Jisho

For whatever reason, linguists do not consider the を that marks 公園 to be the same particle as the one that marks direct objects. As such, it's not representative of 歩く having a direct object.

It's not just that every Japanese resource somehow missed this.

Sorry for two points, but I figured I'd just show that the resources are internally consistent on this. On Jisho, if you look at the entry for を you'll see that "indicates direct object of action​" is the first definition and "indicates an area traversed​" is the third definition, suggesting that the situations of "area traversed" are not direct objects.

This reflects definitions found in monolingual dictionaries too. Here, from the 三省堂 大辞林

① 動作・作用の対象を表す。
③ 移動性の動作の経過する場所を表す。

Listing them as separate definitions of を

If it walks like a duck....... It so happened that I today received a grammar in the mail that indeed says that 歩く is transitive (Japansk syntax ISBN 978-91-44-49711-2). Question is: why do linguists differ between を and を? The sad fact is that descriptions of Japanese grammar tend to have a very westernized (Latin-based) outlook and this is reflected also in Japanese publications. See Roy Andrew Miller's The Japanese Language (The University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. ix-x. My own conviction arrived when translating: 明りをさげて ゆっくり雪を踏んで来た男は. (Kawabata: Snow country at the very beginning.) The snow is definitely the object of the action. I strongly suspect that the reason for creating a second type of を is the wish to make words like 歩くsimilar to their English counterparts. It is not all that difficult to think that I do something to a street when I walk on it. Compare 公園で散歩(を)する where I use the park rather tan inflict my walking on it. German and Swedish have transitive words for walk: 'betreten' 'beträda' so why use the English outlook? In French: 'Je me promène' with a direct object.
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I don't really see how this is a sad fact, or that different linguists having different opinions makes this resource (or any other that describes 歩く and verbs like it) a certain way incorrect. You can take it up with the databases that Jisho uses though if you want. Jisho doesn't do any of the writing of the entries directly. Your suggestions will be reviewed by an editorial board that presumably has thought about this before, but maybe you can convince them they have it wrong.

walk - 走, (and 步行) is modern definition in Hanzi.
Run - 走 is obsolete usage for them with reason; replaced by run- 跑.

The reason of walk -走 vs. run- 跑 is 低 vs. 高 for the latter.

What does that have to do with this thread? And it doesn't even make sense on its own. On what planet is the meaning of "run" for 走 obsolete in Japanese?

intransitivity vs transitivity is a simplification of the more general linguistic concept of "valency", which has to do with what case arguments a verb is allowed to accept in what situations.

To oversimplify, transitive verbs are exactly those verbs that are able to accept a normal direct object in normal circumstances. All other verbs are intransitive. Most intransitive Japanese verbs of motion accept a small number of types of accusative (direct object-like) arguments, but they are limited to a VERY small set of nouns, which doesn't qualify as "a normal direct object in normal circumstances".

To be practical, it's just a matter of remembering to attach the particle を to the places where the subject moves when
using movement verbs in japanese such as 歩く, 走る, 散歩する, etc. If you are already well aware of that but your question is in regards of whether these kind of verbs fit into the definition of transitive or not, good answers have been provided. However, I do not recommend to overthink it as long as you understand how it works and in what situations you should use it.

To expand a bit on Wareya's answer, I think that it is misleading or at superfluous to set a division between verbs that take a "normal direct object" ans verbs thar do not, because the very meaning of each verb, conveying a different action, will make it suitable or not to use with a particular object.

I can not think of situations such as "touching an idea", "throwing an exposition" or "holding a universe" (I made examples with what I think of as common transitive verbs). Another example, the verb 飲む only allows liquids as an object and its transitivity is out of doubt, but you wouldn' say 公園を飲む。Does it make the verb 飲む special in any way? not IMHO. The same applies to the other way around with 水を歩く。The confusion fades away as soon as one realizes that in Japanese, places are walkable, runnable, etc. and it is just fine if you abstract it from other languages standpoints. If you can provide a transitive verb either in Japanese or in English that makes sense with any kind of object, I may rethink my opinion, but my point here is that ALL transitive verbs allow only a limited set of types of objects. The size of this limited set will depend of course on the nature of each action itself, and I don't see why setting an arbitrary boundary between these transitive verbs in terms of how many objects they can take is useful or meaningful.

TL; DR: I can't grasp the concept of "a normal direct object in normal circumstances". Would you mind to explain it in detail? thanks.

Well, think about what english does. "walk" has transitive and intransitive versions. The transitive version is about making something walk, like walking a dog, or walking a lover home. The intransitive version always takes the subject to be the primary thing doing the walking, like walking home or walking around. However, when you give some type of "pathway" as the direct object to "walk", you don't get the transitive meaning, you keep the intransitive meaning: "I walked the lonely road home". This is definitely not the transitive version of walk, it's the intransitive version. Even though it has a direct object.

