Yokote

Tohoku, Japan · Town / small city, Countryside / satoyama, Snow

Three municipalities in inland Akita that itineraries skip on the way south from Kakunodate. In February Yokote builds snow houses with an altar to the water deity inside and children who invite you in for sweet amazake, and two days later poles over five metres tall, topped with a bamboo basket, are shoved up to a shrine on the hill. In Masuda, more than forty merchant houses hide a storehouse under the main roof where the street cannot see it, and one of them holds the museum that keeps over four hundred thousand original manga pages, with free admission to the permanent display. Twenty kilometres south, a crack in a sixty-metre cliff spits boiling water, and higher up there is a hot-spring waterfall you can get into, in a swimsuit, from July to September. And in August, in the village of Ugo, they dance with their faces covered one of the forty-one dances UNESCO inscribed in 2022.

The essentials

Getting there

Car — Yokote is on the JR Ou Main Line, not the shinkansen. The usual way from Tokyo is the Akita Komachi to Omagari and a change there onto the Ou Line southbound: about 3 hours 40 minutes all in, by the city's own published times. Two alternatives take much the same: Tohoku Shinkansen to Kitakami then the Kitakami Line (about 4 hours), or Yamagata Shinkansen to Shinjo then the Ou Line north (about 5). From Akita it is 1 hour 20 minutes direct; from Sendai 2 hours 10 either way; from Morioka an hour and a half changing at Omagari. By car the city reckons 48 minutes from Kitakami and 52 from Akita. Akita airport is an hour away by road with nine flights a day from Haneda. Inside the area a car changes a good deal: Masuda is 25-30 minutes by bus from the east exit of Yokote station, but there are only four departures a day (9:50, 13:38, 15:00, 16:05) and some do not run at weekends or on holidays; Oyasukyo has a bus from Yuzawa station, but Kawarage and its waterfall are 45-50 minutes away by car with no public transport. Snow tyres in winter: the kamakura are built from what falls on the city itself.

Frequently asked questions about Yokote

What to do in Yokote: 12 activities

• Four hundred thousand original pages, and it is free to go in 2 h must-see Masuda, Yokote · 30 min

  The Masuda manga museum is not about published volumes but about the original: the hand-drawn page, kept here in storage. It holds over four hundred thousand. The permanent display is free and you pay only for the temporary one, ¥800 adults, ¥600 high school, ¥400 junior high, ¥200 elementary, under-sixes free, with an annual pass at ¥3,000. Open 10:00 to 18:00 with last entry at 17:30, closed the third Tuesday of each month, or the next day when that is a public holiday. 180 free parking spaces. That a museum like this sits in a storehouse village in inland Akita and charges nothing to enter is part of the story.

• Masuda: the storehouses the street cannot see 2.5 h must-see Masuda, Yokote · 30 min

  Some four hundred metres of Naka-Nanoka street with more than forty merchant houses, and the trick is that the storehouse is not out back in the yard but inside the house, under the main roof: from the street you see nothing. The national dossier describes them as saya-tsuki dozo, earthen storehouses with a wooden sheath around them, and explains that the rear structures are chained together to cope with the snow. A protected district since 27 December 2013, 10.6 hectares, classified as a zaigomachi or inland market town, on a road that left the Ushu highway towards the Sendai domain's lands. Walking the street costs nothing; going inside the storehouses varies house by house and is worth confirming with the Masuda tourism association (0182-45-5541).

• The Nishimonai bon odori, danced with the face covered 3 h must-see Nishimonai, Ugo · 35 min only 16, 17 and 18 August, fixed dates

  16 to 18 August, all three days, on Honmachi street in Nishimonai. What makes it different is that you cannot see anyone's face: some wear a curved-brim straw hat pulled down to the eyes and tied with red cord, others the hikosa-zukin, a black cloth hood with two eye holes. Which is why it is also called the dance of the dead. There are two dances, the ondo, slow and the first children learn, and the ganke, faster and harder. The patchwork silk costume, the hanui, is for women only and has to be earned: according to Ugo town, a woman does not put it on until her family and her neighbours judge her dancing good enough. The state designated it an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property on 21 January 1981 (the town says it was the first bon odori to be so designated) and it is one of the forty-one furyu-odori UNESCO inscribed as intangible heritage on 30 November 2022, at the 17th committee, meeting in Rabat. Ugo's tourism association announces neither admission nor hours.

• The snow houses and the water deity 3 h must-see only the second Friday and Saturday of February (since 2026; it was 15 and 16 before)

  Mind the dates, because they changed: since 2026 the kamakura are no longer the usual 15 and 16 February but the Friday and Saturday before the bonten, which in practice is the second Friday and Saturday of the month. The city publishes 12-13 February 2027 and 11-12 February 2028; the tourism association frames it as a trial running to 2029. Almost everything written abroad will send you two days late. What you visit are snow houses about three metres high on a circular base of three and a half, with half-metre walls and a 1.30 by 0.70 mouth. There is no party inside: there is an altar to the water deity. The children who occupy them call you in with two lines of dialect, haitte tanse (please come in) and ogande tanse (please pray to the water deity), and give you amazake and mochi. The city reckons it is about 450 years old.

