Why Not Take a Little Detour?

Maniwa City, Okayama Prefecture.

Surrounded by mountains, fields, and quiet countryside, a small guesthouse opened here this summer.

Its name is michikusha.

The person behind it is K, who is currently working in Maniwa as a member of Japan’s Regional Revitalization Cooperation Corps.

For this month’s Come on UP study session, we invited K as our guest.

At first, we simply wanted to ask:

“How did you build the guesthouse?”

But as the conversation went on, it became about much more than creating a place to stay.

Why did K come to Maniwa?

Why did he want to open a guesthouse?

And why is the idea of michikusa — taking a detour, wandering off the main path — so important to him?

Behind all of these questions was the path K himself has taken through life.

By the end of the conversation, I found myself thinking:

I want to stay at michikusha and talk with K in person.

More Important Than Convenience: A Place Where People Support What You Want to Do

If you were going to open a guesthouse, what would you look for?

A location near a station.

Easy access to tourist attractions.

A place where lots of people already visit.

Of course, all of these things matter.

But when K chose where to create his guesthouse, his biggest priority was a little different.

“Will the people in this community support what I’m trying to do?”

After moving to Maniwa, K visited a variety of guesthouses and share houses.

Through those experiences, he realized that even if a place is slightly inconvenient to reach, people will still travel there when they feel:

“I want to meet this person.”

A guesthouse is not only about having a beautiful building.

Sometimes people travel because they want to meet the person who is there — to learn how they think, how they live, and to experience the atmosphere they create.

That is why K chose to build his guesthouse not only around location, but around relationships with people.

The building that eventually became michikusha was also introduced to him by someone in the local community.

“There’s an empty house over here.”

Someone remembered K because he had kept telling people about his ideas:

That he wanted to run a guesthouse.

That he wanted to create something in the community.

Someone listened, remembered, and eventually connected him with the building.

Perhaps michikusha had already begun, through relationships between people, long before the guesthouse itself existed.

Running a Guesthouse Was Never the Real Goal

There is an idea that K holds close to him:

“Opening up people’s possibilities.”

It might sound like a big phrase at first, but when you hear him explain it, the meaning becomes much more tangible.

It is not about teaching someone something or trying to change who they are.

It is about meeting people you never would have met before.

Encountering values different from your own.

Discovering ways of living that you did not know existed.

Through those experiences, someone might think:

“I didn’t know you could live like this.”

or,

“Maybe I’d like to try something like that too.”

And suddenly, the number of possibilities they can imagine for their own life increases, even just a little.

What K wants to create is a place where those kinds of moments can happen.

K originally worked as a gardener.

Through his work, he experienced how strongly nature can affect the way people feel.

You climb a mountain and suddenly find a huge landscape opening up in front of you.

You stop in front of a beautiful garden without even realizing it.

Something that felt overwhelming just moments earlier can suddenly feel a little smaller.

You might find yourself thinking:

“Maybe the world is bigger than I thought.”

But there was something else that also had a major impact on K’s life:

meeting people.

Discovering Different Ways of Life in Australia

K once spent a year in Australia on a working holiday.

Living in guesthouses, share houses, and backpacker hostels, he met people from all over the world.

They came from different countries.

They spoke different languages.

They valued different things in life.

Some of the problems that had seemed enormous to him while living in Japan began to look different after hearing the perspectives of people with completely different backgrounds.

He sometimes found himself thinking:

“Maybe I was worrying inside a much smaller world than I realized.”

Simply talking to another person can change the way you see the world.

You discover ways of living you never knew existed.

The feeling that “I have to live this way” begins to loosen.

And K realized something.

Just as a gardener can design a relationship between people and nature,

perhaps it is also possible to design places where people meet one another.

That became one of the reasons he wanted to create a guesthouse.

For K, michikusha is not the final destination of a dream.

It is a place where people can meet new people and encounter nature.

A place where someone might suddenly realize:

“Maybe there are possibilities I had never considered before.”

The guesthouse is simply one way of creating those opportunities.

michikusha

michikusha is a small guesthouse in Hokubo, Maniwa City, Okayama Prefecture.

K, who works in the area as a member of the Regional Revitalization Cooperation Corps, created the guesthouse with the help of his partner, local residents, carpenters, and many others.

Around 80% of the guesthouse was built through DIY work.

With michikusa — the idea of taking a detour — as one of its central themes, michikusha hopes to create opportunities for people to encounter new people, new values, and nature.

Moments that might make someone think:

“I didn’t know you could live like this.”

or,

“Maybe I’d like to try something like this too.”

A place where the possibilities people can imagine for themselves might grow, even just a little.

If you are traveling through Okayama or Maniwa, consider making michikusha one of your stops.

▼ michikusha — Stay & Details

https://michikusha.com/

▼ Instagram

https://www.instagram.com/michikusha?igsh=djJpazZvdHE3azcx&utm_source=qr

▼ YouTube — DIY & Guesthouse-Making Journey