A New Pocket Reference for the Trail
I’ll preface this by saying this is one of the projects on the blog I’m happiest with. Pulling all of this information together into one place has been a labour of love – something I’ve spent a good chunk of time refining over recent months.
Some of you will remember the Hiking Kanji Cheat Sheet I put together back in 2020. It did the job, but it was always a rough-and-ready thing – essentially just a list. Useful for quick reference, sure, but not something you’d call overly polished. It was also only available to Patreon supporters.
The Japan Hiking Field Guide is a ground-up rebuild of that idea done properly this time and designed for a wider audience. Read on to find out what it’s all about.
The guide prints double-sided on A4 and accordion-folds down to A7.
What it is
It packs in more than 160 Japanese hiking terms and phrases across thirteen glossaries, covering everything from landforms and features, common trail signage, mountain hut etiquette, and bear awareness – all with kanji and romaji.
Designed to cover the things that tend to catch people out when hiking in Japan – not always because the mountains are difficult, but because the signage, emergency procedures, cultural norms, and even basic terminology work differently from what most non-Japanese hikers are used to (myself included). Sections include:
• Emergency and helpful mountain phrases in Japanese, with kanji and romaji
• Glossaries for trail signs, topo map terms, landforms, weather, transport, public lands, and mountain hut situations
• Hiking season calendar for Honshu
• Emergency weather warnings
• Mountains over 3,000 m and long-distance trails
• Day-hiking and overnight checklists
• Emergency contacts, rescue membership information (including Cocoheli), and safety reminders on the back panel
It’s aimed primarily at foreign hikers, but the bilingual layout also makes it useful for Japanese hikers wanting English reference terms.
Japan Hiking Field Guide Front.
Japan Hiking Field Guide Reverse.
Built by hand
The guide was created entirely in Adobe Illustrator – text frames, vector artwork, layout, everything. No AI tools were involved; just old‑fashioned Illustrator elbow grease and a lot of careful decision‑making. Every section was researched, written, and arranged manually, which is part of why updating the previous version took so long. I wanted this to be something people could rely on: accurate, durable, and genuinely useful on the trail.
Built from the ground up using Adobe Illustrator.
Challenges
One of the hardest parts of the project was deciding what to include and, just as importantly, what to leave out. There’s an enormous amount of information that could be useful in the Japanese mountains, but fitting it into a genuinely pocketable format without making it feel cramped or overloaded was a constant balancing act.
A lot of time also went into figuring out how best to categorise terms and structure the layout so people could absorb the information quickly on the trail rather than feel overwhelmed by it. The aim was always usability first: something dense with information, but still clear, readable, and intuitive to use.
Design
Typography uses Shippori Mincho for Japanese text and Zen Kaku Gothic New for English, a pairing chosen for balance and readability. The cover panel uses a deep forest green, while the interior features a warm paper tone with coloured section headers and a single kanji representing each category.
Each section is headed by its own category kanji.
How to get it
The guide is available via Ko-fi with a minimum price of ¥300 and ‘pay what you want’ enabled. If you find it useful and would like to support the work, anything above that is genuinely appreciated and goes directly towards future projects.
Patreon supporters can download it free from the feed – a small thank-you for helping keep this blog going.
If you spot errors or have suggestions for future editions, I’d be glad to hear them.
Two double-sided A4 pages · over 160 terms and phrases · PDF Print-ready
Price: From ¥300
Instant download
One-time payment. No Ko-fi account required.
Wow. Congrats David. This is excellent, and quite and achievement!
I know it would have come in useful to me plenty of times.
Thanks a lot, Greg. As it happens, it would have come in handy for me plenty of times as well! Even pulling it together was a good refresher on a few things I’d half-forgotten over the years.