt and pretended to pay attention to the safety briefing. My neighbour and I exchanged courteous nods, but little else.

I declined the complimentary champagne on account of the hour (11am), opting for a Perrier instead. A little later, we were served a passable three course meal by our impeccably dressed, and quite beautiful stewardesses. After lunch, and a couple of glasses of surprisingly good wine, I think I may have dozed for a short while, before flicking through the on board entertainment system and finding something to amuse me briefly before returning to my book. Occasionally I'd get up to stretch my legs and use the bathroom.

Little else of any real consequence happened until, at 3.25pm, twenty-five minutes ahead of schedule, we disembarked the aircraft and shuffled up to the gate. All of which would have been perfectly acceptable were it not for the fact that, save for a brief sortie to the end of the runway and back, for four and a half brain-punishing hours, we had been rooted to the same fucking spot.

Manaita

Tsuguyasu Kida used to be an architect. When he retired, he decided to indulge his passion for food, built himself a restaurant and called it Manaita meaning chopping board. Built, as in, with his own bare hands. It's a small place; eight seats around the counter and another four at a small Japanese table. He cooks, a girl serves. Every morning he goes to Tzukiji market and comes back with whatever takes his fancy. Then he paints the daily menu on two sheets of A4, sellotapes them together, hangs them on the wall, and opens the door.

Manaita

A Japanese potato, liberally seasoned with sea salt and accompanied by a few cold edamame beans are the opening gambit. Simple, understated, delicious. Next, a small bowl of tiny raw white fish, long and thin, like broken strands of vermicelli with microscopic eyes. A dab of wasabi, add your own soy sauce. Fresh, clean and silky. Tofu next. In the bowl next to it, a raw egg yolk and chopped green onion. The soft, creamy texture of the tofu and the crisp acidity of the onion, tempered by the rich smoothness of the egg. Masterful.

Tsuguyasu with his spanner crab

An enormous oyster, adorned with a solitary blob of hot pepper sauce, follows. The crab is next. Spanner crab, a half each, its cavity filled with delicious white meat you normally find hidden in the darkest corners of the claw. In the course of any other meal, this would be the crowning glory, but the best has been kept to last. A white fish soup (something approximating cod, with firm meaty flakes, in a clear broth with cabbage and seaweed. It is the greatest rendition of the sea that has ever passed my lips. Pure, unadulterated ocean, right there in that bowl; the water that lapped the shores of Eden could not have tasted any finer.

Ocean in a bowl

Kamikochi

Kamikochi is neither a town, nor a village. It's a scattering of hotels and onsens, a bus stop, a few buildings, and a lot of trails that carry countless happy hikers around the Japan Alps. As I strode away from the bus terminal, I noticed a Japanese man, the only other person on his own in a sea of groups and couples, turn and look back at me. He hesitated long enough, and smiled, for me to recognise the polite invitation to join him, and smile back.

Kamikochi

We talked as we walked, his English slightly broken but evidently once proficient. He wanted to know where I'd been, where I was going and where I'd walked. We talked about the parks in America, about Arizona and Utah, which he knew well. He'd been up Kilimanjaro and to Everest Base Camp, can see Mount Fuji from his window and decides in the morning whether to climb it or not, something he's done more times than he can remember. He tells me about Kamikochi; the peaks, the river, hesitating only to slap his forehead as he occasionally searches for a word.

Like all people who are great company, he doesn't talk too much, and we probably spend three quarters of our short time together saying nothing; sharing an experience rather than thoughts or words, rendered superfluous by the unmistakable, unutterable glory of that walk. After forty minutes or so we reached a bridge. I was crossing it, he was not, so with another smile, and a handshake, we relinquished one another's company as quickly and easily as we had taken it up. "See you again," he proffered with a cheery wave, and I waved back, sure in the knowledge that, sadly, he would not.

I march over the bridge, pace quickening now and the arms swinging, the peculiar ennui rendered upon me for the past few days vaporised by the fresh alpine air as I resume my solitude once again.

