Hello everyone. My name is Kimiyasu Morikawa, and I work as a CTO in several startups based in Tokyo, Japan. One of my favorite way to spend holidays is to walk for a long distance. In this post, I would like to write about my longest walking trip, and why that trip made me a passionate Google Maps contributor.
About 5 years ago, me and 2 of my friends went on a 150 km walking trip. The main goal for this trip was to have a glance at the new year sunshine at the town named Choshi, located in eastern part of Japan. Because the town was located at the east-most land area in Japan, it is known as one of the spots where you can have a look at the sunrise at the earliest time in Japan. However, as mentioned, the town was 150 km away from Tokyo, so we had to plan a detailed schedule.
We departed Tokyo in December 29, 2013, and arrived at Choshi just in time for the new year sunrise in January 1, 2014. Along the way, we took some rest in the cities of Funabashi and Sakura. Although we have traditions of seeing the new year sunrise every year here in Japan, it was the most beautiful, romantic sunrise I have ever seen in my life.
The trip was not easy at all, and we had numerous problem along the way. Of these challenges, the biggest issue was the routing. Of course, we had Google Maps with us, but the number of places listed in the map was not enough, especially in rural areas of Japan. Sometimes our planned route was far from what we have expected, and had to take roundabout routes, which led to our delay. Since our goal was to see the exact moment of the sunrise, so the delay was a serious problem for us.
After the trip, I realized that a lot of contributors were active in town-side, but there were less contributors in country-side. Although I live in Tokyo area, I love nature and visit country area of Japan from time to time. Later on, I signed up for the Google Maps Local Guide team, and since then, I am making effort to register as many places as possible to be a help to future tourists. Since I like taking photographs as well, Google Maps is one of the best places to post my picture of my favorite places.
We now have many more contributors here in Japan, but we still lack contribution in rural parts of our country. I still have high motivation contributing to this community by posting new photographs and places. I’ll be happy if I can make new friends having similar sense of purpose!
