Hiking to Japan's Hidden Forest Shrine | Japan 4K

today we most certainly have an adventure ahead of us i've actually spent about half the day searching for a shrine that is described as a shrine that's even a bit of a hidden mystery for japanese people you see a large part of my day went into just trying to find this bridge right here and now that we've found it and that gentleman down there is fishing he looks like such a boss as he's fishing too we are going to start exploring so right now in terms of where we are as you can see we are in a river gorge which is honestly always fun and this is in gifu in an area known as seki or itatori in gifu and you'll have to excuse the audio being a little tough on this one as this area is known for having lots of waterfalls as well and first spiderweb of the day hits right there i can see the next spider right here i just need to try and make sure i don't go through his web all right here we go and as with any good tokyo lens explorer adventure we are starting off on the stairs and a lot of them and these are so steep in fact that they've had to add cinder blocks just to make them walkable this is actually too steep for me to actually climb up without the cinder blocks these are impressive almost now from here to the shrine i honestly have no idea how long it's going to take us but the blog that i found said it it is quite a shrine quite a hike and this is it here huxley so this says huxi-nodia this is the huxwee waterfall and apparently it's a definite hike you want to make sure you're wearing proper hiking gear and as we do this again my shoe comes untied there we go and now we're on our way and the last thing that i did before going on this adventure was tie my shoes nice and tight so step up here that's slippery and it flexes a lot i don't really trust it and that's our first waterfall i don't know how many others there are but the path you know we're gonna go to the left here now one thing i will say is that these rocks and branches are super slippery right now and so with any luck we might get some okay all right i've really i have no idea but look how giant this rock is since we don't often have the opportunity to come out and do forest hikes and adventures i thought you know what we'll take today's video as an opportunity to do exactly that all right and we're gonna head up this way all the signs are like worn out faded there we go it has been some time since i've had the chance to go on a hike here in japan like a proper proper hike has probably been at least a year for me now so i'm definitely looking forward to seeing where this takes us and as it's been kind of a common theme in our videos lately i do want to address the bear side of things and not as many bear sightings in this area so it's not a major concern however again the constant talking and sound of human voice will hopefully help ward bears off so the path actually splits quite a bit here we could go down this way we go off this way but luckily as with many japanese hiking paths they've got it clearly marked so we can just follow it and it's got pipes running under it honestly every single step that i'm taking is slipping i am really glad that i came on this adventure with proper hiking boots it would not have been possible otherwise now i'm sure that there are going to be questions popping up and while i can't predict every question i'll do my best to answer a couple questions as we walk along so i think one of the first and most obvious basic questions would be would you recommend hiking in japan and japan has a lot of mountain roads and a lot of trails pathways i would highly recommend it you can do one of the major trails or you can do something minor even if you were to climb something like takao-san which is japan's most popular mountain for climbing and i think it's one of the top if not the top hiking mountains in the world just in terms of the number of people who choose to climb it from the top of takasam there are actually hiking trails that will take you to completely other mountains in fact takalasan itself has multiple different hiking trails so it's not just the one trail there's easy mode and hard mode and pretty much everything in between so again thankful thankful and look at this area here and that was me slipping once again so if you are into hiking especially if you have a hiking buddy or you're an experienced hiker i would recommend it again i say it all the time but safety above all else look at this look at this area this is just something else i wonder if there's a way to sneak back behind the falls ish looks like there's a bit of a path we'll stay on trail for now and it starts to get pretty steep from here so let's do our best now you might look at this and be like oh this is really nice they have little wooden steps but more often than not those little wooden steps are the slippy slippiest slippery part and if you actually manage to step on one you you might be going down especially if they're wet so if you do come out hiking watch out for that i guess the next big one would be that the safety aspect how safe is it to hike and explore the mountains of japan now each area has its own bear information usually posted unfortunately it's not on like a standard website some areas do a really good job of putting it together others not so much there's not as much information for monkeys and boars but you will see signs all