Hello — I’m Akiko Makimura, a photojournalist and writer based near Tokyo.
I’ve been writing professionally since the 1990s: first about software and technology, and later about the subject that quietly took over my life — civil engineering in the landscape. Dams. Fishways. Irrigation canals. Abandoned railways. Bridges whose towers are all that remain. In Japanese, my work has appeared in JBpress and in the web magazine of 太陽 (Taiyo), where I wrote a serialized column of solo day-trip explorations. I also run a Japanese-language site, Exploration Walks (soloppo.com), with more than 500 articles, and a YouTube channel of the same name.
My method is simple and slightly obsessive: I go alone, on foot, with a camera. I read up on the structure, then I walk its full length — including the dark parts. I am, for the record, a coward. It doesn’t stop me; it just makes the flashlight non-negotiable.
The photos of these places already travel the world. The stories mostly don’t — they sit in Japanese, in engineering journals, local histories, and, well, on my site. This annex is my attempt to carry a few of them across. Not as translations, but as walks re-told for readers who look at a station in a lake and ask the best question there is: why is that there?
If you ever walk one of these routes because of something you read here, that would make me genuinely happy. You can reach me through the contact form.