The arguments a verb can accept are part of, and consequences of, its meaning. Most Japanese verbs of motion don't have anything about causing something to happen to anything else in their meaning, unlike verbs like 破る or 解く. That's why you can't use "a normal direct object in normal circumstances" with them. However, even some verbs that don't have anything about causing something to happen to anything else can use direct objects in rare situations, like verbs of motion with pathways or locations. Why? Nobody really knows. Such verbs are definitely far more like typical intransitive verbs than typical transitive verbs, though, which is why the line between the two categories is drawn in the place it is.

Thank you for your reply. I think I see your point even though I do not share your idea that what makes a verb transitive (in particular "to walk") is getting the object to perform the action of the verb (that is the definition of the passive voice, indeed). As I understand, the action is carried out by a subject and the object, (and I am in the same page than you here) is the recipient of the action. I mean, I do not understand at all how a verb can be intransitive and have a direct object at the same time. I must say I'm not a native English speaker, maybe that's why I can not get it. In a side note, it is also worth noting that being the object means being the recipient of the action, but it does not necessarily imply that the object changes or suffers a change as a result of receiving the action (it may, though) which is perfectly compatible with the Japanese idea of walking the street i. e "I do the action of walking to the street".

for the word "inform": transitive 告げる vs. intransitive 密告 ,
vs information there is a word secret.

For almost all of synonyms of "walk": 1 intransitive 2. transitive or no

I guess 歩く is intransitive is right.

What you're really looking for is the difference between verbs with active-voice meanings (the subject is agentive) and passive-voice meanings (the subject is an experiencer). The verbs of motion that you can use the direct object marker with are also the ones with active-voice meanings. Transitivity is different, and only has to do with syntax, and only the syntax of normal situations.

Leebo, It is a sad fact because it hides the structure of the language to the student and makes learning more difficult.

The simple definition of transitive is that it means verbs that take direct objects. The idea here seems to be that we do something to the street by walking on it.
We can 'walk the street' and 'fly the sky'. Street and sky are direct objects. We can walk in the street in which case there is no direct object. We have a similar obvious distinction in German where walk in the street is 'in der Strasse' = indirect object (dativ) whereas walk into the street is 'in die Strasse' = direct object (ackusativ). In French it is 'je me promène' with a direct object.
There is a point here in that if you traverse a park walking just to transport yourself it is をwhereas if you have been told by your doctor that walking is good for you and you take the walk in the park it is で but you would use 散歩する in which case there is no problem.

I don't see how thinking about this を as "through" or something makes it more difficult to learn how to use particles for these words. It certainly doesn't make me sad.

If there was an epidemic of Japanese grammar being too much like English it might be a little easier for English speakers to learn, but that doesn't seem to be the case to me.

I mean, you don't say that the "walk" in "I walk down an empty aisle" is transitive just because the "walk" in "I was about to walk the dog" has a direct object. Words can have different syntactical behavior depending on the phrase they come up in. It's not weird for Japanese to have a thing where intransitive verbs of motion can temporarily be treated as though they're transitive in certain situations.

My sad comment does not apply specifically to を. There are fundamental structural differences between Japanese and Germanic languages and these are hidden by the over-reliance on using English grammar as a model. (which is a modified Latin grammar)
One example is that Japanese has no relative clauses. Instead the information content is used as a modifier. Since this modifier may contain a subject, the English centered student/teacher thinks that the sentence in question contains two subects which he has learnt is forbidden. The result is that some - otherwise good teachers- state that は is never used with a subject or that Japanese has no subjects whatsoever.
Miller's example op.cit. is another one.
In Swedish, German and related languages, an adjective inflects for genus and numerus. It never inflects for tempus or modus and it cannot be a predicate on its own. The japanese "i-adjective" is the opposit on all five; just as the Japanese verb is. The only similarity between an "i-adjective" and a Germanic adjective is that they can be used as modifiers but so can Japanese verbs. It would be much better to accept that there are no adjectives in Japanese and to say that European adjectives translate to Japanese verbs. That would make it easier for the student to understand why there are such forms as 高かった and 高くなければ. And to remember them and remember to use them. We do not need the word 'adjective' to understand that 高い is a word defining a property - we get that from understanding the meaning. Words like 'adjective' or 'verb' are there to tell us how the words are used syntactically and IMHO It is misleading to use the term 'adjective' on any Japanese word.

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I'm gonna cry myself to sleep tonight over the fact that before people have learned enough Japanese to be able to talk about Japanese grammar in Japanese, they talk about it using the language they know.

