Aomori Hidden Gems

Aomori is two cultures with a bay between them. West of Mutsu Bay is Tsugaru, the old Hirosaki domain, with its castle, its orchards and a dialect other Japanese speakers genuinely struggle to follow. East is Nanbu, centred on the fishing port of Hachinohe, governed separately for centuries and still distinct in food and speech. The apples are not decoration on the landscape but the landscape itself: the prefecture grows most of Japan's crop, and the roads around the Iwaki foothills run through orchards for kilometres at a stretch. Two of the things most worth travelling for are protected precisely because nothing was done to them — Shirakami-Sanchi, one of the last large stands of virgin beech forest in East Asia, and the Jomon settlement at Sannai-Maruyama, occupied for well over a thousand years before rice farming reached the north. Behind Aomori City, the Hakkoda mountains catch some of the deepest snowfall recorded anywhere on earth.