Nagano

The old highway between the two capitals ran through a valley in the south of this prefecture, and two of its post towns survive because the railway and later the expressway were built elsewhere and left them behind. One of them went further: in the 1970s the community agreed to bury the power lines, keep cars off the main street during the day, and refuse to sell or demolish the buildings.

That is why it looks the way it does in photographs, and it is also why it repays staying rather than passing through. The day visitors leave in the late afternoon and the street reverts to the people who live on it. The eight-kilometre stretch of the old road to the next post town is walkable in two to three hours over a pass, there is a service that moves your bag between the two ends, and doing it in that direction leaves the climbing behind you early.

Five days, and it is one of the few prefectures where that is an understatement rather than padding. Nagano is large, mountainous and has at least four separate destinations that do not chain: the city and its temple, the Kiso valley post towns, Matsumoto and its castle, and the Kamikochi highlands.

Distances. Tokyo to Nagano City is about ninety minutes by shinkansen; Nagano to Matsumoto is roughly an hour by limited express; Matsumoto to Kamikochi is around ninety minutes by bus, and private cars are banned from the valley. The Kiso valley is a separate line altogether, running south-west toward Nagoya, with Magome and Tsumago about an hour and a half from Matsumoto and joined by a walkable stretch of the old highway.

Three days forces a choice: city and Kiso, or Matsumoto and Kamikochi. Both are good. Doing all four in three days means seeing the inside of trains.

The Hokuriku Shinkansen reaches Nagano City in about 80 minutes from Tokyo. Matsumoto is on the Chuo line, roughly two and a half hours from Shinjuku by limited express, and the two cities are joined by the Shinonoi line rather than anything fast — treat them as separate bases. Kamikochi is reached by bus from Matsumoto via Shin-Shimashima, with private cars banned beyond Nakanoyu. The Kiso valley post towns are on the Chuo line, and Tsumago to Magome is a walkable eight-kilometre trail with a bag-forwarding service. Jigokudani is a Nagaden train plus a bus and a 30-minute walk. Mountain roads close under snow from November.

Almost everything here sits well above the plains, and the highland valleys people come for are higher still. The practical consequences catch out visitors arriving from a Japanese summer: nights are genuinely cold even in August, the sun at altitude burns faster than the temperature suggests, and weather in the mountain valleys turns much more quickly than it does on the coast.

Pack a warm layer and a waterproof even for a midsummer trip, and do not treat a highland day as a city day with better scenery. The same altitude explains the food — buckwheat and preserved river fish rather than rice and sea fish — and the short growing season behind it. It also explains the closures: the roads into the high valleys open in spring and shut again in late autumn on published dates, so a trip in the shoulder months should be checked against them rather than assumed.

Kamikochi is shut in winter and its access road opens around the middle of April; the highland roads over Norikura and Utsukushigahara open later still. Turning up in March for the Alps is a mistake with no workaround.

Golden Week and the middle of August fill the valley towns and the post towns completely, and the Kiso villages are small enough that this genuinely spoils them. Autumn weekends at Kamikochi have the same problem in concentrated form. The best windows are late May to June and the second half of September into October, both of which are quieter than the peaks either side and no worse for weather.

Rails handle the corridor — Nagano, Matsumoto, the Kiso valley — and they handle it well, which makes this an easier alpine prefecture than its geography suggests. The walk between Magome and Tsumago is a bus at one end and a train at the other, and the Kamikochi valley is closed to private vehicles anyway, so the bus is not a compromise but the only option.

A car earns its keep for the ski areas, the Norikura and Utsukushigahara highland roads, and the smaller onsen. It is close to useless for the headline attractions. If you are visiting between December and March, note that mountain roads close and the highland routes do not reopen until late spring.

Altitude means the seasons arrive at different times in different valleys. Kamikochi opens around mid-April and closes in mid-November, and its summer highs sit near 25°C while the Matsumoto basin below is above 32°C. High alpine trails are realistically July to early October. Ski season runs December to March, and Nagano hosted the 1998 Winter Olympics on that snow. The Jigokudani macaques use their hot spring year-round but the scene people come for needs snow, so January and February. Autumn colour descends from the peaks in early October to the valleys by early November. Soba is harvested and eaten new in late autumn.

Shinshu soba is the prefecture's staple because the highland climate suited buckwheat where rice struggled, and the Togakushi and Kiso areas are the names to look for. Oyaki are wheat dumplings stuffed with pickled greens, pumpkin or aubergine and grilled or steamed — farmhouse food from the northern valleys. Azumino grows most of Japan's wasabi in spring water channels near Matsumoto. The prefecture is also the largest producer of miso, centred on Suwa and Matsumoto, and the mountain villages preserve river fish and horse meat that flatland Japan rarely serves.

A first visit should be Matsumoto and Kamikochi. The castle is one of the surviving original keeps — steep, dark, wooden, entirely unlike a concrete reconstruction — and the valley behind it is the entry point to the Northern Alps, a flat river walk beneath three-thousand-metre peaks that requires no climbing at all. Two days, one bus, no car.

The second visit is the Kiso valley on foot. Walking the old post road between Magome and Tsumago takes two or three hours over a pass, the villages at either end preserve the shape of an Edo-period highway town, and a service will carry your bag between them so you walk unencumbered. Add Nagano City's temple, where you can join the pre-dawn service and walk the pitch-dark passage beneath the altar, and you have a very different prefecture from the alpine one.