Hidden shrines and temples, forgotten roads and local history: stories, photos and videos of the Japan that lives between the headlines and the guidebooks.

I dropped the room key off at Sun City Hotel early in the morning, around seven if I remember right, then went out to do what I had done every morning of this trip. Before the Beast goes anywhere, I run through a checklist, half out loud, like a pilot who has watched a few too many movies. Keys, check. Battery, check. Phone and wallet, check. Route loaded in Garmin, check. Ortliebs clipped on properly, check. Helmet on my head, check. Everything, check. It sounds a bit silly, but by day seven it had turned into a kind of ritual.

This was the big day — the day I would finally reach Fukui Station. Compared to some of the earlier days, the distance was almost nothing, only around 40 kilometers, so it felt more like a victory lap than a real ride. I wasn’t in a hurry at all.

Kaga sits right at the southern edge of Ishikawa, so it didn’t take long before the road started to climb. On Route 8, the border between Ishikawa and Fukui runs over Ushinoya Pass, cutting right across the top of a tall, thickly forested hill. This part of Route 8 is a two-lane road with a steep slope, where the trucks don’t really slow down for anyone, so I stayed close to the edge, letting the motor do most of the hard work. Apparently, there are plans to dig a tunnel through the pass someday to get rid of that steep section, but for now everyone, trucks and e-bikes alike, still has to climb over the top. Right at the top, a sign welcomed me to… Fukui Prefecture and Awara City! Yes! When I stopped to take a photo of it, a big Costco truck came rumbling up the hill right behind me, which wasn’t exactly the welcome committee I had imagined.

Then came the reward for all that climbing. The other side was a long downhill where I barely had to touch the pedals for quite a while. Bit by bit the forest got thinner and the hills got smaller, and before I knew it I was cruising through the flat farmland of northern Fukui, with nothing but fields all around.

Some of the fields were still waiting to be harvested, glowing yellow and green. Fukui takes its rice quite seriously, for good reason. Koshihikari, the variety that has been Japan’s most widely planted rice for decades, was developed right here in 1956 at what is now the Fukui Agricultural Experiment Station. Its name basically means “rice shining in the land of Koshi,” Koshi being the old name for this part of Japan. So in a way, a lot of the rice people eat all over the country today has its roots in fields that look a lot like these.

Every morning on this trip has started pretty much the same way. I walk out of the hotel, find the Beast parked by the entrance under its silver rain cover, and take the cover off. In my head, I do it in one big swoosh, like a magician pulling the sheet off a car he’s just made appear out of thin air. In reality, it’s a lot more tugging, unhooking, and walking around the bike trying to figure out which corner is stuck, which is probably why nobody has ever clapped. I’m also not sure the Beast enjoys being undressed on the sidewalk in front of strangers every day, but it hasn’t complained yet. Toyama was no different. The cover got folded up and stuffed into the bag, and off we went. The rain from the day before had moved on, too, and there wasn’t a single cloud anywhere to interfere with my ride.

The plan for Day Six was a long ride of about 110 kilometers from Toyama to Kaga, a city in the southwestern corner of Ishikawa Prefecture, right on the border with Fukui. The ride would be almost completely flat. Great!

You might be wondering why I stopped in Kaga at all, because from there it’s only something like 36 kilometers to Fukui. I probably could have squeezed that in and wrapped up the whole trip on Day Six. However, I didn’t want to roll into Fukui in the evening, all tired and hungry, with the sun already gone. I wanted to get there around noon. Arriving in the middle of the day feels different. The city is awake, you still have the whole afternoon ahead of you, and there’s time to actually enjoy the fact that you made it. It’s also how my Tokyo to Kyoto ride ended back in May, when I got to Kyoto right around noon, so finishing this one the same way felt kind of right. A little tradition, if two times is enough to call it that.

I headed west out of the city on Route 8, the big national road that runs along this side of Japan all the way from Niigata to Kyoto. I’d been following it on and off since Day Four, so by now it felt a bit like an old acquaintance. Not exactly a friend, since it comes with a lot of trucks, but more like a neighbor you nod at.

Somewhere around Takaoka I stopped at a 7-Eleven for a late breakfast. Out of the whole row of onigiri on the shelf, one big one jumped out at me right away. It had “Hokuriku” printed in huge letters on a bright orange label, with a little outline of the Noto Peninsula next to it, and inside was rice cooked with kelp and a lump of tuna mayo on top. This one is only sold in this region (which is called Hokuriku), so you won’t find it in Tokyo, and that pretty much made the decision for me. When you’re on a trip like this, eating something you can’t get back home is half the fun. I ate it standing in the parking lot in the sun (which, if you ask me, is the correct way to eat an onigiri).

The road west of Takaoka runs through wide, flat farmland, and in the middle of October a lot of the rice was still waiting to be harvested. Some fields were already cut, others were still a deep golden yellow, and every once in a while there’d be a stripe of bright green right next to them, as if someone had run out of yellow paint. Every now and then a small cemetery would show up right in the middle of the fields, with no temple anywhere near it, just a few rows of gravestones surrounded by rice and the mountains far behind them. It’s a pretty common sight in the Japanese countryside, and apparently especially here in Hokuriku. Most of these are shared village graveyards, called kyodo bochi. Before the war, people could put up graves pretty much anywhere, and since the rice fields were where the whole village worked together every day, they were a natural place to keep the family close by.

The forecast for Day Five had said rain in Toyama from morning till night, which was the whole reason I’d booked two nights at the hotel. In the end, the rain turned out to be a lot gentler than it sounded, more of a steady, on-and-off drizzle than a real downpour. Still, a whole day in the saddle in it didn’t sound like much fun, and I’d already promised the Beast a day off, so I wasn’t about to go back on that now.

