Nasu

We arrived at Nasu tired and slightly sick of cities. Three weeks of Japan’s beautiful, relentless density had worn us down, and Lia said, half-joking, that she wanted to see a cow. Nasu delivered cows. It also delivered a cool, resinous mountain air that hit us the moment we stepped off the bus, and I felt something unknot in my chest. This is a highland the way the Japanese imagine highlands — gentle, green, faintly aristocratic, with a volcano smoking quietly overhead.

The Mountain and Its Steam

Mount Nasu, or Chausudake, is very much alive. A ropeway carries you most of the way up, and from the top station a rocky trail climbs to the crater, where sulphur vents hiss and stain the stone yellow and the wind comes hard enough to lean into. We hiked up on a bright, blustery morning, the plain of Kanto spread out behind us like a map. It’s not a difficult climb, but the mountain reminds you it’s serious — signs mark the shelters, the steam smells sharp, and the summit weather turns on a whim. Coming down, we passed the older Sessho-seki, the “killing stone,” a lump of volcanic rock wrapped in legend as the resting place of a murderous nine-tailed fox spirit. It cracked in two a few years back, which the internet took as an omen. Standing before it in the sulphur reek, I could see why people invented a demon to explain the ground.

Ranches, Milk, and the Imperial Air

Down on the plateau, Nasu is dairy country, and it wears it proudly. The ranches sell milk, cheese, and the kind of soft-serve ice cream that ruins you for all other soft-serve — dense, cold, tasting of actual grass-fed cream. We spent an entire afternoon grazing our way between farm stalls, unbothered, sunburnt, happy. There’s a genteel quality to the whole region, and it isn’t imagined: the imperial family keeps a summer villa here, the Nasu Goyotei, and part of its grounds opened to the public as a nature park. You feel the reason the emperors came. It’s the coolness, the green, the sense of a place deliberately kept unhurried. After weeks of trains and crowds, it was exactly the medicine we needed.

Soaking It Off at Shika-no-yu

Nasu has been an onsen town for over a thousand years, and its oldest bath, Shika-no-yu — the “deer’s hot spring,” named for a wounded deer said to have healed in its waters — is a plain wooden bathhouse of milky, sulphurous water and fierce heat. We went in the evening, the light going blue outside the steamed windows, and I lowered myself into water hot enough to make me gasp while an old local chuckled at the foreigner’s face. There’s a ritual here of dousing yourself in stages, moving between pools of different temperatures, and I fumbled it and got corrected, kindly. Afterwards we walked back to our inn boneless and pink, the mountain air cold on wet hair, and slept the deepest sleep of the whole trip.

Getting There

Nasu is refreshingly reachable for how remote it feels. The Tohoku Shinkansen from Tokyo to Nasu-Shiobara station takes about seventy minutes, and from there local buses climb up to the Nasu highland, the onsen village, and the ropeway base — reckon another forty minutes or so. A car makes the ranches and scattered farm stands far easier, and we half-wished we’d rented one. Come in early summer for the coolest air and greenest pastures, or in October when the volcanic slopes turn scarlet. Give it more than a day. We meant to give it one, and gave it three, and still left reluctantly.