Chichibu

Chichibu is close enough to Tokyo that it shouldn’t feel remote, and remote enough that it does. We rode out on the Red Arrow express from Ikebukuro, the city thinning and the mountains closing in, and got off in a valley town wrapped on every side by wooded ridges. Nobody else on the platform had a suitcase. This is the paradox of the place — a whole mountain district of shrines and river gorges an hour and a half from the largest city on earth, and on an ordinary day you can have most of it to yourself.

Shrines and pilgrim temples

Chichibu is old, spiritually old. The town’s own Chichibu Shrine has stood in some form for two thousand years, its main hall carved with famously exquisite figures — three monkeys, a wise pair of dragons, small painted scenes tucked under the eaves that reward anyone who slows down enough to find them. Beyond the town, threaded through the whole valley, runs the Chichibu Fudasho, a pilgrimage circuit of thirty-four Kannon temples that walkers have followed for centuries. We did not walk all thirty-four — we are not that serious, and it was cold — but we found two or three, small and quiet and half-forgotten up their stone steps, incense going, a logbook for pilgrims to stamp. Lia stamped ours at a temple where the only other person was the cat.

The pink hills of spring

If you come in April or May you come, really, for one hill. Hitsujiyama Park spreads a slope below the mountains with over forty species of shibazakura — moss phlox, a low creeping flower that carpets the ground — planted in wide bands of pink, white, magenta and pale violet, so that the whole hillside reads like something spilled and left to run. Behind it rise the jagged peaks of Mount Buko, the limestone mountain that watches over Chichibu, its quarried face a strange scarred backdrop to all that softness. We were a fraction early and caught it half-open, the pink still filling in, but even then the smell of it, faintly sweet on the cool air, and the mountain above, made it one of those Japanese scenes that shouldn’t work and entirely does.

The night the floats climb the hill

The Chichibu Night Festival, the Yomatsuri, falls at the start of December, and people had told us it was one of the great festivals of Japan without quite conveying why. It is this: enormous wooden floats, gilded and hung with hundreds of lanterns, are hauled through the freezing streets by teams of chanting men, and on the final night the largest of them are dragged up a steep slope toward the shrine — a genuinely difficult, dangerous haul — while fireworks, rare for December, burst over the winter mountains above. We didn’t time our main trip for it and I’ve regretted it ever since; a friend who went described standing in the cold crowd as a lantern-covered mountain of a float inched up the hill to drums and the whole valley cracking with light. It’s why I’d go back.

Getting There

Chichibu lies in the mountains of western Saitama. The most comfortable route is the Seibu Railway’s Laview limited express from Ikebukuro to Seibu-Chichibu Station, around eighty minutes; regular Seibu trains cover it more slowly for less. From central Chichibu the shrine and Hitsujiyama Park are walkable, while the outer pilgrim temples and river gorges are best reached by local bus or a rented car. For the Night Festival on the 2nd and 3rd of December, book trains and any bed far ahead — the whole valley fills.