Ueda

We came to Ueda because Lia had been reading about the Sanada, the clan whose six-coin crest you still see everywhere in this town, and who in 1600 held Ueda Castle against a Tokugawa army many times their size while the great battle of Sekigahara was decided elsewhere. History nerds, both of us, arriving by the shinkansen that now stops here in barely 90 minutes from Tokyo. The castle itself is mostly gone — the Tokugawa tore it down out of spite, the story goes — but the stone ramparts remain, and the surviving turrets, and a certain defiant atmosphere that a lot of prettier, better-preserved castles somehow lack. It felt like a town that had lost and never quite agreed to forget it.

The castle that punched above its weight

Ueda Castle Park is modest by Japanese standards — no soaring white keep, just earthworks, moats, and three reconstructed yagura turrets over the old Sanada gate. But the guide walking a school group told the story with such relish that we tagged along. Twice, he said, small Sanada forces used this river-cut terrain to defeat Tokugawa armies, the second time delaying an entire wing of the army so badly it missed Sekigahara altogether. You can still read the land: the steep drop to the Saigawa, the natural moats, the cramped approaches that turned numbers into a liability. There’s a shrine to the clan inside the walls now, hung with the six-coin banners, and a well the defenders supposedly used. Lia bought a little enamel pin of the crest and wore it the rest of the trip.

Bessho Onsen, the “little Kamakura”

A short local train — the two-carriage Ueda Dentetsu, rattling through rice fields — took us up into the hills to Bessho Onsen, which the town proudly calls the “Kamakura of Shinshu” for its cluster of genuinely ancient temples. We soaked first at Ishiyu, one of the little public bathhouses, in water so soft and faintly sulfurous it left our skin squeaking. Then we walked, still pink from the bath, up to Anrakuji temple and its octagonal pagoda — the only one of its kind in Japan, a slightly dizzying eight-sided tower of dark wood from the Kamakura period, standing in a grove so quiet we spoke in whispers without deciding to. An old woman sweeping the steps nodded at us as if we’d been coming for years.

The riverside town and its noodles

Back in Ueda proper, we spent the evening wandering the old Yanagimachi street, a preserved lane of dark-timbered merchant houses now holding sake breweries and cafes. We ducked into one of the breweries, were handed a tray of tiny cups, and came out cheerfully off-balance and carrying a bottle we didn’t need. Dinner was shinshu soba — this is Nagano, and the buckwheat here is taken seriously — served cold on a bamboo mat with a broth we were shown, gently, how to dilute correctly. Lia got it wrong on purpose to make the owner laugh. The Chikuma River slid by black and wide at the edge of town, and we crossed the bridge back to our inn under a sky absolutely crowded with stars, the kind Tokyo has taxed out of existence.

Getting There

Ueda is genuinely easy: it’s a stop on the Hokuriku Shinkansen, about 90 minutes from Tokyo Station and only 12 minutes from Nagano city, which makes it a fine base or a half-day detour. The castle park is a flat 10-minute walk from Ueda Station. For Bessho Onsen, transfer at the station to the private Ueda Dentetsu Bessho Line — a charming little single-track railway that takes about half an hour to reach the hot-spring village at the end of the valley. If you’re touring the region, Ueda pairs naturally with Bessho and, a little further on, the temples of Nagano; a car helps for the deeper hills but isn’t needed for the town itself.