over the place for them it's difficult if you don't read japanese to pre-research these things and just want to go out to the water here for a second there we go the vines up there so there are such things as guided hiking tours that you can do with official guides and groups and they often have them all over japan in fact some of the really nice ones are along the coast of iwate prefecture iwate has some great hiking routes and some great guides minimal research and you should be able to find them so now if you do insist on going on your own i recommend doing it if you do insist on going without a guide or a group i recommend that you at least do it with a friend or again you keep yourself some kind of gps device like the garmin inreach mini i have here that will allow you to contact the outside world should you need to just loving this area here let's keep moving on so we're going to climb up this way over here almost went down again oh and the sun is starting to come out once again ah started to get really hot today wow this is a really beautiful riverwalk look at the bridge out there oh no way what is going on oh wow and i think we might have already found our first major stop look at the way the light just cuts through now obviously people are going to be asking about heat and humidity it is about 30 degrees celsius right now and being out here in this forest as you may be able to tell from the moss and the ground and whatnot this is a rather humid area and we brought ourselves to this little bridge right here and i don't know how well the microphones are picking it up but that waterfall behind me it's got some volume to it look at that this alone is most certainly definitely worth the hike out to wow look at that ground again is really slippery here so we got to play it nice and safe look at this oh wow oh let's head up and check out the shrine area here there we go so this is the shrine here head up our little rock step there we go and the shrine is right here huh and the bug spray as well emergency bug spray and these look clean enough that it looks like they may have been placed here recently and then right beside that is the waterfall let me try not to fall as we go down it's so slippery oh there we go just the opportunity to come and hang out at a waterfall is one that we don't get enough of in today's world [Music] nice show there we go and the sun has disappeared making it dark once again looks like they're maybe that's the old bridge it looks like the old bridge just gave out and has floated downstream all right wow as i have zero confidence in the microphones ability to actually pick up my voice near the waterfall we're gonna go back and explore a bit more of the other trails and see what we can find cause today today is a hiking adventure now for those of you who get to watch this during the premiere thank you i had this whole thing i was going to say in my head and then as soon as i started the sentence i got distracted by these vines over here and completely forgot about it i am so easily distracted i think there's a t-shirt that says easily distracted and i think honestly that that right there should have been the tokyo lens brand sidebars oh i should open a bar and call it sidebar and make everything sideways maybe it doesn't need to be sideways but i think i should still open a bar and call it sidebar just spitballing here so for those of you who have the chance to watch these during the premiere once again unfortunately we don't really get it in full 4k glory because the premiere only comes out in 1080p celebi there but for those of you who watch it afterwards don't forget that the premiere chat should still be off there to the side for you to check out i hope i'm not speaking i hope it doesn't disappear and i've just touted a chat that doesn't exist but you can kind of see what we're up to as we're watching along with the video together but between the lighting situation and the absolute lack of signal there's no way that i'd be able to come out and do a live stream in a space like this and quite honestly this is just a lot easier anyway just kind of walking around holding the little camera and trying not to fall and then if i do fall and i end up getting really badly injured i can either just edit it out or not post it and what if i fall really badly in a live stream well that's just that's just live that's just there if you're gonna clip that it's gonna become a gift that's right i'm in part of the gift crew not the jiff crew all right so that's the way we came from i'm kind of curious to see how far this route will take us so it's clearly not as well maintained runs higher up along the river but this as well is a hiking path and we are here to hike oh boy so many spider webs all the time like as soon as you get off the main route even on the main route more often than not in the face when i did the uh the series of videos on the abandoned villages by the way don't want to fall honestly like look at this you'd fall into nice water but you probably wouldn't survive that is you would hit a lot of stuff on the way down if you fell there again that's why i keep the garment clipped right to me oh wow by the way i always feel the need to mention me talking about the garmin is is not sponsored they don't sponsor me at all they probably don't even know who i am okay there are some seriously big spider webs out here and try and duck under there's