Travel Writer: Jon DeHart

Rolf Potts' monthly Travel Writer series — more than 200 interviews with a wide range of travel writers — turns to Jon on the craft and the road.

Jonathan DeHart is the author of two guidebooks for Moon Travel Guides (Moon Japan and Moon Tokyo, Kyoto and Hiroshima) and a journalist with more than 500 published articles. His work has been selected for various "best of" lists by the Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, Foreign Policy and Real Clear World. He is currently writing a series of travel essays, mostly set in Asia, and has a few book ideas simmering on the back-burner.

How did you get started traveling?

Travel began for me while growing up, when my dad, a retired world history and geography teacher, took my family on a series of epic cross-country road trips throughout the American West during his summer breaks. My family also took many jaunts to meet relatives, camp and hike throughout the southern US and New England, and to my grandpa's lakeside cottage in Michigan every summer.

Hat tip to my dad as well for sharing tales of his backpacking adventures in Latin America, Europe and the Middle East. Another seed was planted in the form of a cache of Asian antiques passed down from my great aunt Ruby and uncle Harold, who ran in literary and artistic circles. Harold, a photographer, painter and inventor who studied art in Paris under Man Ray in the 1920s, and Ruby had amassed a collection of wispy Japanese prints, bold paintings of Khmer dancers, and ornately carved furniture, etched with dragons and mandarins in robes, that largely ended up at my grandparents' house. From a young age, these heirlooms linked Asia in my mind with a sense of adventure, worldliness and refinement.

Aside from quickly stepping across the Canadian border at Niagara Falls and a brief foray into Tijuana on a few of those long childhood trips, I didn't venture overseas until college. At age 19, I visited a series of stellar European museums with a Near Eastern archaeology class. Gawping at Babylonian antiquities and exploring London, Paris, Berlin, and Rome dramatically expanded my horizons, but I returned from Europe feeling that I wanted something a bit more… different.

It was then that Asia began to weave its subtle spell. With little idea where it would lead, I chose to major in Asian Studies and took Japanese classes to fulfill the foreign language requirement. In the winter of 2004, I boarded a plane to Tokyo where I lived with a host family of five to study the language for a few months. As fate would have it, I watched Sophia Coppola's Lost in Translation in a US theater only a few weeks before I found myself wandering down some of the same neon-lit boulevards where I'd just seen Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson carouse on screen. A potent mix for an impressionable 21-year-old.

Those few months in Japan were a major turning point in my life. I've lived in Asia for the bulk of the past two decades, mostly in Japan, but also with a stint in Shanghai. During that time, I've roved and written about the region, from Seoul and Angkor Wat to rural Rajasthan and Kathmandu. While I've planted roots in Japan, I see myself moving to Southeast Asia in the next few years and deepening my ties there.

How did you get started as a writer?

Growing up, a number of teachers complimented my writing, beginning with my second-grade teacher Mrs. Dennis who remarked at the (relative) imagination that went into a story I'd written. It involved a protagonist navigating the wilds of Indonesia. Where I'd heard of that distant archipelago at age 7, I'm not sure, but I suspect my dad's collection of National Geographic back-issues, which I incessantly pored over as a kid, played a part.

Fast forward to college when I received praise from a few professors for essays I'd written. The one that stands out to me was for a class titled Geography of Religion. For the assignment, I visited a local mosque, a Hindu temple and a synagogue, then wrote about my observations and experiences at each. In hindsight, this was my first attempt at crafting something that involved travel, albeit it local, and interaction with different cultures.

After graduating, while teaching English in Japan for a brief stint, I took an online journalism class taught by a staff reporter at The Los Angeles Times. This was the first time I formally learned to write in a structured way for a public audience.