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In Japan, Fudai is famously the town that survived. When the tsunami of March 2011 struck, the wall of water that bore down on the coastal settlement of 2600 residents was more than 23 metres high – about the height of a seven-storey building – but it slammed into a concrete floodgate built against great opposition by a far-sighted mayor in the 1970s.

As other towns along the Tohoku coast were all but obliterated, with 400,000 homes destroyed and almost 20,000 people killed, Fudai lost not a single house or life.

A decade and a half or so on from the tsunami generated by Japan’s largest recorded earthquake, Fudai is suitably the start of the most beautiful and dramatic section of the Michinoku Coastal Trail, a 1000-kilometre coastal hiking path built in the hope of enticing visitors back into the region.

Amid the inevitable scars that remain along the coast, it’s a trail of immense beauty, isolation, sumptuous seafood and unexpected openness about the terror and trauma of the tsunami.

Taking flight

I’ve come to Tohoku, a region encompassing the six northernmost prefectures on Honshu, Japan’s main island, to spend a week on foot along the Michinoku Coastal Trail. Hiking at the head of our Walk Japan group of 11 international hikers is guide Yo Murakami.

“‘Here is nowhere.’ And yet it’s so clearly not.” ...Michinoku Coastal Trail.

“Like the writer,” he says of his surname, and suitably, this chronicle also begins with birds.

The Michinoku Coastal Trail’s northern trailhead is Kabushima Shrine, sat atop a small peninsula at the edge of Hachinohe, the far-northern city that’s home to Japan’s largest market. The Shinto shrine doubles as a national natural monument, seasonally home to up to 40,000 black-tailed gulls nesting in the peninsula’s grassy slopes – such numbers that the shrine provides umbrellas to visitors as protection from bird droppings during the nesting season.

It’s from here that we, too, take flight on one of Japan’s longest and newest hiking paths. The Michinoku Coastal Trail opened in 2019, just months before the COVID-19 pandemic closed Japan to the world, so even now, there’s limited awareness of its presence among local residents. Guided by markers painted onto fishing buoys, we set out across tiny bays where old women squat at the tide line, gathering kelp and watching us pass with puzzled looks.

“What are you doing here?” one woman asks with genuine curiosity. “Here is nowhere.” And yet, it’s so clearly not.

Though the trail was built on the stories of the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and the immense waves that followed, the coastline south of Hachinohe is as beautiful as it is battered. Along the Tanesashi Coast, cliffs fray into fingers of rock that reach far into the ocean, and waves pound ashore like a heartbeat.

On this first day alone, we’ll climb to a World War II observation post with a grandstand view over cliffs, beaches and a lighthouse, walk the length of a four-kilometre beach with sea spray washing over us like a mist, weave among the twisted trunks of a century-old pine grove and finish our day beside the Tanesashi Natural Lawn, a band of coastal grass that resembles a Scottish links golf course.

Hiking through the Yodo Pine Grove near Tanesashi Natural Lawn.

Already it’s a coast I’d happily hike for the scenery alone, and yet Fudai, where this little-visited coastline truly turns on the charm, is still a day away.

The death of optimism

It can take up to two months to walk the Michinoku trail in its entirety. In a week, we take a more multi-faceted journey, hopping between stages in taxis, buses and the Sanriku railway, a line so badly damaged by the tsunami that it took eight years to get trains running again.

On the third morning of our hike, we arrive by taxi in Fudai where, immediately south, the long Kitayamazaki Cape is lined with cliffs that tower up to 200 metres above the Pacific Ocean. For two days, we’ll hike atop, beneath and even through these cliffs, reaching their apex at a lookout high above looping sea arches and sharp-tipped sea stacks in a scene worthy of the Great Ocean Road.

Beyond the lookout, the trail enters its most challenging and exhilarating stage, descending steeply to sea level, where the way is seemingly blocked by cliffs. Donning helmets and head torches, we advance through hand-cut tunnels connecting a series of hidden beaches where the ocean thunders ashore even on a benign day.

Guiding us for a day along the cape is Takuro Kusuda, who was leading a clean-up on one of these very beaches when the earthquake hit. With its shock waves absorbed by the sand, the group barely noticed the shake, but when rocks began falling from the cliffs, they feared the worst. Frantically scaling the cliffs, they watched as a 20-metre-high wave rolled towards them.

“It was like watching a movie,” Takuro says. “It didn’t feel real.”

Today, Takuro is the head of a nonprofit organisation promoting tourism around Kitayamazaki Cape. Bear bells hang from his backpack, chiming in our presence as we rise back into the forest, where trees and trailside seats are clawed and chewed by the bears that are often sighted by hikers.

Tall stories … hikers on the Michinoku Coastal Trail.

According to Takuro, this region has traditionally seen few foreign tourists, though the Coastal Trail has started to change that, with an estimated 70 per cent of its hikers coming from abroad.

“At first, local people were a bit confronted,” he says. “A lot of them hadn’t seen foreign tourists before. Now the trail is getting promoted, the variety of people walking it is growing, and that’s giving the local people joy. The inns and hotels are benefiting, and I’m hoping there’ll be more opportunities for locals to get income from hikers.”

One such hotel is the Ragaso, a 10-storey complex set behind a maze of breakwaters at Kitayamazaki Cape’s southern edge. Standing isolated beside the trail, it’s a primary base for hikers, and it’s our tatami-floored home for the two nights we spend along the cape.

As we indulge in a now-customary seafood banquet in the hotel’s fifth-floor restaurant, I’m struck by this coast’s curious existence, where the ocean is both a friend and mortal enemy. Fishing is Tohoku’s major industry, and our plates each night hold a bounty of sashimi, clams, abalone, sea snails, octopus and swordfish heads, but it’s also a destructive force.

Tsunamis strike this coast with regularity – about one every 40 years in recent times – while earthquakes continually rumble under the skin of the earth. In the week before I arrived in Hachinohe, five quakes of between 3.8 and 5.1 magnitude were recorded. It is just another Tohoku week.

“Along this trip, I think there’s usually about a 50 per cent chance of feeling an earthquake,” Yo says.

The tsunami was generated by the world’s fourth-largest earthquake since 1900. Yasuko Miura was serving lunch to guests in the Hotel Ragaso when it struck, and the 79-year-old remains the restaurant hostess 14 years on. As we eat, she recounts her experience of the day, her eyes filling with tears as she speaks.

“I’d seen previous tsunamis, and in those, I could see the actual waves coming in, but this one was more like a huge wall of water,” she says. The wave barrelled over the breakwaters, hitting the hotel three storeys up.

“I thought I was going to die,” Yasuko says.

While the hotel stood firm against the power of the sea, the surrounding villages and valleys were all but wiped out. Residents fled to higher ground after the shake, but the wave didn’t arrive for another 45 minutes. Many returned to their homes ahead of the wave, thinking the danger had passed.

Apartment block in Rikuzentakata destroyed in the 2011 tsunami. A marker on the top floor notes the height of the wave.

The moving Iwate Tsunami Memorial Museum.

“We’re going to paradise”... Jodogahama Beach.