Zen and the Art of Ultralight Hiking

Before Akira Natsume heads off for a backpacking trip, he has a ritual: He draws up a complete list of what he’s taking. Everything, no matter how small, gets jotted down, along with its weight. Not just the backpack, sleeping bag and tent but also his toothbrush, battery recharger and lighter for the stove. At the bottom of the page is a number: the base weight of Natsume’s stuff before adding food, water and fuel. Usually, it comes out to around 2.2 kg (4.9 lbs). 

The gear list is one of the hallmarks of what it means to be an ultralight hiker –– the kind who carries only the most essential equipment in order to minimize pack weight and maximize freedom of movement and sheer enjoyment on the trail. The list is an elegant way of figuring out what you have, what you need and what you can do without. It's a form of self-interrogation: Do I really need to carry this? 

Natsume has been a gear-list booster ever since he and his wife, Yumiko, started the Japanese ultralight hiking brand Yamatomichi in 2011. Of course, you would expect him to. Natsume is in the business of outfitting hikers who spend days or weeks exploring mountain ridges, backcountry trails, pilgrimage routes and remote, out-of-the-way places. The brand he launched with a lightweight sleeping pad now boasts a full lineup of more than 80 products that he and his team have developed from scratch, including backpacks, jackets, shirts, mittens, arm sleeves, trousers, shorts, button-downs, belly-warmers, hats and sacoche and stuff bags. Each was conceived to be lightweight and compact and with specific functions in mind: an “active-insulation” jacket warm enough for a blizzard and breathable enough to wear on the move; super-thin hiking trousers, with pockets for a smartphone and maps, that are comfy for swampy summer days; an insulating vest that wards off chilly winds while preventing against overheating; a hood to add a bit of insulation; backpacks for an overnight trip or a thru-hike lasting weeks. 

But ultralight hiking isn’t only about the gear, Natsume says: “I tell my staff and customers that ultralight hiking offers the chance to experience what it’s like to strip life down to what’s truly essential to live in harmony with nature. Through that, we can rediscover what we truly need in life and maybe that will ease some of the anxieties of modern living.” People just need the tools to change their own lives.

First, though, you really have to know your gear. There’s a vulnerability that comes with being out in the wilderness. You’re exposed to the elements. Anything can happen –– a turn in the weather, a bear encounter, a twisted ankle –– and you have only your wits and experience and the stuff you’ve packed to get to where you’re going and back home safely. Confronting your insecurities is part of making the deliberate choices needed to declutter your pack. “What you gain in the process and on the trail is immeasurable,” Natsume explains. 

Natsume is telling me this on a recent morning in October, at the box-of-a-building that serves as Yamatomichi’s headquarters in Kamakura, a coastal city southwest of Tokyo. (Yamatomichi means “mountain and way”.) In the building’s upstairs loft floors, staffers are filling orders, planning events and working on designs and prototypes for new products. The smell of beef curry wafts over from the office kitchen. Down the road, tourists throng Kotokuin temple for its famed giant bronze Buddha statue (Kamakura Daibutsu) that dates to the 13th century.

In person, Natsume –– bespectacled, compact, with a tidy goatee –– is preternaturally calm. He speaks with a documentary narrator’s delivery: an even, unhurried tenor that carries the weight of authority. In the past decade and a half, that voice has become one of the most respected in Japan’s ultralight hiking scene. 

Natsume has managed to do that entirely through exceptional products, word-of-mouth publicity and a prolific online presence. Over the years, he and his full-time staff of 30 have flooded Yamatomichi’s website, YouTube channel and Instagram feed with everything a hiker might find useful: packing tips, gear suggestions and skincare routines, as well as staffers’ accounts of their own walks –– 600 km (373 miles) across Iceland, 350 km (217 miles) around Kyushu, hundreds of kilometers (miles) spanning the length of Taiwan. There are plenty of how-to guides, too. Here’s how to pack less than 4.5 kg (9.9 lb) of gear. Here’s how merino wool compares to synthetic fibers as your first layer of clothing. Here’s how to stay warm with layering on a winter hike. Here’s how to hand-wash a backpack. Curious about the history of ultralight tents and backpacks? Want to know what it’s like to ferment food while on the trail? Interested in walking Japan’s long trails? Yamatomichi has got you covered. 

The ultimate objective, Natsume says, is to spread the ultralight hiking mindset, build a close-knit community and foster an open exchange of ideas. “I think of ultralight hiking not merely as an outdoor style but as something that has the potential to grow into a culture that helps more people find their own authentic way of living,” he says. 

Natsume’s own ultralight awakening happened in the mid 2000s, over two very different hikes. The first, in the northern Japanese Alps, made him miserable. It was his own fault: He’d overpacked and spent the five-day trip struggling under the weight of his own stuff. “All I could think was, ‘Hiking shouldn’t be this uncomfortable,’” he explains. He didn't even have the energy to admire the scenery.

For his next long hike, in the Yatsugatake range, Natsume vowed to take less. He cherry-picked ideas from blogs written by a niche community of Japanese hikers who prided themselves in being extreme minimalists. They used small backpacks and weighed every item in pursuit of the lightest possible load. Much of the unconventional gear they touted was either from the US, developed by and for long-trail hikers, or homemade. Natsume initially had his doubts about their approach. “It seemed stoical and far from comfortable, like an endurance club,” he recalled. Their exploits hinted at the old-fashioned Japanese alpinist’s ethos of the “three K’s”: kitanai (dirty), kiken (dangerous), kitsui (difficult). But the alternative –– lugging a lot of weight around –– was untenable. 