• Bathing under a hot-spring waterfall 2 h Kawarage, Yuzawa · 70 min only bathing from early July to mid-September

  A twenty-metre fall with the pool below turned into an open-air bath, no building and no ticket desk. The season when the water is right to get into runs from early July to mid-September, which is when a temporary changing hut goes up; a swimsuit is required. No charge. From the car park, around fifty spaces, it is fifteen minutes on foot. One practical warning: you cannot drive between the Kawarage hell and the waterfall, it is thirty minutes walking down and about twenty back up. The road closes for snow, usually November to early May.

• The great jet in the Oyasu gorge 1.5 h Oyasukyo, Yuzawa · 60 min only the trail open from mid-April to mid-November

  From the floor of a gorge, a crack in the sixty-metre wall sends out boiling water and steam under pressure, loudly. A path goes down there and passes right beside it. No charge. The fact that decides the trip is the date: the path is closed from mid-November to mid-April, so for half the year the jet can only be seen from above. By bus from Yuzawa station it is a little under an hour to the Kawarayu stop and two minutes on foot; the city says 52 minutes and the prefecture 60, which in practice means allowing an hour. Sixty parking spaces at the local produce building.

• Eating Inaniwa udon in Inaniwa 1.5 h Inaniwa, Yuzawa · 45 min

  Inaniwa udon is a thin hand-stretched noodle, and the village it is named after is here, in Yuzawa. The Sato Yosuke main house, at Inaniwa-machi 20, serves food and runs a quarter-hour factory tour, free, where you see the tenai, the hand-twisting the texture comes from. Two warnings: the tour does not run on Sundays (the company itself also listed Saturdays and public holidays, though that note is from 2019), and the make-your-own noodle workshop is listed as suspended with no return date on the Yuzawa tourism association's site, so if that is why you are coming, phone first (0183-43-2911). Reception is 11:00 to 15:00.

• Getting inside one of the storehouses 1 h Masuda, Yokote · 30 min

  Seeing the street is fine, but the thing to do is get inside one. The Kura no Eki is the former Ishihei hardware shop, from the middle of the Meiji era, and works as the district's front door: you walk through its interior storehouse, and it is also the bus stop that carries the name. A few metres away, the Hotaru information centre opens the Ishida family's old storehouse to the public. Between them they are the cheap way to see from inside what the street hides.

• The bonten, 16 and 17 February 2.5 h only 16 and 17 February, fixed dates

  Two days after the kamakura, and on fixed dates because it is a Shinto rite: the competition is the morning of the 16th, 9:30 to around 12:00, in front of the main city hall building, and the offering at Asahiokasan shrine is the 17th, also in the morning. A bonten is a pole topped with a cylindrical bamboo basket 90 cm across; the two local sources disagree on the pole, the city saying 4 metres and the tourism association 4.3, but both put the whole thing at over 5 metres and over 30 kilos. Neighbourhood and workplace teams carry them, and what people come for is not the procession but the shove at the shrine gate: they fight to get theirs in first. About 300 years of history, with no documented origin. Nothing to pay.

• Yokote yakisoba 1 h

  Thick, straight, square-cut noodles, pre-boiled, not the curly Chinese noodle of ordinary yakisoba; cabbage and minced pork; a barely-set fried egg on top and fukujinzuke, red pickle, on the side; and Worcester sauce that each shop tops up with its own, which is where the milder, less sharp taste comes from. That is how the Noren-kai, the association of participating shops, defines it, and it also asks that the name always be written the same way. In 2009 the fourth B-1 Grand Prix, the contest for local everyday cooking, was held in Yokote itself and the home team won it: that is what the organisers' own roll of honour says. The Noren-kai publishes the map of member shops.

• The Kawarage hell 1 h Kawarage, Yuzawa · 75 min only open from early May to early November

  A bare hillside, white with sulphur, not a tree on it, fumaroles coming out of the ground: one of the landscapes Japan calls a hell. Free, fifty minutes by car from Yuzawa station, twenty parking spaces. The city warns about the one thing that really matters here: the volcanic gas is toxic and leaving the path is forbidden. Closed from early November to early May.

• The sake brewery's storehouse 1 h Masuda, Yokote · 30 min

  Hinomaru Jozo, the brewery behind the Mansaku no Hana label, is one of the Masuda houses that charges to show its interior storehouse: two hundred yen, which it then hands back as a two-hundred-yen voucher for the shop, so if you leave with a bottle the visit is free. One thing worth knowing, because the prefecture tells it differently: the tasting is not included, it is three hundred yen extra for three tokens. Under-twenties go in free. Open 10:00 to 16:00 with no fixed closing day, and no booking needed unless there are ten or more of you. Three parking spaces of its own, or the Hotaru car park a minute away on foot.

What only happens on specific dates

• The snow houses and the water deity the second Friday and Saturday of February (since 2026; it was 15 and 16 before)
• The bonten, 16 and 17 February 16 and 17 February, fixed dates
• The great jet in the Oyasu gorge the trail open from mid-April to mid-November
• The Kawarage hell open from early May to early November
• Bathing under a hot-spring waterfall bathing from early July to mid-September
• The Nishimonai bon odori, danced with the face covered 16, 17 and 18 August, fixed dates

Chains well with

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