Okazaki

Everyone told us Okazaki was a stop between things, a name you pass on the way from Nagoya to somewhere prettier. So of course we got off the train. It was Lia’s idea, made on the strength of a single sentence in a guidebook about eight-hundred-year-old miso, and I have learned to trust her when she gets that particular look. We walked out of the station into a bright, unremarkable Japanese city, the kind with pachinko parlours and phone shops, and I’ll admit I doubted her for about twenty minutes. Then we reached the river, and the castle, and the doubt quietly folded itself away.

The birthplace of a shogun

Okazaki Castle is a reconstruction, and I usually shrug at reconstructions, but the story underneath it is real enough to give you goosebumps. Tokugawa Ieyasu, the man who ended a century of civil war and locked Japan into two and a half centuries of peace, was born inside these walls in 1543. Standing in the park, I tried to feel the weight of that and mostly felt the sun and the crows. What did land was small: a well they say was drawn from at his birth, a statue of him as a fat, serene baby, and Lia reading the placards aloud in a deliberately grave voice until we both cracked up. History is easier to love when you’re allowed to laugh at it.

Down the Hatcho miso road

The real pilgrimage was five hundred metres west, in the old district called Hatcho, where two rival houses have been making the near-black, ferociously savoury Hatcho miso for centuries. We took the tour at Kakukyu, ducking into a cavern of a warehouse where wooden vats taller than me stood crowned with pyramids of river stones, thousands of them, stacked by hand to weight the fermenting paste. The air was thick and sour-sweet and got into everything. Lia bought a tub of miso and a miso-flavoured soft-serve ice cream, ate the second while carrying the first, and declared it the strangest and best dessert of the trip. She wasn’t entirely wrong.

The river at the blue hour

We’d meant to catch an evening train, but the Otogawa river stopped us. Along its banks Okazaki has strung the promise of one of Japan’s great cherry-blossom seasons, and even out of bloom the avenue of bare trees framed the water beautifully as the light went soft and violet. Families were out walking dogs. A boy practised trumpet badly and bravely under a bridge. The castle lit up gold across the river, and Lia leaned on the railing and said this was the sort of place people live in without ever thinking to brag about it, which felt exactly right. We missed the train we’d planned on and caught a later one, still smelling of miso.

Getting There

Okazaki sits on the main line between Nagoya and Toyohashi in Aichi Prefecture. The fastest approach is the Meitetsu Nagoya line to Higashi Okazaki Station, about thirty minutes from Nagoya and a short walk from the castle park and the Hatcho miso district. JR’s Okazaki Station is a little further from the sights, so the Meitetsu route is the one to choose. It makes an easy half-day from Nagoya, but give it longer if you can, especially in early April when the riverbanks turn to cloud.