Can’t See the Forest for the Tourists
When Tokyoites want to escape, they go to Kamikochi. All of them, apparently
EVERY COUNTRY should have its Shangri-la; perhaps this is Japan’s. Thrust upward by tectonic mischief, Kamikochi, in the center of Japan’s main island, attracts millions every year. Cool, green larch woods flank the slight but lively Azusa River that plunges through an erratic necklace of precipitous granite known in Japanese as “the mountains of the standing ears of corn.”
So pristine are Kamikochi’s habitats, so dreamy its peaks, that access has to be limited by banning private cars. That doesn’t stop thousands of visitors from arriving each day to tramp its narrow trails. The crowds are inevitable. Japan’s 127 million are crammed largely into super-cities, and much of its hinterlands have been ruthlessly cemented, and laid to waste. What’s left is a deeply mountainous backyard—80 percent of Japan is valleys and hills—often too steep to explore or filled with dam water.
Those in their 20s are keenest to move out of Tokyo, but relo- cating near Kamikochi is a tough option, according to some who have made the move. It’s hard to find somewhere to live, says Ken Yamaguchi, who owns a ski lodge south of Kamikochi. “Locals only really rent to those they know and trust,” he says. It took him three years to find a home for his family after he decided to leave his job as a social worker in Tokyo.
His offspring may not thank him for bringing them to a wilderness filled with black bears: Frequent signs on the trails warn of their danger, and hikers are advised to wear bells, whose tinkling is supposed to scare bears off. But wildness, or at least the appearance of it, is the region’s strength. There are few of the tawdry convenience stores that squat like succubi all over Japan, and less of the concrete “rurban” blight that characterizes much of rural Japan.
The scarcity of buildings has another effect. Accommodations in the valley are expensive, though around its rim are plenty of hotels with spas that tap into the region’s scalding volcanic waters. A few even have open-air baths hewn out of rock, surrounded by not much more than shrubs and sky. At others, such as Shirahone Onsen just to the south of Kamikochi, you’re encouraged to drink the water. Silky with sediment, it tastes primal: mud and earth, with more than a touch of the chemistry set.
After the soaking and sipping comes the hiking. And the crowds, tramping the paved paths that run along the pebbly Azusa, their bear bells tinkling. Japanese bush warblers call from their hiding places in the dwarf bamboo, the air is green and sweet, and you can begin to believe the local translation of Kamikochi as “where the gods descended.”
If they did, they’d have to stay on the path. Wandering off-piste is not tolerated at Kamikochi. “This is perhaps how the Japanese have come to experience nature,” says Shawn Mcglynn, a rangy, friendly young biologist from Montana, whom I meet over breakfast at the Northstar. “But it feels weird walking on a paved road in a so-called wilderness.” Without much access to the wild, the Japanese have come to prefer an ordered, safe version of it—sting removed, tidy, pleasant and unchallenging.