Niigata

Wet air coming off the sea hits the mountains and unloads, and the towns underneath have been built accordingly for generations. Entrances sit raised above the street so that a door can still be opened in February. Shopping streets run under continuous covered arcades so that the pavement stays usable. Roof pitches and structures are sized for a load measured in metres rather than centimetres, and in the deepest valleys you will see second-floor doors that exist because that is where ground level ends up.

Noticing this turns an ordinary town into something worth walking. It also explains the region's reputation in Japanese literature, which is built on the sense of a place cut off for months at a time. If you come in winter, the arcades are not decoration — they are the reason the shops stay open — and walking a small town under a covered street while snow falls outside it is one of the more particular experiences in the country.

Three days for the mainland, five if Sado is in the plan. Niigata is long — it runs some 300 km down the Sea of Japan coast — and the two halves behave differently: the Joetsu end in the south-west is ski and sake country an hour and a half from Tokyo by shinkansen, while Niigata City and the northern coast are two hours out and face the island.

The routes that work. South: Echigo-Yuzawa, the Uonuma valleys and the Kiyotsu gorge, two days, no car needed in winter because everything is built around the ski traffic. Central: Niigata City, the rice plain and the breweries, two days. Sado: a two-and-a-half-hour ferry or a jetfoil of about an hour from Niigata port, and a minimum of two nights once you are there, because the island is bigger than it looks and its bus network is not.

Do not try to combine the far south and Sado in under five days.

The Joetsu Shinkansen reaches Niigata City in about two hours from Tokyo and Echigo-Yuzawa in around 80 minutes, which makes this the most accessible snow country in Japan. The Hokuriku Shinkansen clips the south of the prefecture at Joetsumyoko. Niigata Airport handles domestic and a few regional international routes. Sado is reached by ferry from Niigata port — the car ferry takes about two and a half hours, the jetfoil around an hour — and you will want a car once on the island, since bus service there is minimal. On the mainland, the Shinetsu and Uetsu lines follow the coast and plain, but the mountain valleys need driving.

Three things coincide here: the largest rice-growing plain in the country, soft water from snowmelt, and winters cold enough for a slow ferment. The result is a prefecture with close to ninety sake breweries, more than anywhere else, spread from the north of the coast down to the southern border.

Visiting them individually is a car problem and a language problem. The efficient answer is the tasting hall at the main station, which pours dozens of them by the small cup from a token machine, with salt on the counter to clear the palate between. Half an hour there tells you which houses you actually like, and you can then buy properly or make a detour to one brewery rather than guessing at six. Do it at the start of a trip rather than on the way home, when it merely becomes shopping.

The shinkansen down the middle is excellent and the local network is not. Echigo-Yuzawa is eighty minutes from Tokyo and Niigata City about two hours, and around the ski towns everything runs on shuttles because that is the business. That covers a winter trip without a car.

Outside the snow season, and anywhere off the shinkansen, a car changes the prefecture: the rice terraces, the coastal road north toward Yamagata, the inland valleys and most of the smaller breweries. On Sado a car or a rental scooter is close to essential — the island's buses are infrequent and built for residents, and the distances between the gold mine, the coast and the main towns are real.

The snow makes this the most seasonally divided prefecture on the Sea of Japan side. Between December and March the mountains are magnificent and the coastal roads north are frequently bad; between June and August the rice plain is hot, humid and green with nothing in particular happening.

The genuinely awkward window is late March into April, when the ski season is ending, the snow is dirty, the mountain roads have not reopened and the rice has not been planted. Come in May for the flooded paddies reflecting the sky, or September for the harvest. On Sado, avoid the winter crossing if you can — the Sea of Japan in a January storm cancels ferries and the island has no other way off it.

Snow defines the calendar. Yuzawa and the Myoko area hold some of the deepest reliable snowpack in the world and the ski season runs from December into April, with the shinkansen delivering you to the base of the lifts. Rice is planted in May, when the flooded terraces at Tokamachi mirror the sky, and harvested in September. Summers are humid and hot in the low 30s°C, with the coast a little cooler. Sado's ferries are weather-dependent and winter crossings are frequently rough. Autumn colour arrives in the mountains in late October. The Nagaoka fireworks fill the first days of August.

Koshihikari rice was bred here and the Uonuma district's crop is the benchmark other regions are measured against; it is worth eating plain, at least once. The sake breweries run from Murakami in the north to Itoigawa in the south, and Niigata Station has a tasting hall with dozens of them on tap by the cup. Hegi soba is bound with seaweed instead of egg and served in folded ribbons on a lacquered tray. Nodoguro, a fatty rockfish, is the expensive fish here, best grilled and best in autumn and winter.

A first visit should be the southern mountains in winter or the rice country in May. The winter case is straightforward: eighty minutes from Tokyo to genuinely deep snow, an onsen at the bottom of the run and sake brewed with the meltwater. The May case is quieter and better — the paddies are flooded and mirror-still, and the terraced hillsides of the interior are the landscape this prefecture is actually about.

The second visit is Sado. An island that held an imperial exile, a gold mine that funded a shogunate, a distinct folk-arts tradition and a coastline you can drive around in a day — and it is a ferry ride from a shinkansen terminus. Give it two nights, rent something to drive, and go between May and October.