MATTHIAS LEY
	SANCTUARY: The author's home, Chiiori, is an austere heaven in an isolated Japanese valley

Finding Shangri-la is not so difficult, but leaving it is nearly impossible. I first entered Iya Valley in 1971, at the age of 19, and today, at 52, I'm still in its thrall.

It began when, as a college student, I hitchhiked around Japan for a summer. I had partly grown up in Japan as my father, a naval officer, had been posted to the U.S. base at Yokohama in the 1960s. As a boy, I would take the train every weekend to nearby temples and beaches, and I enjoyed these adventures so much that I decided then that Japan was the place for me. But at 19, majoring in Japanese at an American university, I was having doubts. The juggernaut of Japanese industry described in my college textbooks seemed to overshadow every other aspect of the country. Aside from shipyards and car factories, what else did Japan have to offer?

The summer of 1971 was to be the test—and fate intervened immediately. On my first day back in Tokyo for the holidays, someone gave me an amulet from Kompira Shrine on the southern island of Shikoku. Intrigued, I followed the amulet, and found myself two months later in Shikoku, riding into the mountains on a motorbike with a friend, in search of a rumored "hidden valley" called Iya.

	This place has shown me how to be Japanese. —KOHEI WATANABE,  young Tokyo executive

As our motorbike headed into the interior of Shikoku, we found ourselves entering a hybrid world. The towering peaks came straight out of a Chinese Sung-dynasty landscape painting, but they were draped in a feathery, vapor-shrouded foliage. Far from neat, pruned, modern Japan, the precipices felt wild, prehistoric, like something out of the age of the dinosaurs.

The Iya Gorges are, in fact, the country's deepest, and are sometimes called "Japan's Grand Canyon." The unpaved one-lane road wound along cliffs so steep that on one side there was a 60-m drop to the river, and on the other side the rock of the cliff face curved up and over the road. Finally, we emerged from the canyons and found ourselves at an ink-landscape village, with thatched cottages perched high overlooking the river. White threads of waterfalls cascaded over blue green rocks. Mists boiled up from the chasms below. I wept. Iya had claimed me.

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