The fog was only just starting to lift when the Beast and I rolled out of Komoro, a little before seven in the morning. It was Monday, but also Sports Day, the last day of the long weekend, so the town was still mostly asleep. The plan for the day looked simple enough on the map. Follow the Chikuma River downstream all the way to Nagano, then turn west and head up into the mountains to Hakuba, about 92 kilometers in total. And since rivers, as far as I know, only ever flow downhill, I had a feeling the morning was going to be kind to me.

About ten kilometers west of Komoro, in the town of Tomi, I turned off the main road and pretty much rode straight into a different century. Unno-juku is just one street, roughly 650 meters long, with old wooden houses on both sides, dark lattice windows, and heavy tiled roofs. A narrow stream runs right down the middle of it, with trees and little shrubs along its banks and flat stone slabs laid across it here and there, so people can get to their front doors. There were no cars, no flashing signs, nothing. Only a few people out for an early walk, and the sound of the water. All the shops were still closed at that hour, and with the holiday I don’t think they were in any hurry to open. I didn’t mind one bit, though. Having a place like this almost to yourself feels a little like sneaking into a museum before the doors open.

Unno-juku opened in 1625 as a post town on the Hokkoku Kaido, the road that connected the Nakasendo with the Hokurikudo along the Sea of Japan coast. It was a busy road, too. Gold from the mines on Sado Island traveled along it on its way to Edo, the lords of the Hokuriku domains marched through with their processions on their way to the shogun’s capital, and plenty of ordinary people walked it on pilgrimage to Zenko-ji temple in Nagano. There was already a post town right next door at Tanaka, but there were so many travelers that a second one was set up here. It helped that Unno already had a name for itself. Back in medieval times it was the home of the Unno clan, the most powerful family in eastern Shinano. The Sanada clan, the ones made famous by Sanada Yukimura and his red armor, traditionally claimed to have branched off from the Unno, although historians these days aren’t so sure about that.

I left the container hotel in Kanra at about 8:30 in the morning, a little later than I’d planned. I wasn’t too worried about it, though. After the 125 kilometers of the first day, Day Two looked almost like a day off, at least on paper, with just 62 kilometers to my hotel in Komoro, over in Nagano. The tricky part was hiding in the elevation profile. Somewhere in the middle of those 62 kilometers, the Beast and I had to haul ourselves, plus all my bags, over the mountains that separate Gunma from Nagano, and one look at the map told me some of those hills were going to be very steep.

As I rode west out of Kanra, the mountains started showing up ahead of me almost right away, and they looked nothing like the soft, rounded hills I’d seen on the horizon the day before. These were all sharp teeth and zigzag ridges, the kind of outline a kid might draw if you asked for “scary mountains.” What I was looking at was Mount Myogi. Strictly speaking, Myogi isn’t one mountain at all but a whole cluster of rocky peaks, the highest of which, Somadake, stands at 1,104 meters. They’re what’s left of volcanic activity some four to six million years ago, with wind and rain chewing away at the rock ever since, which is why they look so wild. Myogi is counted among Japan’s three most unusual landscapes, together with Yabakei in Oita and Kankakei on Shodoshima, and it’s also one of the Jomo Sanzan, the three famous mountains of Gunma, along with Akagi and Haruna.

Sayonara, dinosaurs, see you again! I took one last look back at the robot dinosaurs in front of Fukui Station, then pushed off and started the long ride back. Fukui likes to call itself the Dinosaur Kingdom, and it has earned that title fair and square. Digs around the town of Katsuyama have turned up so many fossils that several new species were named after the prefecture, like Fukuiraptor, Fukuisaurus and Fukuititan, and the prefectural dinosaur museum there is often counted among the world’s three great dinosaur museums. But Fukui turned out to be a lot more than dinosaurs. What I saw and learned in such a short time was honestly a bit overwhelming. I rode along a coastline that looked like some old master had painted it in sumi-e ink centuries ago. I walked through the ruins of a town that burned for three days straight and then lay hidden under farm fields for close to four hundred years. I climbed the steep corridors and stairways of a mountain temple where Zen monks spend their days among giant cedar trees. And, most important of all, I learned that dinosaurs are still alive.

Each of those is going to get its own post, I promise. Back in my Kanazawa article I said I’d be writing up this whole trip day by day, so this one covers Day One. To do it properly, though, we have to go back to the very beginning, to a sunny mid-October morning in Tokyo with 125 kilometers between me and my destination for the night, and the Beast, packed and eagerly waiting at the door.

Departing from Tokyo, I rode north through Kawaguchi in Saitama, and pretty soon I was on what would turn out to be my road for a good part of the day, the Midori no Healthy Road, or Green Healthy Road. It’s a walking and cycling path about 56 (!) kilometers long, running all the way from Kawaguchi up to Gyoda, where it stops at the Tone River. The road really goes on forever. One minute you’re riding between open fields, the next you’re squeezing (and nearly trespassing) past houses and backyards in some quiet suburb, and then you’re out in the fields again. Most of the time, there’s a narrow strip of water running right beside you, with thick greenery growing along both banks. For the first hour or so I just assumed it was a small, unimportant river.