Matsumoto

There's not an enormous amount going on in Matsumoto, but once you get past the cordon of shit business hotels around the station, a small, elegant little town fans out before you. Classical music is piped through speakers in the flower beds, and the curtains of a thousand tiny restaurants flutter gently in the alpine breeze that flows down from the great mountains circling the city.

The main tourist attraction is Matsumoto castle, the oldest in Japan, having stood resolutely upon the same spot for the last five hundred years. Which is impressive for a building made entirely of wood, sitting on a flat plain, in a country whose history is studded with habitual conflicts between warring clans. Catching my first glimpse, I like to think it survived because, well, it looks really cool. Who'd want to burn down a thing like that?

Inside is pretty smart too - low beamed ceilings and impossibly steep staircases linking the six storeys. A "warrior corridor" links two parts of the building, wide enough for hundreds of tooled up samurai to charge back and forth along in the heat of battle. Downward openings line the fourth floor, for the dropping of rocks on the sieging forces below.

By the fifth floor, the walls are really beginning to encroach. This was the command centre, where generals directed the battle below with the advantage of a 360º view. It's not always easy, in historical places, to connect the place to its own past. But for some reason, as I stoop to look out of the small openings, I experience a nanosecond of transportation, and imagine what it must have been like up there, in the throes of ferocious war. The noise, the smell, the commotion. The blood. The fear. The feeling of besiegement, entrenched in a wooden fortress, just a moat between you and your eager foes, bearing down upon you on all sides as the arrows and shot fly all around. And fire. The thought, surely, that all you were actually defending, was your own funeral pyre.

And it seems odd to think, standing on that spot, that the only thing separating me from then, is time.

Nikkō

Autumn is beginning to win the struggle with summer in Nikkō, though there's still a little work to be done. In a couple of weeks the whole place is going to burst into the most incredible colours. I'll be gone by then, sadly, but it's enough for me, in the corner of an exquisite Zen garden, to glimpse a preview of what is about to unfurl itself upon the surrounding hills.

Nikkō is a small town, borne out of temples and shrines whose history dates from the eighth century. They're concentrated in a corner of Nikkō National Park, separated from the rest of the city by a small but fast flowing river. The sacred crossing, the Shin-kyō Bridge runs alongside it's modern replacement.

The diminutive river still roaring in my ears, stone steps covered in moss carry me into the park in the shadow of ancient trees, as water runs back down past my feet from the mountains. It already feels like a sacred place, without the help of any temples. The dampness is overwhelming, but not in a cloying or muggy sense; rather it is like being engulfed by clouds, though there are none, and the sun occasionally manages to find its way through the dense natural shelter.

The further I venture into this peculiar place, where man made temples and shrines nestle in the forest's natural spendour, the more I wonder why they bothered building them. The towering, arrow straight trees are more magnificent than any of the stone pillars, and the grand temples themselves were only built by chopping them down.

The temple buildings are plush and gilded, with the sumptuous effect of a Roman Catholic Cathedral. But none of their intricate carvings can match the patterns of the fern and moss for sublimity. The forest alone is a wondrous, magical, sacred place, where the sanctity of nature reigns. The great Japanese Cedars that reside here are cousins of the Giant Sequoias that grace Yosemite, and beneath them, you feel the same awe, the same proximity to the heart of the world itself.

Everywhere I turn, I hear water; narrow channels ferrying it somewhere, as I climb higher into the forest and its core of illustrious temples. It feels like I'm tracing something back to its unknown source, in some fated, Kafka-esque, vocation. All the time though I'm touched by the moisture; by the way it snakes its way down the mountain and the fact that, as it does, it breathes life into everything it passes. It's as though I'm inside some giant living organism, and the water is the blood coursing through its veins, I think, before realising that I am.

Flying over Japan on my way back from Korea, I noticed how the rural towns and villages follow the water; forever seeking out the arable land like the roots of a tree. Here in the heart of Nikkō, where man has studded nature's canvas with his own little jewels, the essence of things seems so obvious; flowing, beating, living and breathing, right up until the point at which gravity takes over and the water, that feeds the forest, that feeds the temples, drops down into the valley below to continue its inexorable journey.