So here’s a fair warning before we go any further. If you came here hoping for more tunnels, mountain passes, and long stretches of coast like in the last few days, I’m afraid you’re going to be a little disappointed, because there’s no riding in this one at all. Instead, you’ll have to sit through a whole afternoon of glass art with me. I promise it’s a lot more colorful than it sounds.

For once on this trip, the plan from the night before actually happened more or less the way I’d imagined it. I found a café at the station and spent a good part of the day fiddling with AI on my MacBook, and every now and then just watching people outside shaking their umbrellas. After four days of riding pretty much from morning until it got dark, sitting still for that long felt kind of strange, and I kept getting this restless feeling that I was supposed to be somewhere.

At some point, though, I decided it was time to do something a bit more Toyama, preferably somewhere not too far away. The obvious choice was the Toyama Glass Art Museum. It’s in Nishicho, in the older part of downtown, about 1.5 kilometers south of the station, so it was a bit of a walk.

The building the museum is in is called TOYAMA Kirari, and it’s pretty hard to miss. From the outside it’s a big, rounded block covered in roughly 1,000 tall panels of glass, aluminum, and granite, all set at slightly different angles so each one catches the light a little differently. Kirari is a Japanese word for a quick sparkle or glint, so the name sums it up well. The idea was to make the outside look like the Tateyama mountains, the big range that stands behind the city, and on a sunny day I’m sure the whole thing glitters. Under a heavy grey sky it looked a bit more serious, but it still stood out from everything else on the street. It was designed by Kengo Kuma, one of the best-known Japanese architects today, who also worked on the design of the National Stadium in Tokyo for the 2020 Olympics. The museum only takes up part of the building, though. It also houses the main branch of the city library, a café, a museum shop, and on the ground floor, a bank, which explains the green Toyama Daiichi Bank sign by the entrance.

When I got to Hakuba the evening before, the sun was already behind the mountains, so all I could really see of them was a dark, jagged outline against the sky. I knew they were big, of course, but I didn’t really know what they looked like. So the next morning, when I wheeled the Beast out of the guesthouse entrance onto the road and looked up, I kind of forgot what I was doing for a minute. The sun was now on the other side of the valley, shining straight onto the peaks and lighting up all that bare rock in a soft gold, with a long band of white cloud hanging across the middle of them. Exactly what you’d expect from a proper Alpine region.

So, of course, the photo session from the day before started all over again. I’d ride maybe a hundred meters, see the mountains from a slightly different angle between two buildings or behind some trees, and stop again. And then again. It was honestly really hard to stop. At some point I had to convince myself to get going, because I had about 130 kilometers ahead of me, and at this rate I’d get to Toyama sometime next week.

The good news was that a big part of those 130 kilometers would be downhill. Hakuba is at roughly 700 meters above sea level, so the first half of the day was basically about getting from up here down to the coast, and then following the coast west to Toyama. In the end, something like 40 or 50 kilometers of the ride went downhill. Not all of it, and not the whole time, but most of it, and it felt great. After two days of climbing up the Usui Pass and the Olympic Road, it felt like I’d finally earned it.

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 pretty much 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 an easy one.

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 and no flashing signs, just a few people out for an early walk and the sound of the water. All the shops were still closed at that hour, and since it was a holiday, I don’t think anyone was in a hurry to open. I didn’t mind at all, 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 was carried along it to Edo, the lords of the Hokuriku domains passed through with their processions on the way to the shogun’s capital, and lots 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 also helped that Unno was already a well-known place. In medieval times it was the home of the Unno clan, the most powerful family in eastern Shinano. The Sanada clan, famous mostly because of Sanada Yukimura and his red armor, traditionally claimed to be a branch of the Unno family, although historians today aren’t so sure about that.

I left the container hotel in Kanra at around 8:30 in the morning, a bit later than I’d planned. I wasn’t too worried, though. Compared to the 125 kilometers of the first day, Day Two looked almost like a rest day, at least on paper, with only 62 kilometers to my hotel in Komoro, over in Nagano. The tricky part was the elevation. Somewhere in the middle of those 62 kilometers, the Beast and I, plus my two panniers, had to get over the mountains between Gunma and Nagano, and just from looking at the map I could tell some of those hills were going to be pretty steep.

Riding west out of Kanra, I started seeing the mountains 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 sharp and jagged, with zigzag ridges, pretty much what a kid would draw if you asked for “scary mountains.” That was Mount Myogi. Technically, Myogi isn’t one mountain but a whole group of rocky peaks, and the highest of them, Somadake, is 1,104 meters tall. They’re what’s left from volcanic activity some four to six million years ago, and wind and rain have been wearing down the rock ever since, which is why they look so rough. Myogi is counted as one of Japan’s three most unusual landscapes, along with Yabakei in Oita and Kankakei on Shodoshima. It’s also one of the Jomo Sanzan, Gunma’s three famous mountains, together 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 really has earned the name. 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 listed as one of the three great dinosaur museums of the world. 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 and then stayed buried under farm fields for almost 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.

I’ll write a separate post about each of those, I promise. In my Kanazawa article I said I’d write about this whole trip day by day, so this one is Day One. To do that properly, though, we need to go back to the start, to a sunny mid-October morning in Tokyo, with 125 kilometers to go until my destination for the night, and the Beast all packed and ready by the door.

I left Tokyo heading north through Kawaguchi in Saitama, and soon I was on the road I’d stay on 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 that goes all the way from Kawaguchi up to Gyoda, where it ends at the Tone River. It really does feel endless. One minute you’re riding between open fields, then you’re squeezing past houses and backyards in some quiet suburb (I felt like I was almost trespassing), and then you’re back in the fields again. For most of the way there’s a narrow strip of water right next to the path, with lots of greenery on both banks. For the first hour or so, I just thought it was some 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.