If you’ve ever seen a photo of Kanazawa in Ishikawa Prefecture, there’s a good chance the big wooden gate in front of the station was in it. Funnily enough, it almost didn’t get built. Shirae Ryuzo, the architect who designed the station square, wanted it built only from the standard things a station actually needs, like a roof against the weather, a bus terminal and walkways. He wanted those things to look good because they were well engineered, not because someone stuck decoration on them. There was no gate anywhere in that design. Once the basic plan was done, he presented it to a council that included not just architects but also ordinary local residents. Several of them pretty much told him straight out that it didn’t feel like Kanazawa at all. What the city needed, they said, was wood and black roof tiles. He was a bit thrown by that at first. Eventually, he decided this was the local voice he should be listening to and went back to the drawing board. What came out is the Tsuzumi-mon, the Drum Gate, now one of the best-known and most photogenic symbols of the city.

I ended up in Kanazawa on my way back from Fukui, riding my e-bike. It was a rather short visit, though. I got into the city in the late afternoon and had just one evening to look around. By the next morning I was back on the bike and heading for Toyama. I’ll be posting the whole trip day by day soon, so think of this as a little side quest before the main story. With the little time I had, I did what a lot of people probably end up doing in Kanazawa without planning to, and spent most of it hanging around the station.

The gate stands right outside the east exit, which is officially called the Kenrokuen exit. There are two massive pillars, 13.7 meters tall, holding up a gently curved lattice roof. The whole thing is built from laminated Douglas fir. The pillars are the part that really caught my eye. They aren’t straight posts but bundles of wooden beams wound around each other in a spiral, and from across the square they look like two giant ropes standing on end. Up close, it’s honestly hard to work out how the thing stays up at all. The design comes from the tsuzumi, the small hourglass-shaped hand drum used in Noh theater, the one that makes that sharp “pon” sound with the drummer’s shouts in between. A tsuzumi has two drum heads tied together with hemp cords called shirabe-o, laced up and down around the body. The player basically squeezes those cords to change the tone. Those twisted pillars are the cords, blown up to the height of a four-story building.

I didn’t really plan the visit; it was more of a spur-of-the-moment thing. A typhoon had been crawling over Tokyo for most of the day, and by the evening it was finally moving off, leaving behind a light drizzle that doesn’t really bother anyone but keeps the streets wet and shiny. That’s actually the ideal condition for photographing a place like Golden Gai, so I headed out to Shinjuku before the pavement had a chance to dry.

If you don’t know it, Golden Gai is a small block of tiny wooden bars on the eastern edge of Kabukicho, a few minutes on foot from the east exit of Shinjuku Station. Small is the key word here. The whole area covers roughly 7,000 square meters, and inside that you’ll find six narrow alleys running east to west, one lane crossing them, and somewhere around 280 bars, most of them with a single counter and maybe five to eight stools. The buildings are two stories, sometimes three, wooden, and packed together so tightly that in most places two people can barely pass each other in the lane. Shinjuku is already one of the densest places in the country, and Golden Gai is pretty much at the top of that density chart. It really is its own little world in there.

I expected the rain to keep people away, but no. There were quite a lot of visitors wandering the lanes, and I’d say about ninety percent of them were tourists from overseas, which is more or less how it’s been for the past decade or so. Golden Gai was showcased in the Michelin Green Guide back in 2009, and the number of Western visitors apparently went up sharply after that, to the point where the alleys now fill up with foreign visitors night after night. The bar owners have adapted, for the most part, but they have also put up a lot of signs. Signs asking you not to shout. Signs asking you not to drink in the street. Signs asking you not to photograph the inside of the bars, which many of the owners are fairly firm about, and you can understand why when the entire bar is the size of a walk-in closet and everyone inside is about a meter from the lens. I kept my camera pointed at the alleys and left the interiors alone.

The Meiji Tunnel at Utsunoya is usually described as Japan’s first toll tunnel. That holds for the tunnel that opened here in 1876. It is not quite the tunnel you walk through today. The first one was built mostly of wood and lit by open oil lamps. After about twenty years a lamp set it alight and the whole thing burned and collapsed. The brick tunnel standing now is its replacement, finished in 1904.

I approached from the west, riding Route 1 back toward Tokyo on the Beast (my e-bike, if you two haven’t met yet). There is a turn off the highway that drops you into Utsunoya. The transition is quick: one minute you are on a national road with loud traffic, the next you are in a narrow, quiet hamlet with no sign of the road you were just on, and it feels like you accidentally slipped back in time.

Utsunoya sits on the old Tokaido, on the difficult stretch of pass road between the post towns of Mariko and Okabe. It was never a full post station itself, more a rest point on the climb, with teahouses for people crossing the pass. What is left is one main paved lane of old wooden houses running up the slope, with steep stairs cutting off between them. The city lists it as a protected townscape, and the pass road is a national historic site. People still live here, so it is a village first and a sight second.