To prepare for Yatsugatake, Natsume bought a tarp and ditched his tent. He chose a compact alcohol stove to replace his gas stove and a small backpack for day hikes that was half the size of his pack. “I got the weight of my pack down to 4.5 kg (9.9 lbs), plus food, fuel and water,” he says. “By carrying less weight, I felt this amazing sense of unity with nature — it was comfortable, and I could move freely. It completely blew me away.” Reducing the physical strain also lowered the chance that he'd injure himself.

At the time, Natsume was reading Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Henry David Thoreau’s classic account of living alone in a cabin next to Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau believed that the wilderness needed protecting and that living in it with as little as necessary was liberating and beneficial. Natsume had experienced that for himself and wanted more people in Japan to see how ultralight hiking could be a catalyst for change for them, too.

Back then, hardly anyone in Japan had heard of ultralight hiking. The gear, tailored to long-trail hikes in the US, was hard to find in Japan. In 2010, for a two-week, 200-kilometer (124-mile) hike on the John Muir Trail in California, Natsume and his wife Yumiko ordered DIY backpack and tarp kits from the US. The gear worked well. It also got Natsume thinking: What would ultralight backpacks for Japanese trails look like? 

Japan's climate is considerably wetter. On trails, it’s common enough to find yourself scrambling on all fours over steep or rocky sections. When that happens, you're better off with a backpack whose hip belt isn't meant to bear a lot of the weight and won't restrict movement and clothes that dry quickly and keep you warm even when damp. 

Not long after they returned from California, Natsume started designing a backpack. He and Yumiko turned their 40 sqm apartment into a mini factory. While Yumiko, a freelance costume designer for events and concerts, made the prototypes on a sewing machine in the kitchen, Natsume tweaked the design, sourced materials and filled orders at a makeshift desk. A shelf above their bed was the stockroom. Backpack orders came in through the blog Natsume wrote. 

Within a year and a half, they were so inundated, they moved their operation to a more spacious, renovated house, hired their first employees, and found a cut-and-sew factory to take on some of the work. 

Since the beginning, every Yamatomichi product has been put through extensive testing in harsh conditions. On average, it takes five years from concept to product launch, though some take even longer. “There’s one thing we’ve been working on now for 10 years and we still haven’t released it yet,” Natsume says. Clearly, for him, there are no shortcuts. “Basically, I only want to make products that don't exist yet and that I would want to use. And I want to use the very best products,” he explains. 

Frequently enough, that means finding ways to work with Pertex to make products that didn't exist. Yamatomichi and Pertex go way back, to around the time Natsume and Yumiko were just getting started. That's when they visited their first Pertex trade show. Not realizing that it was appointment-only, they had just shown up. But instead of sending them away, the Pertex staff sat down with the couple and listened to what they soon realized was the fresh perspective of passionate hikers and industry outsiders who were eager to be different.  

The resulting partnership has been fruitful, producing a series of unique products –– mainly all-weather jackets and pants –– that combine Yamatomichi's minimalist, ultralight-focused design philosophy and Pertex's technical expertise. Pertex's windproof, water repellent, breathable fabrics are widely used in outdoor brands' down jackets, sleeping bags, wind shells and rainwear. But nobody had ever made a backpack with Pertex. A few years ago, Natsume wondered: Why not? To Natsume, the reasons for doing so were obvious. Pertex's nylon is known for being strong and lightweight. If only the fabric could be woven in a way that it would perform better than sturdier, heavier backpack-grade materials, without compromising on weight, Yamatomichi would be able to trim even more grams (ounces) off of its already lightweight backpacks while also adding qualities not found in rival brands’ products. 

The thought of making a backpack with custom-woven Pertex fabric and the fact that nobody was doing it was the sort of thing that Natsume lives for. Not long after the two sides teamed up to look into the idea, they had developed two original nylon fabrics: a thinner Pertex 07RS-PC and more robust Pertex 21RS-PC. Both are durable and highly resistant to tearing. Both were woven in a way that balances the competing demands of strength and weight –– not too tightly, allowing for flexibility and stretchiness to more easily absorb and dissipate the stress of heavy loads and prevent tearing, but still extremely strong for their weight –– and tested against other backpack materials to confirm their utility. 

Natsume’s team put the two fabrics mainly on the backpacks’ upper parts while sticking to a thicker, fully waterproof, stain-resistant material for the base. The team also went with a polycarbonate coating for the nylon, which is also more costly, technically fussier to work with but won’t break down and peel off when exposed to sunlight and humidity the way more commonly used polyurethane (PU) coatings. (Polycarbonate coatings are typically used for car interiors, architectural panels and industrial protective gear when preventing wear and tear is vital, but almost never for backpack fabrics.)

The brand’s three Pertex backpacks went on sale in 2024. How happy was Natsume with the products? “You can feel right away how much lighter it is, and a lot of people have commented about the packs' vibrant colors,” he says. And yet, it's not perfect. “We are already thinking of what improvements we can make on the next version,” he adds.

Enthusiastic product reviews are a sign that Natsume and his team are doing something right. But it's their efforts to set up and support community gatherings and hiking events around Japan and in Taiwan that Natsume thinks will ensure the ultralight hiking culture gets passed on to future generations. Every month, Yamatomichi-appointed “ambassadors” lead hikes and workshops somewhere in Japan and Taiwan, and every 18 months or so a big Yamatomichi Festival gets the community together for a big celebration of ultralight hiking.

There's satisfaction in giving people the opportunity to forge their own path and to do it while exploring the planet’s wild places and finding others who share their world view.

This is something that Natsume has wanted to do since starting Yamatomichi just months after the devastating earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan’s northeastern shore in 2011. “That disaster made me realize just how important human connection is. I think everyone probably felt the same way –– that having people you can rely on and having real connections with others matter more than money or social status,” he says. 

Discover more from Yamatomichi here.