The Road to Nozawa

The car was set, our Winter tires ready, the five of us ready to go. Joined by Millo, Ken, Kazue, and her brother Dav, we set out en route for a festival that sounded too crazy to be real, deep within the mountainous prefecture of Nagano, in a small town called Nozawa. It was a long time coming, but we finally got the road trip we had been looking forward to for months. And what a good experience it was.
However, the road to Nagano is, simply put, quite short. So we decided to take our sweet time getting there, heading south-west then north, rather than simply north west, and ultimately adding some time before we got to our destination, not to mention some beautiful sights as well.

Our first stop was the often-romanticized city of Atami - known for its beaches, spas and, little had I known until then, numerous brothels. Atami in itself is very scenic, with a beautiful coastline which pretty much characterizes the whole area it's in, the Izu Peninsula, for which it serves as a good entrance point from Tokyo. But as it was, we chose only one place in Atami to stop at - and nothing would do but for that place to be Atami Castle!

Folks, don't get too excited about this seemingly wonderful castle overlooking the sea. Beautiful as that might sound, Atami Castle has, historically, never existed. That's right. It was built just for the sake of there being a castle there. If you can overlook that, though, the castle is a very handsome looking building, offers a great view of the whole city, and is pretty interesting to go inside. There, you'll find a small museum about castles, an exterior walkway with foot baths, a room where you can play ancient Japanese style dress-up in, and even an arcade. Who said a castle couldn't be fun, eh?

 But though I'm sure there's plenty of stuff to spend a day in Atami alone, we eventually got going, heading north towards our destination. Cutting across the Chubu province actually brought us very close to Mount Fuji, and there, at its very foot, was a town where we decided to make our second stop: Fujinomiya.

 The town, though quite sleepy, used to be the traditional starting point from where climbers would begin to ascend the fabled mountain. And at the mouth of that trail is the Fujisan Sengen Shrine, the most important shrine built in worship of the mountain. Though lacking the magnificence of the numerous other shrines in Japan, the Fujisan Sengen has a splendid garden, with ponds fed directly by Mount Fuji's waterfalls, resulting in exceptionally clear water where the fish can be seen from a distance. It probably wouldn't have been too hard to spear one or two, as Dav had said.

 Continuing north, we stopped at Matsumoto, Kazue and Dav's hometown (which has a splendid castle I stopped by on my first Japan roadtrip.) This time, however, Matsumoto was merely the point at which we decided to call an end to our first day of travel. Finding a ryokan in Matsumoto was, thanks to Ken, nothing too difficult, and we got a room to the five of us, which, despite being a little bare, was lots of fun together. The ryokan having an onsen was a welcome bonus, although the water was only a step below scalding.

 From the next morning on, our destination was within reach, and we made it there with little trouble. We found Nozawa Onsen covered in a deep sheet of white snow. Having finally made it, we were rewarded with a day of ski (my first in three years since coming to Japan.) But the true pearl of this whole voyage would be the festival that awaited us here in this seemingly sleepy ski resort town - the Dosojin Fire Festival.