Did you read what i wrote? Your comment does not seem to apply. Is my English difficult to understabd? If so I apologize.
My two examples have nothing to do with the language used for talking about grammar and I did not feel the need to use the japanese words myself I was using words of latin origin and that works well (I hope).
I was trying to explain why I think that attempts to explain Japanese syntax by using words and structures that mainly apply to European languages, sometimes is misleading and that this makes learning more difficult. I have been subject to this difficulty myself and I know others who have been and are.
Sleep well.

Adjectives in predicate heads can only act as inherently stateful descriptors. As the language changes over time, verbs can evolve in and out of various levels of statefulness or agency, adjectives can't gain transitivity or eventness without undergoing inflection. That's the actual difference, not whether they modify nouns directly or need a copula to be a predicate or not.

Japanese's relative clauses are still relative clauses. Relative clause doesn't mean that it has a relative pronoun marking it, it means that you have a clause syntactically structurally somewhere inside of another clause. You can also use relative clauses to modify nouns that aren't the logical subject or object of the relative clause, even in English, like "The person the bomb blew up next to last night just ended up with a broken bone", where "person" is in the prepositional phrase starting with "next to" even though it's a mile away and structurally outside of it.

Modern linguistics doesn't work the way that school grammar works. Mixed transitivity, relative clauses, adjectives, etc. all apply universally across all languages and insisting otherwise is just exoticising Japanese and putting it on a special pedestal it doesn't have. Japanese DOES have special parts, but these aren't them, these are completely normal and you're only being especially aware of them because you were never taught what linguistics terminology really means.

Basically don't worry about it and place a little more trust in the academics who decide what their own jargon means when they apply it to stuff.

To return to the original question:
I just consulted Shogakukan's progressive English Japanese Dictionary fifth edition (ISBN978-4-09-510205-4). On page 2203 it calls walking on a street or other place a 'tadooshi' application. 'Tadooshi' is normally translated to 'exoactive' by linguists and is usually approximated to 'transitive'. It is of course more precise to use the words 'exoactive' and 'endoactive' rather than 'transitive' and 'intransitive' but these words are not generally known so I avoided them.

Exoactive and endoactive is a much more intuitive place to draw the line for 歩く and such, yeah. They're not borderline in some cases with that distinction, like they are for transitive and intransitive.

Wareya
You must first rectifie the names said Confucius.
The point is that the word adjective to a person speaking a germanic language means a certain set of rules how to use the word and five of six are wrong when applying them to Japanese. Thus the word 'adjective' is misleading to the student. It is as simple as that. Your comment may be absolutely right but it misses the point i am trying to make.
Most grammars agree that there are no relative clauses in Japanese. However, it does not matter what we call it. The information content of the European relative clause can be applied in the shape of a modifier without a relative pronoun. The clause or modifier or whatever can contain a subject. To someone who does not recognize it as a clause it looks as a sentence with two (or even more ) subjects. This has caused a lot of confusion to some people who try to understand the structure from an Anglosaxon point of view. No elmentary book I have seen adresses this in an adequate way but you can find it in Bruno Levin's 'Abriss der Japanischen Grammatik' He calls the phenomenon: "Verschachtelung"

Postscript
It is of course equally confusing when a complete sentence is used as a predicate. Japanese sntences are like Russioan dolls. Ther can be complete sentences inside complete sentenses inside...
To understand what is going on one has to abandone the European syntax rules. My lament is that this is not done and that reduces an elegant, logical and regular language to a less logical one with a number of "oriental quirks".

"Did you read what i wrote? Your comment does not seem to apply. Is my English difficult to understabd? If so I apologize."

You have repeatedly said this situation is "sad" and the situation basically boils down to you thinking that the English grammar words shouldn't be applied to other languages. The "cry myself to sleep" line was a reference to you using the word sad.

I think it's unreasonable to tell people who are starting out a language that they can't use any of the words they are actually familiar with. People need something to grab onto when learning a language, and then if they want to dig into the complicated native-level material later, when they have the foundation to understand all of these.

Just telling people "adjectives don't exist in Japanese" isn't going to help any beginner.

"空気を読みなさい".

Read between the lines and dig up a little compassion.

Is that directed at me? If it is, I don't see what it's a reference to. You'll have to "read" it to me.

As far as I can tell, this topic is about declaring that Japanese linguists are wrong without having any standing or research experience to make such a claim. Unless I missed where the OP indicated they have such experience. I believe they said they're a translator.

I don't deny that I have a blunt way of putting things, but I'm not the one making declarations about how an entire field should be run.

This is not a trial, this is a forum. In my opinion, OP is not "claiming" a truth that needs to be backed by an academic research. Forums are places to discuss and discussions should be approached with an open mind and a will to learn, if not they turn into ego battles and this hinders the purpose of the forum itself.