Shiga

Most lakes are geologically young and fill with sediment within tens of thousands of years. This one is around four million years old, which is long enough for isolated populations in it to have become species that exist nowhere else on earth. It is a scientific site as much as a scenic one, and the local museum on the eastern shore is unusually good on exactly this.

It also explains the strangest thing on the local menu. A crucian carp from the lake, salted and then fermented in rice for a year or more, produces something sharply sour that most visitors find confronting and that is the direct ancestor of sushi as the rest of the world knows it — the rice was originally the preservative and was thrown away. Order a small portion with sake rather than a plate of it, and treat it as the historical document it is.

One day if you are based in Kyoto, two if you want the lake properly. Shiga is the prefecture next door to Kyoto and its main feature is Japan's largest lake, which is a scale problem rather than a sight — you cannot see Lake Biwa in the sense of standing somewhere and taking it in.

The routes. East shore: Hikone for one of the surviving original castle keeps, about fifty minutes from Kyoto by train, plus Omi-Hachiman's canal district twenty minutes back down the line. That is a strong single day. West shore: Otsu, the Enryaku-ji monastery complex on Mount Hiei above it, and the lakeside shrines, another day and partly by cable car.

Two days does both shores. Adding the northern end at Nagahama and the Ibuki foothills is a third day and needs a car to be worth it.

Shiga is unusually easy because the Tokaido line runs along the lake's south and east shores — Kyoto to Otsu is ten minutes, to Hikone about 50, and Maibara is a shinkansen stop. That covers Hikone, Omi-Hachiman and Nagahama without any planning. Mt. Hiei is reached from the Kyoto side by cable car and ropeway or from Sakamoto on the Shiga side. The western shore has the Kosei line for Shirahige Shrine and Omi-Maiko. The awkward parts are the inland valleys and the Shigaraki pottery area, which needs the single-track Shigaraki Kohgen Railway or a car. Cycling the full lake circuit takes two to three days.

The temple complex on the mountain above the south-western shore was, for centuries, the training ground of Japanese Buddhism. The founders of nearly all the major schools that came afterwards studied there before going out to establish their own lineages, which makes it the single most consequential religious site in the country and one that most visitors to the old capital next door never climb to.

It was also a military power in its own right, with armed monks, and was destroyed for it in the sixteenth century; what stands today is largely later rebuilding spread across a wooded ridge in three separate precincts. Allow most of a day and expect walking between them rather than a single compound. Go up by cable car, start at the far precinct and work back, and dress for a mountain — it is markedly colder up there than beside the lake.

Nothing about Shiga is seasonally ruined, which makes it a good wet-weather or shoulder-season alternative to Kyoto. The two things worth timing are the cherry blossom at Hikone Castle, which is late in the Kansai season and correspondingly busy, and the winter, when Mount Hiei is genuinely cold and the ropeway operates on reduced hours.

The thing to avoid is treating Shiga as a Kyoto day trip taken at the end of a long trip. The towns close early, the last useful trains back are earlier than Kyoto's, and arriving at three in the afternoon leaves you an hour at the castle before the ticket office shuts.

Trains, easily. The main line up the east shore is frequent and fast — this is a commuter corridor for Kyoto and Osaka — and the west shore has its own line plus the cable car and ropeway up Mount Hiei. Almost everything a visitor wants is a short walk from a station.

A car is worth having only for the northern lake and the inland valleys, where services thin. It is a disadvantage in Hikone and Omi-Hachiman, both of which are compact walking towns. The one thing to note is that circling the entire lake by car takes most of a day and is not a rewarding drive for most of its length.

Omi beef is one of the oldest branded beefs in Japan, raised on the plain east of the lake and sold in Omi-Hachiman and Hikone. Funazushi is the local extreme: crucian carp from the lake salted and fermented in rice for a year or more, sharply sour, and the direct ancestor of modern sushi — worth trying once, ideally in a small portion. Lake fish simmered in soy and sugar as tsukudani appear on every souvenir shelf. Sake breweries cluster in the north around Nagahama, using snowmelt water off the Ibuki range.

The northern lakeshore is snow country — Nagahama and the Makino area get real falls from December to February, while the southern end near Otsu stays mild with January highs around 8°C. Summers are humid and hot, above 33°C in the basin, though the lake moderates the shore slightly. Autumn is the best season: Mt. Hiei and the Hikone castle grounds colour in mid to late November, and the lakeside cycling route is at its most comfortable. Cherry blossoms at Kaizu-Osaki line the water in early April. The lake is at its clearest for swimming in July and August.

A first visit is Hikone plus Omi-Hachiman, and the reason is the castle: it is one of about a dozen keeps that survived in original timber, the climb inside is up ladder-steep stairs in the dark, and it sits above the lake with a garden below it. Omi-Hachiman down the line is a merchant town built on canals, with a mountain behind it and a boat you can take through the reed beds.

The second visit is Mount Hiei. Enryaku-ji was the great monastic power of medieval Japan until it was burned by Nobunaga in 1571, and what stands now is a scattered complex across a forested ridge, reached by cable car from either Kyoto or the Shiga side. It is atmospheric, thinly visited and completely different in character from the temples down in the city.