Winter without skis

The snow of Tohoku and Nagano without setting foot on a piste

For anyone who wants the Japanese winter and doesn't ski. The milky-water baths of Nyuto, in the snowbound forest above Lake Tazawa. Kakunodate's Hiburi Kamakura, where people swing burning straw sacks over the snow. Zao's snow monsters, firs swallowed by ice, reached by chairlift. Ginzan Onsen's gas-lamp lane, closed to traffic at dusk. The Jigokudani macaques sitting in their pool. And Shirakawa-go lit up, a handful of nights a year.

The itinerary, stop by stop

1. Aomori2 days

   The giant Nebuta floats parade on the first nights of August, but the floats themselves stay on display all year at the Wa Rasse museum, so the city does not hang on that one week. At Furukawa market you build your seafood rice bowl stall by stall; the art museum holds Yoshitomo Nara's giant Aomori-ken; and up the same road that climbs to Hakkoda sits Sukayu, with its bath for a thousand people.

   The route starts at the northern tip of Honshu for a reason of order: the Tohoku Shinkansen runs straight up to Aomori, and from here everything heads back down, stop by stop, with a little less snow at each one and almost no backtracking. It is also the cheapest leg of the trip, which helps over the first two days, the jet-lagged ones. And the snow monsters turn up here already, on the Hakkoda mountain ropeway, three stops before the Zao ones and with a fraction of the crowd in front of you.

   The two days split into one on the mountain and one in town. The mountain day is the ropeway and, up the same road, Sukayu Onsen: over three hundred years old, home of the Sennin-buro or thousand-person bath and designated a National Recreational Onsen. The awkward part is that a ropeway in February shuts down the moment the wind picks up, so keep the town as your fallback. There is enough down there for a full day: Nebuta Wa Rasse keeps the giant lanterns on show all year, because the parade itself is in August and you will not be seeing it; the art museum with Yoshitomo Nara's dog; Furukawa market, where you build a nokkedon bowl stall by stall; and the old Tsugaru strait train ferry.

   What puts it in this route: Mount Hakkoda Ropeway

2. Kakunodate and Lake Tazawa3 days

   The best-preserved samurai quarter in northern Japan: wide earth streets between black wooden fences, with warrior-family houses you can go inside. Four hundred weeping cherries bloom over them in late April, and in winter those same fences under snow are the other reason to come. Fifteen minutes by train from the deepest lake in Japan and from the seven hot-spring inns hidden in the forest of Nyuto.

   Kakunodate is the heart of the route and the stop that pins down the dates of the whole trip, because Hiburi Kamakura falls on the night of 14 February and does not move. People swing burning sacks of rice straw on a metre of rope above their heads, to purify the rice fields and ask for a good harvest; some neighbourhoods do it on the eve as well. You can join in by paying for a sack, around 300 to 500 yen, in clothes you do not mind burning, because sparks fly. Getting here is not straightforward: only the Komachi, the Akita shinkansen, stops in town, about three hours from Tokyo at 17,260 yen with a reserved seat, compulsory because that train carries no unreserved cars.

   The first of the three days is the town on foot, fifteen to twenty minutes from the station: four hundred metres of wide street with no pavements, black palisades and gateways kept since Ashina Yoshikatsu laid out the settlement in 1620, with the Hiyoke, the firebreak that separated samurai from merchants. The Ishiguro house dates from 1809 and the descendants still live in it; the Aoyagi holds six museums, from armour to gramophones. Worth knowing that the catalogue entry here is written for April, when four hundred weeping cherries lean over the walls: in February they are bare sticks and what is left is black timber against snow, which is a different thing and better than it sounds.

   The other two days face west. Lake Tazawa, the deepest in Japan at 423.4 metres, never freezes over: in February it stays dark cobalt. Behind it lies Nyuto, not a village but seven inns scattered through the forest with ten different waters between them. The famous one is Tsuru-no-Yu, whose milky sulphur water bubbles up through a sand-floored pool; a day bath costs around 700 yen, from ten to three, and Mondays are out. Sleeping there is booked by telephone only: the line opens at seven on the 1st, six months ahead, and fills within minutes. The snow walls come up to your shoulder, and the bus climbs in fifty minutes for 950 yen, with few departures and a very early last one.

   What puts it in this route: Nyuto under the snow · Tsuru-no-Yu, the milk-white hot spring · Hiburi Kamakura, the swinging fire ritual

3. Ginzan Onsen2 days

   Wooden inns line both banks of the river and the gas lamps come on at dusk; in winter that stroll is regulated, and anyone not sleeping in the village comes up by shuttle. The valley grew out of a silver mine more than five hundred years old whose tunnel you can still walk into, and the Senshinkyo gorge supplies the spring green and the autumn colour. Day visitors have a public bath beside the river.

