Japanland: A Year in Search of Wa is a 2004 documentary television series (broadcast in late 2005) and book by American documentary filmmaker and travel author Karin Muller

Karin Muller

Karin Muller is a Swiss-born author, filmmaker, photographer, and adventurer. Muller set out in the 1990s to travel the world's historic highways...

, who spent a year in Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

 searching for wa

Wa (Japan)

Japanese is the oldest recorded name of Japan. Chinese, Korean, and Japanese scribes regularly wrote Wa or Yamato "Japan" with the Chinese character 倭 until the 8th century, when the Japanese found fault with it, replacing it with 和 "harmony, peace, balance".- Historical references :The earliest...

, the Japanese concept of harmony (it is also the oldest recorded name of Japan).

Japanland was written and filmed by Muller, an American judo

Judo

is a modern martial art and combat sport created in Japan in 1882 by Jigoro Kano. Its most prominent feature is its competitive element, where the object is to either throw or takedown one's opponent to the ground, immobilize or otherwise subdue one's opponent with a grappling maneuver, or force an...

ist who traveled to Japan in 2001 to improve her art and realized she could not succeed without understanding Japan itself, so she set out on a one year solo trip around Japan to see what she could.

Muller's adventure took her to live with a pre-Buddhist mountain ascetic cult

Yamabushi

' are Japanese mountain ascetic hermits with a long tradition as mighty warriors endowed with supernatural powers. They follow the Shugendō doctrine, an integration of mainly esoteric Buddhism of the Shingon sect, with Tendai and Shinto elements...

, join a samurai

Samurai

is the term for the military nobility of pre-industrial Japan. According to translator William Scott Wilson: "In Chinese, the character 侍 was originally a verb meaning to wait upon or accompany a person in the upper ranks of society, and this is also true of the original term in Japanese, saburau...

-mounted archery

Archery

Archery is the art, practice, or skill of propelling arrows with the use of a bow, from Latin arcus. Archery has historically been used for hunting and combat; in modern times, however, its main use is that of a recreational activity...

 team, and complete a 1,300-kilometer pilgrimage around Shikoku

Shikoku

is the smallest and least populous of the four main islands of Japan, located south of Honshū and east of the island of Kyūshū. Its ancient names include Iyo-no-futana-shima , Iyo-shima , and Futana-shima...

. Muller found Japan was more like a living entity, a person, than a country, and very complex and almost contradictory.

She took no camera crew or companions, or even much money. She went on foot and emerged profoundly changed and informed, concluding that as a "typical" American she could not really become Japanese. The journey became a three-hour set of documentaries shown on U.S. television channel PBS and a book.

Japanland has even been shown on Japanese TV, rare for a U.S. program, especially one on Japan.