For most of its history, the way past this mountain was to run.

Satta-yama drops straight into Suruga Bay. There was no dry ground at the bottom, nowhere to put a road. For centuries the road was whatever wet rock the sea left uncovered. If you had time, you waited for low tide. If you didn’t, you waited for a wave to pull back. Then you ran. Time it wrong and the sea took you. They called that stretch oyashirazu koshirazu: “parent doesn’t know child, child doesn’t know parent.” Everyone was on their own.

That same strip of shore is still the only flat ground here, and these days it is full. National Route 1, the Tokaido Main Line, and the Tomei Expressway all run through it side by side, crossing over each other in a gap barely wide enough to hold them. The pass above looks down on all of it, with Mount Fuji standing behind. That is the picture.

Hiroshige drew this around 1834, for the Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido. It is called Satta Peak at Yui. A crag rising on the left. Two wind-bent pines. Three small figures at the top of the cliff, one of them leaning out over the drop. Sails on the water, Fuji across the bay. Most of his series is busy with porters and teahouses and weather. But this one is rock and air, and you have to look carefully to find people in it.

The scene still lines up, more or less. The sails have gone. The pines have gone. The bald hill Hiroshige drew is under fruit trees and scrub. But the shape of the land is the same, and so is the angle on Fuji.

Once a year, on the night of Setsubun, the people of Ohara used to shut themselves inside this shrine and sleep on the floor of the worship hall, men and women side by side in the dark. The custom had a name, ohara zakone, which means something close to sleeping jumbled together like small fish. By the old account they were hiding. A great serpent was said to live in a pond called Obuchi, down the valley at Ide, coming out from time to time to take people. Gathering in the shrine to wait out the dark together is remembered as how the custom began.

None of that is on the sign at the shrine, and there is nothing left to see of it. The vigil is long gone, the pond is only a name now. On the afternoon I rode up I was the only visitor there.

Ohara is farming country in the north of Kyoto, better known for its temples, Sanzen-in and Jakko-in, and for the red shiso that turns the pickles here bright purple. Ebumi Shrine is not in the visited part. It sits off on the road up to the Ebumi Pass, the old crossing over to Shizuhara, a few hundred meters up a lane that follows a small river into the forest. I rode up from the valley floor, and the trees soon close in on both sides. The sound of Ohara drops away behind you until there is only the water and the birds.

It’s an odd place for a shrine. This is the head shrine of the eight villages of Ohara, the birthplace guardian for all of them, and it sits apart from all of them, up on the pass. Village guardian shrines usually sit among the houses they protect, but this one is out in the forest at the foot of the mountain, nowhere near the houses it watches over.

The first thing you’ll notice is that there are no railings. A bare plank walkway, 356 meters of it, laid low over a wide, shallow river, with nothing to hold on to. It carries no signs, no lights, nothing that would place it in the present century. It looks less like a bridge than a film set nobody bothered to take down, and a few weeks a year that’s pretty much what it is. It has the look of the Edo period for a practical reason: it is built to fall apart. When the Kizu rises past a certain point, the deck lifts off its piers and floats off downstream. That isn’t the bridge failing. That’s the bridge working. Locals call it Nagarebashi, the flowing bridge, and the nickname has stuck better than its official name ever did.

When the deck floats off, it doesn’t wash away. You’d think loose planks in a flooded river would be gone for good, but these don’t go anywhere. The deck is built in separate sections, and each one is cabled to the piers. So when the water lifts a section free, it just rides there in the current like a boat on a mooring, pulling at its line but going nowhere.

Tanuki figurines, those little (and sometimes quite big) plump raccoon dogs that turn up all over Japan, are dotted along the path. You can find them in ones and twos, tucked against steps and railings, said to number more than 300 across the grounds. Visitors have been leaving them here since about 1970, for no better reason than the name of the place: Tanukidani, “raccoon-dog valley”. So you climb the steps assuming that’s what the temple is named after. But it isn’t. The deity at the top of the 250 steps is written as 咤怒鬼, three characters meaning something closer to “the one who scolds the demons”. He is a Fudō Myō-ō, a fierce Buddhist guardian, with a sword in one hand and flames at his back. The exact opposite of gentle. By legend, one was placed here to guard the northeast corner of Kyoto, the direction bad luck was thought to come from. Those three characters his name is written in read the same as tanuki, but they mean nothing like a raccoon dog: scold, rage, demon. The one who snarls at whatever comes through the gate.

The climb begins at the cluster of figurines, where the steps start. The last of the lane up to it is steep enough that I pushed the bike the final stretch. The forest here is dense, and on a hot day it holds the cold. After the effort of getting up, the chill comes as a kind of reward. Bamboo runs through the trees. Partway up, the steps pass under a short tunnel of red torii, a compressed echo of Fushimi Inari – a few dozen rather than its thousands.