In the Zone

There's no official border between North and South Korea, just the Military Demarcation Line from the armistice of 1953. Two kilometres either side of it is the DMZ: the Demilitarized Zone. The Cold War might have thawed out everywhere else, but the Korean divide is still the most militarised frontier in the world, and as frosty now as it ever was.

Just outside the DMZ, you can descend 350 metres into the ground and walk (well stoop) along a damp, narrow tunnel, discovered, in 1978. A North Korean incursion tunnel, it is one of four that have been found, and there are believed to be around ten more. The North Koreans rubbed coal dust along its walls and claimed it was a coal mine, despite the fact there is no coal anywhere near it.

Above ground a sculpture depicts a world being put back together, a map of the Korean peninsula in its centre. Visitors sit through a short film which punctuates the history of the region with gushing talk of reunification and reconciliation.

A few miles away is Dorasan Station, rebuilt in recent years. Walking around the plush, modern but deserted terminal, you can't help but think how ridiculous the whole thing is. There are even fake train times flashing on a board and a platform sign showing trains to Pyongnang. It may be a powerful symbol of hope for the South, but it seems little more than naive sentimentality when the other guys are torpedoing your warships and digging secret tunnels big enough to drive armies through. (North Korea has a population of 25 million, but one of the five biggest armies in the world).

Cast the politics aside and what remains is a human tragedy. Barbed wire fences are strewn with coloured ribbons; some in memory of those who died in the war, others for family members stranded on the other side when the country was split in two.

An old train riddled with bullets, a relic of the War, is preserved nearby. It's a sad memento of a conflict that never actually ended; the two sides are still technically at war and hostilities persist. The sinking of a South Korean Navy vessel in March was only one incident in a long history of skirmishes that make reunification seem little more than a dream for now.

It's hard to envisage drastic change any time soon. The North remains under the control of the world's barmiest regime; a brilliantly scripted comedy, were it not so tragically real (the Party conference this week was the first for thirty years). Until that changes, the people of North Korea will continue to suffer and the children of the South won't get any closer to their countrymen than a school trip to the Dora Observatory.

Save for a few outposts and some furtive tunnelling, a thousand square kilometres of the Korean peninsula has remained largely unmolested for the last fifty seven years and a unique natural environment has flourished in the human vacuum. As the dream of reunification persists, along with the imbecilities, the flora and fauna have had a field day in the man made chasm that divides a nation.

Onggi

You see onggi everywhere in Korea. Giant ones, big enough to smuggle a sumo wrestler in, stacked up in people's yards, covered in dust and cobwebs. Tiny ones in shop windows, tabletop ones in restaurants. Fermentation is the quintessence of Korean cuisine and these ceramic jars are the vessels in which it works its magic.

In the tiny village of An-nae, Choi Kil-Dong has an onggi factory. He comes out to meet us with a cheery smile and shows us around. There are maybe six people working for him; mixing and cutting clay, filling moulds, finishing, stacking and wheeling rickety old carts about the place. They all share the same look; a little wizened, but ageless and graceful. They do everything slowly, economically, and by hand.

Hand finishing onggi

Korean society holds artisans in relatively low esteem. There is no recognition for traditional skills like these, handed down through generations and so central to their culture. These guys hide away in their corners, diligently crafting the most wonderful creations. They are artists, and we tell them so. But it won't help. Demand is waning and one day, in ten years maybe, Dong thinks he might not have a business any more.

Lids, drying in the sun

Onggi, dried and ready to be fired

The clay is a mixture of red earth from the nearby hills, charcoal and water; nothing more. The jars it creates, though impermeable, have a unique breathability perfect for fermentation. They also inhibit dangerous bacteria, and have been proven to actually purify water left in them. Mr Dong, a devout Catholic with a holographic Jesus/Mary on the wall of his lounge, believes they are a miracle.

They are round, like ying and yang. The world is round. The sun is round, the moon is round. We are round. Everything man makes is square - fridge, TV, book. One day, maybe I will make square onggi, just to see if they still work

He wears the smile of a man who knows they won't.