   After three days of samurai quarter, mountain buses and a fire festival, this stop exists in order to do nothing. The problem is getting here: no single line links Kakunodate with Oishida, so you come down through inland Tohoku with two or three changes, and this is exactly the kind of day on which one local train stopped by snow costs you the evening. The catalogue gives it two days with a minimum of one, and it is fair to say that what you come for is a single night: by day Ginzan is a small village you can walk in an hour, with the foot bath by the river, the Shirogane waterfall from the bridge and the lit entrance of the old silver mine.

   The centre is closed to traffic, cars stay five to ten minutes away, the inns handle the luggage, and the gas lamps are lit at dusk above the wooden lodging houses. That is where the catch lies: day visitors leave before any of it happens, or they come in on a quota. Since the winter of 2024-25 the village has regulated the late-afternoon window with tickets bought online, an hourly cap and a ban on walking in from the checkpoint, so check the current year's rule. Staying overnight gets you in without fuss, but along with Nyuto this is the most expensive night of the trip. If you are not staying, the Shiroganeyu public bath is the only way to get into the water.

   What puts it in this route: A car-free night in the valley

4. Zao Onsen2 days

   The trees that turn into ice monsters in February — seen from the chairlift, and floodlit at night — are the same ones that line the walk down from Jizo-dake to the Iroha-numa bogs between June and October. The village water is sulphurous and among the most acidic in Japan, with neighbourhood baths and free ashiyu dotted among the inns; up top is the Okama crater lake, viewed from the rim because the caldera is closed.

   This is the shortest hop of the route, because Oishida and Zao sit in the same prefecture: a train to Yamagata and a mountain bus up. It is also the loud version of what Hakkoda showed you quietly. The juhyo are firs swallowed by ice and you ride a chairlift in among them; from 27 December to 23 February there is also night illumination of the trees, torchlight skiing, fireworks on 7 February and a night ride in a snow cat. What cannot be papered over is that this is a working ski resort, the largest in Tohoku, with 57 runs: on a trip that prides itself on never setting foot on one, you will be the odd one out in the lift queue.

   One of the two days is really weather insurance. The monsters are only there once it has been cold enough for long enough, and the upper mountain closes in wind just as it does in Aomori; with a single day and bad luck you leave without seeing them. The rest falls into place on its own: Zao's water is among the most acidic and powerful in Japan, imoni-jiru of taro and beef is the Yamagata dish and here it comes with grilled meat alongside, and the kokeshi museum, where you paint your own doll, is the indoor plan for when the mountain says no. The Okama crater and the crater-rim walks belong to the snow-free season, so do not count on them.

   What puts it in this route: Snow Monsters (Juhyo) by Chairlift

5. Echigo-Yuzawa2 days

   The mountain hot-spring town where Yasunari Kawabata wrote "Snow Country": the room he wrote it in, the Kasumi no Ma, is at the Takahan inn and only overnight guests get to see it, while the town museum holds a recreation of Komako's room, the novel's heroine. There is also the Yuzawa Ponshukan (with its own "sake bath"), the Gala Yuzawa ski resort with its own Shinkansen stop, the Dragondola (Japan's longest gondola lift, 5,481m) and the sotoyu, the town's public hot-spring baths.

   Day trip to Tokamachi (Echigo-Tsumari)

   This is where you leave Tohoku, and the journey looks worse on a map than anything else on the trip: down the Yamagata Shinkansen, a change of line near Tokyo, then back north again on the Joetsu, half a day of trains to reach a village that sits an hour and a quarter from Tokyo for 6,370 yen unreserved. It pays off because this is the literary stop of the route. Kawabata wrote 'Snow Country' in the Kasumi no Ma room of the Takahan inn between 1934 and 1937, and that room takes no day visitors: either you stay the night or you do not see it. The hotel screens the film adaptation every evening, and its spring has been in use for more than nine hundred years.

   Of the two days, one is Yuzawa and one goes to Tokamachi. The Yuzawa day begins, oddly enough, inside the station: the Ponshukan with its sake tasting machines and the hot bath dosed with an alcohol made from the local sake. Outside there are several sotoyu, public baths dotted around the village and open to anyone, workshops for making soba and sasa-dango by hand at Daigenta and, further out, Kaikake Onsen, whose 37-degree water has been documented since 1486 and is held to be good for the eyes. One irony is worth pointing out: GALA Yuzawa is the only shinkansen station in Japan that doubles as the base building of a ski resort, and this is exactly the trip that walks straight past it.

