Gunma Hidden Gems

Gunma is landlocked, mountainous on three sides, and sits on so much geothermal water that hot springs are less an attraction than an industry. Kusatsu alone discharges more litres per minute than any other resort in Japan, at temperatures too hot to enter directly — which is why the yubatake in the town centre exists, a wooden cooling apparatus that doubles as the main square, and why the yumomi paddle-stirring performance survives. The plain around Maebashi and Takasaki was silk country: Tomioka's mill, built in 1872 with French engineers and machinery, industrialised the trade that paid for Japan's early modernisation, and the buildings are still standing in full. Above the plain the land rises to Mt. Haruna and Mt. Akagi, both collapsed volcanoes with lakes in their craters, and to the Oze marshes on the northern border. The winds off those mountains in winter are dry and hard enough to have their own name locally.