Niigata Hidden Gems

Niigata is long, and the winter is the reason everything here looks the way it does. Wet air off the Sea of Japan hits the Echigo mountains and drops snow in quantities that have shaped the architecture — raised entrances, covered arcades along shopping streets, roofs pitched for a load measured in metres rather than centimetres. The Echigo plain behind the dunes is the largest rice-growing area in Japan, and the combination of that rice, soft snowmelt water and long cold winters is why the prefecture has close to ninety sake breweries, more than any other. Sado, two and a half hours offshore, was a place of exile for a thousand years and then a gold mine for the Tokugawa, and it still has an isolation the mainland lost. In the south, Tokamachi's hillsides are carved into terraced paddies, and the region hosts a triennial art festival that puts installations in disused schools and rice fields.