My brother-in-law has a T-shirt that puns, "Come to Ithica it's Gorges", or take the train to Takayama. Indeed the guidebook's bad pun was not off the mark. While the ride from Tokyo to Nagoya was interesting, you never really leave urban sprawl the whole way. The south coast of Honshu is much like the eastern seaboard or California between San Diego and Santa Barbara. But at Nagano we swtched trains and veered inland and up. The route is spectacular. Steep volcanic slopes leap upward on either side of a river. The walls impossibly vertical but for the rigid volcanic rock that forms them. It's very forested here, Japan is the most forested nation on Earth. Where there is flat land it is cultivated for rice, but only the modest slopes can be terraced. The rest are left to the forest (and I imagine the hope that the roots keep the slope in place come typhoon season).
The forests are dense and old, but not first growth. A little over four-hundred years ago Japan was rather badly deforested. But after Tokogawa consolidated control of the country he put in place laws protecting trees from wonton destruction, and mandating the planting of new ones. The result four centuries later is an environmental success story.
While not first growth, the forests don't seem planted. I've heard that elsewhere huge areas are covered in the perfect ordered rows of trees planted for future clear-cutting, but here this wasn't the case. Every once in a while the mountainside forest would be accented by the light pink of a Sakura in bloom. Whether truly growng there by nature or planted I can't say.
Outside of the city one also sees a great deal of traditional architecture. The rooflines and facings of the houses here still resemble the curved pitch and shoji walls, even when the back or sides of the house are just like those of suburban Kansas.
Takayama itself is a really charming little place. We stayed in a little Ryokan, a traditional Japanese Inn. This is a great experience. Japan is clean, and cleanliness the national obsession. With the Ryokan you see the practices that make this happen. As soon as you arrive you switch into slippers for walking through the house. There are separate slippers for walking in the bathrooms. In bedrooms, dining rooms etc. you leave your slippers in the hall and walk barefoot or in socks. At least you're supposed to. The amiable old proprietor nearly choked when Susan accidentally took two steps into our spotless room with her immaculate slippers. “Sumimasen”, a bow and a sheepish look acquitted our faux pas.
After Tokyo, the room was a palace. In Tokyo I could touch both walls with flat hands. Here we had a place to sit and have tea, place for the futons, a corner to dump our bags... Ahh luxury.
Having only eaten Bento boxes on the train, we set out for some food. A bento box is a Japanese to-go meal. It might be sushi, noodles, fish soup, whatever, but it's cheap, delicious and come complete with little handi-wipes. Turns out this region is known for... Hida beef! Oh how we feasted. Lunch was Hida beef sushi and Hida beef soup and noodles. Dinner at a really fun, really hospitable place filled with Japanese tourists was Hida beef that you cook yourself on a grill on the table (not to break the chronological narrative, but Sunday's lunch was Hida Bento Boxes on the trains). This stuff is gooood, and it's amazing how you will eat meat that is far less cooked when you know it is local, fresh and not from a factory.
The town itself a huge tourist draw for Japanese because of it's authentic Edo period buildings and architecture. A whole district is still the same builidings from way-back-when and there are many shrines ringing the town. Even outside of the sanctioned tourist-swarmed (it is a weekend) historic district, most of the city has kept the character. We took a nice walk through town and up through a sacred hill over the city preserved for trees and nature.
Everywhere in the city one hears the sound of water. There is a large river bisecting the city, and a fairly large stream the winds through the historic district. But every street also has deep gutters of flowing water on both sides. I couldn't find an english language history or accounting for this. However, there are canals along the sides of the stream and river than carry large volumes of water at a different height. These drain into and out of the gutters, so it is clearly deliberate. In the historic district there was a funny little automaton powered by a water wheel, and there are many planters and faux-antique water wheels for sale at the trinket shops so I suspect this was some form of early hydro-power. Whether it also served as sewer and water-source (since it is on BOTH sides) I don't know. In any case it is an enginering marvel. Like the castles in Tokyo, a reminder that Japan had a population equivalent to that of all of western Europe during this period. The availability of labor realized ambitious civil works unimaginable to Europeans of the time.