a huge spider web right here then gonna try and sneak under what have we got here curiosity curiosity is what we have so some kind of little pot i said it's just a hut is this the end of the road with this it seems to be wait what is that oh wow okay i absolutely need to go in and check that out this feels stable enough and it is exactly for reasons like this that i carry emergency devices what have we got here oh i hope there's no animals in this cave wow okay so it's a tiny little cave space with oh it's got genji genji in it you can't see him because oh we are getting out we are getting out not a huge fan so some seriously big spiders and some gejigezi which are basically house centipedes and if you don't know what a house centipede is just take a look at one on google they are if you're not accustomed to them they look like something from an alien world and almost walked right through that spiderweb that we ducked under before but we made it whoo i'll tell you right now that was neat but unfortunately that's as far as the path goes so make our way back see if i can do a little more exploring all the way and hopefully not fall down the cliff because that would be a terrible albeit ironic ending to this video after me talking about falling down the cliff really beautiful water though there we go so when i went out to the abandoned villages if you remember me starting that story easily distracted i probably ran across i don't know fresh spiderweb every 30 seconds to a minute but that area was so perfect for hiking like i almost want to take us back there just to hike between the abandoned villages like look at that just oh i love it i love it i feel like that's thumbnail material right there but if this hiking the japanese mountains or hiking through japanese nature concept proves to be something that we all enjoy and that we want more of i honestly think it would be worth it to go back to the abandoned villages and hike from one village to another there's these beautiful beautiful albeit borderline inaccessible trails that connects some of the villages then one day i had gone and explored probably 40 minutes in realized that i wasn't gonna reach the other village turn around and doubled back but all that made me want to do is explore even more and since then i've just been dying to go back and do a proper hike and exploration but again unless you're making noise the entire time or you're talking with somebody or you have a podcast that the danger is there especially because the very first time that i ever went out to those abandoned villages if you watch to the end of the video it was kind of a joke video that i shot with the 12k camera that video there at the very end i just ejected myself out of that area because of monkeys they kept getting closer and closer and louder and louder which means they were getting more curious and i was just i'm there in this abandoned village by myself with this insanely expensive camera that i had on loan and i was like no we uh i am not risking this not just because i don't want to die which is you know monkey probably won't kill you might maul you pretty bad but i guess it depends on the size of the monkey it's definitely possible but more than anything i was like i don't have i can't afford to to replace this camera i love the foliage i was like if i have to pay to replace this broken camera well then i'm i'm in trouble so they they made it very clear to me they're like hey um yeah you can borrow the camera and you know we know how you can be with gear sometimes so we just ask you to to not break the camera and it looks like there's another one over here where does this take us okay really interesting seems like we can go back this way but i'm super curious about this way because again the road untraveled we do have some markers along the way but we'll see where it takes us before maybe exploring that alternate exit route or was that just a normal example i can't even remember now i can i think that was just the way i came in i think it was wasn't it it was i for some reason thought we were going to come down where we just were and go to the right but actually that was the way we came in i'm pretty sure of it now that's not some special road i'm glad that i didn't take that i feel like i can hear another waterfall off here in the distance and on the plus side this is just flat road and mountain so i said i was going to try and preemptively guess some of the questions that would come up about hiking and people might ask something like where do you think some of the best places to hike in japan are and i think it really depends on the amount of time that you have and how far you want to go there are no bad options you could go out to west tokyo and do some hiking you could go up north to iwate and beyond you could do hiking you know out in nagano or you could even do a bit of hiking out in chiba believe it or not saitama there there's no limit to where you can do hiking i know that doesn't really wow it gets really cold when you get here suddenly so apparently i'm just walking on what giant milk crates oh that feels safe i feel so safe right now okay so no fires because only you can prevent forest fires that's right i went there but if i had to go with some of my absolute recommended areas i would say that oh i jumped oh it was like a little animal that scuttered up the scuttled up the uh the wall and scared me a second