Name: 24 Hours With a Japanese Hermit in a Hidden Village
Uploaded: 2025-08-25T17:59:15.000Z
Duration: 20 min 8 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Last year I learned about a hidden village here in Japan that apparently couldn't be accessed anymore. Naturally I aspired to locate it and went straight to Google Earth. And I found it.

Past simple

But there was a problem. It really wasn't accessible. There was only one road from the village and it led to a dead end. A facility that turned out to be a landing point for a maintenance boat operated by the nearby dam. So of course I followed the lead. I contacted the dam but they wanted to make two things very clear in our conversation. A. Nobody but dam staff was permitted on the boat. And B. That the village truly was no longer accessible and that there were no other access points. It turns out that this was their standard response. And it was a lie.

To-infinitive

I knew this because I had found a blog by a man who claimed to have visited the village saying that he was friends with the last remaining resident. But that getting there was no easy feat. His blog painted a picture of traversing over entire mountains by foot in order to reach the village. A journey that took hours, required safety equipment, and ran the risk of falling off the side of a mountain or coming across bears or other aggressive wildlife.

And he wasn't wrong. Any remnants of a mountain path had disappeared long ago and for the first hour of the hike I could honestly barely keep from slipping off the narrow ledges.

So with the guidance of Ebisun I've been hiking through these moderately narrow mountain paths for about the last hour or so and honestly there's literally barely enough space to stand on the edge for most of this. And when I saw that on Ebisun's blog I reached out to him and asked him if he'd be willing to come along with me and be my guide for this. And he said that he would absolutely love to do that as he's part of a society that is trying to preserve the last remains of the village that we're hiking out to right now. And so the stars kind of lined up for this one.

Now he is just a little bit shy so he's asked me not to put him on camera too much.

But so far an amazing person, an amazing guide, and this hike is something else.

I hike fairly often. Ebisun is 75 years old and leaving me in the dust. And he says that the old hermit that we're going to visit is even faster at getting through these trails. But I am genuinely so glad that I brought Ebisun. Mostly just because there are a lot of spots along the way where the path just disappears and I wouldn't be sure of which way to continue or if it was okay to continue or safe to continue. Also apparently these mountains are filled with bears so I do have my bear spray and I do have my emergency SOS Garmin thing.

This is certainly within the top five most difficult hikes that I've done so far. But definitely within the top three, maybe four, most beautiful.

I will say that man is fast and he's making like a game of it too. Every time he manages to get really far away from me he turns back and throws me this shady grin. In order to cross the river I had to change into my my rain boots. I have rain boots now. I haven't had rain boots since I was a little kid.

This is quite likely the deepest into any Japanese mountain valley that I've had the chance to hike so far. But the thing that I love about it the most is that for the most part it's only people who are stuck on the tree. We lived in that village and people like Ebisun here. On

Ebisun's recommendation I actually sent a case of beer out to the gentleman that we're heading out to visit right now and it turns out that Ebisun actually did this entire hike and carried the beer. He was very proud. He managed to pull off the entire thing in just over an hour and a half.

So Ebisun says once we get into this group of trees here we're only about 15 minutes away from the village itself.

And this was Izumi-san, the last living link to Kadonyu, a nearly forgotten village hidden in the mountains of Gifu.

The village was bought out by a major dam decades ago along with seven other villages but as it was on the outer edge it was never flooded and so Izumi-san and a few others went back. But now he's the only one left.

He's told me to take a peek upstairs. Oh wow. Oh this is a beautiful beautiful room.

I don't have any feathers so I'm just a normal tatami mat.

It was one of the most inconvenient villages in Tokuyama and Hachika-san in the countryside.

But it had the widest nature and a lot of beautiful rice paddies.

There were a lot of self-sufficiency lives here.

All the salt, medicine, and toothpaste were brought in here.

The older you get, the more you have to get married.

Even in Kadonyu, they don't get married often.

I like it here, but people say it's because it's Kadonyu.

So there were people in the village who didn't like it.

But I don't want to bring them here and make them suffer.

Most of the people in the village work in the city.

The air is good, there's a lot of greenery, and the water is free.

I'm grateful that my parents raised me here.

The best time to exercise is when there's a lot of grass on top.

He plays hide-and-seek, plays hide-and-seek, and climbs trees.

I have to walk 8km, 7km, or 500km every day.

The teacher makes me a big lunchbox every day.

It takes about 4 to 5 hours to walk every day.

I don't know if it has anything to do with it.

So it's better not to get too close to the fruit.

In my house, the spider's footprints sometimes stick to the glass window.

It looks like the door to the front door is big.

In the field over there, there's a black bear.

For all the trips and all the times that I've said we might come across a bear on this trip, there's one right there.

I'm obviously going to keep a safe distance from him.

Something tells me he's probably faster than me.

He's small. It's just a little black bear.

I do actually have my bear spray on my wrist.

I'm probably happier than I should be to be coming across a bear.

But there are plenty of structures for me to go inside of or on top of.

I realistically should probably be just a little more nervous.

I left my other camera here with a big, long zoom lens on it.

I was looking forward to coming up and getting some shots of him.