   Tokamachi is the big day of this leg. Its Snow Festival began in 1950 under the motto of making friends with the snow, is reckoned the oldest in Japan, and its sculptures are built by residents and judged on the afternoon of the first day; it falls in late February and calls for snow boots. The rest is filled by the Echigo-Tsumari Triennale: the light tunnel cut into the Kiyotsu gorge, the Bijinbayashi beech wood, walked in winter on snowshoes rented at the Kyororo museum, and the flame-shaped Jomon pot, Niigata's only National Treasure. The warning is that almost all of the three hundred permanent works are outdoors and in February under snow, and the indoor ones have closing days: MonET on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

   What puts it in this route: Sleeping at the Takahan and the room where Snow Country was written · Tokamachi Snow Festival

6. Nagano-Togakushi2 days

   Zenko-ji Temple, one of Japan's most venerated, at the heart of the city; in the nearby mountains, Togakushi's five shrines linked by a forest trail, ending in a 400-year-old cedar avenue leading to Okusha Shrine.

   Day trip to Jigokudani / Shibu Onsen

   You double back to Takasaki to change onto the Hokuriku line and arrive at the first stop that is not about snow: a city with a temple over fourteen hundred years old in the middle of it. The central rite at Zenko-ji is the Okaidan-meguri, a corridor in complete darkness beneath the main altar, felt along by hand until you find the key to paradise. At sunrise the abbot walks the approach and touches his rosary to the head of anyone kneeling as he passes; it is free, and in winter it starts later than in summer. Sleeping in one of the temple lodgings along the approach, with a vegetarian dinner, is how you make it on time.

   Two days for three things, so something has to go. Togakushi is reached by Alpico bus from the station, fifty to sixty minutes and 2,500 yen, a private line no JR pass covers. In February the final avenue of four-hundred-year-old cedars leading up to the Okusha shrine lies under two metres of snow and is walked on snowshoes with a local guide; the full six-to-seven-hour trail between the five shrines belongs to another season, and the Togakure-ryu ninja museum closes from late November to mid-April. What remains is Togakushi soba, one of the three great sobas of Japan, served in five small mounds on a bamboo tray, and the workshops where you make it before eating it.

   The other day is the monkeys. The Jigokudani macaques sit in a natural hot pool surrounded by snow; after the bus there is a final walk of about thirty-five minutes through the forest. The park was created in 1964: resort expansion had sent the macaques raiding orchards and farmers were calling for a cull, and feeding them here brought them back to the valley. That is why feeding them yourself is strictly forbidden. Next door is Shibu Onsen, with nine wooden public baths along its lanes, but the key that opens them goes to ryokan guests, so on a day trip you hear the geta and look at closed doors. If the baths matter more to you than the temple, move one of the two Nagano nights to Shibu.

7. Shirakawa-go1 day

   The thatched roofs are rebuilt whole every thirty or forty years in a single day, with the entire village up on the frame: that custom, the yui, is what has kept standing the gassho-zukuri houses you look down on from the Ogimachi hill. Once the coaches leave the hamlet falls silent, and what is left is a handful of beds in family homes, dinner round the hearth, and doburoku, a cloudy sake that by a legal exception may only be brewed here.

   Shirakawa-go closes the trip and is the only genuinely famous thing on the whole route: six near-empty stops and then a World Heritage village. It has no station of its own, so from Nagano you carry on along the Hokuriku line to Kanazawa and go in by bus, which is the weakest link of the route: with no railway, a blocked road leaves you no alternative. The single day assigned here only works if the night is what you came for. The winter illumination is a handful of nights with advance booking compulsory for everyone, and on those nights the Shiroyama viewpoint admits only people staying in the village or arriving on an organised tour, with timed entry slots; the village also asks visitors to stay off private property and not fly drones.

   And here the calendar has to be spelled out. Those nights fall between mid-January and the first days of February, and they nearly always run out before the 14th, which is Kakunodate's Hiburi Kamakura; the Tokamachi Snow Festival lands on the third or fourth weekend of February. Three dates that will not fit into one trip in this order: you pick which one dictates the schedule and accept losing the other two. Sleeping in a gassho house is how you get the village once the buses leave, with dinner around the irori hearth, but there are very few beds and they go months in advance; otherwise you sleep in Takayama or Kanazawa and come in during the day.

   What puts it in this route: Winter Night Illumination