i wasn't expecting to see anything moving and so honestly the area of chichibu is really great and it's the kind of thing that you could do as maybe a day hike and come back the same day or the next day nagano also has some great routes if you're an advanced climber or a hiker i would highly recommend checking out any of the areas in the japanese net alps not nelps it doesn't start with an n it is alps with an a there is the northern alps and the southern alps both are filled with amazing places to hike a lot of them you can take a rope way up to them and do hiking up there and that was a big bug and where am i going where is this taking me honestly i wonder if i have any connection whatsoever but if i had to talk about one of my favorite places one of the places that i absolutely positively recommend it would be the area of miyoshi if you go out to miyoshi which is in tokushima prefecture there are some beautiful hiking paths there are some beautiful mountains in fact miyoshi miyoshi is marked as one of japan's quote-unquote unexplored zones so much like the shrine out here this hidden shrine out in the forest there are plenty of hidden or unknown spots and i'm super curious as to what we're coming up on here i found a road over here and a bit of a river with a fence what is going on here okay questions also hopefully someday i'll be able to find the car again but you know that's always a completely separate adventure of its own this feels like it feels like it would be a lazy river for bears it's like the amusement park for the animals okay so oh oh almost went right down on that one and that is actually the nicest oh one we've seen so far so far huxy what have we got here what is this river what is this place there's seems like some kind of water treatment facility here yeah nice barbed wire interesting and despite being fully plugged in the gopro someone gave me a warning that says no battery and then jumps up to 73 so thanks for the the high quality action campness gopro wow this is just nothing spider web central up here duck under this one over here is actually a campsite then i wonder if this is a hiking path that leads to the campsite or from the campsite or if it's just some back entrance to the campsite that i'm not supposed to be privy to i do not know there's a path right here that we'll check out in a minute but before we do that i want to take a peek at this sign that's just a danger sign that says don't go in okay okay interesting enough yep interesting okay i am super confused as to where this is gonna dump us out but that is the point of the adventure so we're gonna swing in back through here can you imagine if this campsite is like oh we're a campsite yay and then i come rocking through from behind the campsite and they're like who are you and where did you come from i kind of feel like that's exactly how things are about to play out i kind of feel like they're gonna see me walking through their campsite and just be wildly confused as to how i got here i don't want to scare anybody but also i do kind of want to see if i can't get out of here so while getting spider webs on my face now it's not like campsites in japan are often like gated like you can't get in it's just you can't set up a tent and whatnot and stay there unless you pay and again that's not with all campsites just many there's an entire group of campers down there yeah this is called suginoko camp jo ynoco campsite let's take a look out at the river and see if there are any bridges or ways to cross the river i am i can't believe that this dumped us out in a campsite what are the odds of that okay and you got people swimming and enjoying the water down here these guys are all playing music and having a great time this is this was a very very unexpected twist to this adventure i 100 did not expect at any point for us to be coming across a campsite there are people over on that side so i wonder wait what oh wow i think that this is connected to the cam i think where those people are is connected it looks like this goes all the way to up and over there so the people that we have down here might actually be staying at the campsite and i'm not gonna not gonna show it but there was a naked gentleman over there enjoying the river so hoping that that didn't show up it looked like he had his legs crossed and everything was hidden so i think we should be good but you better bet i'll be reviewing the footage before uploading this because you want to talk about you want to talk about ending things on youtube that'll do it right quick okay well let's see if we can't find our way back to the trail and eventually maybe even make our way back to the car i'm curious as to how easily we're going to be able to do this i don't assume it being that hard but we might even find one or two new things to explore along the way there are stairs that just come right up here huh there we go all right so it seems like there's a whole path that goes down that way as well a bit of a creek stream that runs over here and then the hiking path just begins right here behind the campsite wow for a quote-unquote hidden shrine in japan that not that many people know about quite honestly especially if you come out here camping it's not really that hard to find that's another thing that i like about campsites in japan is a lot of them are attached to some recommended hiking routes so one of my favorite campsites by