Dear reader,

The story behind us

Kenji Murakami started Primrose Quarry Way in the autumn of 2017, after eight years leading tours for a large agency in Osaka. The agency work was fine, but the groups were too big and the routes never changed. The same forty-five minutes at Kinkaku-ji, the same lunch stop on the Arashiyama road. One October, guiding a family from Edinburgh through the momiji season in Eikan-do, he watched them spend most of the visit trying to get a clear photograph through the crowds. He thought: there has to be a better way to do this.

The first year was small. Kenji took on six custom trips, all word-of-mouth, mostly friends of friends who'd heard he knew the back roads. He ran the bookings from a rented desk in Higashiosaka and did every guide shift himself. The routes got longer and stranger in the best way: a three-day walk along the Kumano Kodo, a sake brewery visit in Nada that turned into a four-hour lunch, a winter morning at Koyasan when the snow was thick enough to muffle the temple bells. 'I started keeping notes,' he says, 'and the notes became the routes.'

The notes I kept on those first trips became the routes we run today.