Inland Sea | the glenn coast

inland sea

Field Notes

Some songs arrive in an afternoon. Others spend decades finding their way home.

When I first moved to Japan in the early 1990s, I wanted to understand the country beyond guidebooks and business travel. I became a regular at Kinokuniya, buying books on Japanese architecture, gardens, aesthetics, history, and culture. I wanted to know not just what Japan looked like, but how it thought.

One book stayed with me more than any other: Donald Richie’s The Inland Sea.

Richie’s book isn’t a conventional travel guide. It is a series of quiet observations from a journey through Japan’s Inland Sea — ferries, fishermen, villages, temples, weather, silence — and a way of life he sensed was slowly disappearing. Like Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, it felt less like one trip than a lifetime compressed into a single voyage.

Long after I finished the book, the title remained lodged in my imagination.

Over the years, I passed the Inland Sea many times. A glimpse from a train window was enough to bring the book back. Later, I found the documentary based on it, with Richie returning to many of the same places decades later, reflecting on what had changed and what somehow hadn’t. It carried the same gentle melancholy as the book: peaceful, nostalgic, grateful.

The Inland Sea also reminded me of another body of water that shaped me years earlier: the Thousand Islands of northern New York. Different country, different culture, different scale — but the same feeling of water scattered among small islands, inviting quiet rather than spectacle.

Near the end of our ten years in Japan, Angie and I spent several days in Tomonoura, a fishing village on the Inland Sea. We stayed in a tatami room overlooking the harbor. Boats drifted past our window. Meals were served in the room. A local festival filled the streets. Temples looked down over the water.

It was one of the most peaceful places I’ve ever experienced. It felt exactly like the world Donald Richie had described.

When we returned to California, Inland Sea remained only a title in one of my notebooks. Years passed.

Then one afternoon, sitting in a hotel room overlooking the water — Monterey or Sausalito, I honestly can’t remember — I picked up my travel guitar and began playing a slow pattern in 6/8 time. The rhythm rocked gently, like small boats lifting and settling on calm water.

I thought it might become a song with lyrics. It never did. It became an instrumental.

Around that same period, Angie and I were standing on the beach in Capitola when tens of thousands of sooty shearwaters streamed along the shoreline in an endless ribbon. Surfers waited quietly for waves. A woman walked the beach carrying her child, seemingly unaware of the migration passing overhead. I filmed about a minute of it.

Later, while making a video for the instrumental, I remembered that clip. I slowed it down, letting the birds drift almost dreamlike across the screen.

The moment the music and images came together, I knew what the piece had always been called: Inland Sea.

Ironically, the video isn’t Japan. It’s Monterey Bay. But by then I understood that the title had never belonged to one place. It belonged to a feeling — first awakened by a book, confirmed by a quiet harbor in Tomonoura, and rediscovered on a California beach.

Sometimes a seed waits thirty years before it knows what it wants to become.