far is out in a lake called nozorico and it's the nozorico campsite i can't possibly recommend this place enough it's actually you can see it in the video i did of camping last year i think i did like a three or four days of camping in japan and did that video with my buddy taiki you can definitely see in those lodico campsite in that one the only thing is it's fairly high up in the mountains and there's a lake right there which means condensation is a wee bit of a struggle so what happens is since it's nice and hot oh there were thorns on that one nice and hot at night and in the daytime and evening and then it gets really cool but the lake's right there all of your stuff ends up getting pretty moist so that's one unfortunate thing about that campsite but then the sun comes out the next day and everything dries up and you're fine usually dries up before you even have to pack it up but still when you're carrying a ton of camera gear and all of a sudden your camera is soaking wet i tried to do a time lapse of the stars while we were there because the night sky was absolutely beautiful we're high enough up in the mountains that it shouldn't have been a problem whatsoever and within 30 40 seconds of getting the camera out the lens just fogged right up so oh i forgot this was downhill on the way here that's why we're hiking so in the comments section today because i always ask you guys to leave something in the comments section after the video's gone up and what i'd like to know from you is one of two things a are you a hiker are you interested in hiking any of that you don't have to be an experienced hiker it doesn't have to be something you do it could just be something that you would like to do what's your take on hiking let me know and if you are a hiker what are some of your favorite spots in fact if you've hiked in japan do you have a recommended spot that you think i should go check out or that you think other people should go check out and as i talk about this and do all this climbing the hunger is starting to hit amazingly i ate like maybe 30 minutes before getting on the trail that way i wouldn't get too hungry while we're out here exploring but whoo it hit nonetheless and now we get the fun of walking over the egg crates again i'll tell you right now i'm kind of regretting leaving the the towel back in the car it's all boy but i like a towel right now the moisture it's very moist i think i heard somewhere once that moist is seen to be like the most unpleasant word in the english language i can't remember when or where i read that all right well that wonderful i've been standing in this spot right here for the past 15 minutes because the gopro suddenly glitched out in a way i've never seen it actually made a quick sound as it did it the screen went all like 90s vcr and like all the colors and static and everything like that and uh then it wouldn't turn back on for a minute and then when it did turn back on it took some time to repair the file hopefully the file is okay fingers crossed on that one no clue this whole thing might have been an exercise in just enjoying the forest which would be nice anyway but seriously gopro i don't know how many times i have to say this i don't know how many times i have to tweet it you guys got to fix your stuff it is absolutely unacceptable in like 2021 when i'm recording this that a camera that has been around by a maker a camera that has made by a maker who's been around as long as gopro should not be suffering this many issues continually and it's every single gopro i've ever owned from the three all the way up to the nine now so that's enough about me whining about gopro i'm still just kind of bitter about it because of the number of videos we've lost over the past year but it's still the simplest option in the end for me to conduct walks like this and just fits in my pocket so until something comes out that works better which i am crossing my fingers for i'm kind of stuck with this so say levy but hopefully it doesn't glitch out on us again i've never heard the gopro make that noise before so that in its own was a bit odd honestly it made like the glitchy like noise and then oh yeah the stairs of doom i'd forgotten about the stairs of doom does the steepness get reflected in the video because every day just trying not to die all right i think we've got a pretty decent rhythm going holding on to the handle as we go yay and there we are we made it and the camper van it's just on the other side of the bridge this guy is still fishing away this has been a fun little hike admittedly a bit shorter than i was originally expecting it to be but there's a tea house just down over here and i think i'm gonna swing by see if it's open grab myself a nice beverage thank you guys so much for joining if you haven't already give the like button love hit that subscribe button and i will see you guys again real soon seriously should we do more of these let me know in the comments you

Channel: Tokyo Lens Explore

Views: 48,754

Keywords: Japan, Japanese, Livestream, Japan live, Tokyo Lens, Tokyo Lens Explore, Norm Tokyo Lens, japan shrine, japanese shrine, japanese, japan travel, hiking, hiking japan, hiking in japan, japan hiking, japan hike, exploring japan, japan explore, japan 4k, japan in 4k, japanese forest, japanese mountain

Id: qdNmXR0jFxA

Length: 46min 26sec (2786 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 25 2021