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Forest bathing is the opposite of whatever you’re probably doing right now, which I’m guessing is scrolling, searching and otherwise screen-timing your day into confetti. The Japanese call it shinrin-yoku<\/em>, literally “forest bath,” a term coined in 1982 by Japan’s Forestry Agency to describe something people had been doing for centuries without a name. The simple idea is walking slowly among trees, breathing and taking it all in. Researchers have since linked the practice<\/a> to lower cortisol, lower blood pressure and a measurable lift in mood, partly credited to phytoncides, the aromatic compounds trees exhale.<\/p>\n Now you can do it in with an itinerary in hand, and one company has been organizing it longer than almost anyone. Walk Japan<\/a>, founded in 1992 by two Hong Kong University academics, pioneered walking tours through rural Japan decades before “slow travel” became a hashtag. Today the company offers 34 guided and self-guided tours, from four-day escapes to twelve-day odysseys, meandering through snow country, pilgrimage routes and fishing villages few visitors ever see. The most iconic is the Nakasendo Way<\/a>, which can take as long as eleven days along the old samurai highway from Kyoto to Tokyo. Travelers sleep in inns that seem lifted from a Hiroshige woodblock print. The Kumano Kodo pilgrimage, through the cedar forests of the Kii Peninsula, is its spiritual (and slightly more arduous) sibling.<\/p>\n