|
As a traditional magnet for Buddhist pilgrims, Zenkoji is approached by a long line of shops selling religious artifacts (though, this being Japan, they also offer pink bunnies and nudie telephone cards). Sidewalks brim with tables full of dried apricots and pumpkin seeds and sachets of apple tea. For all its modern accessories, Nagano remains a farmer's town still sought out for its pickles, its horseradishes and its homemade buckwheat noodles. "I remember catching fish in the local river, or collecting mushrooms during the autumn," says Gen Watanabe, a young museum administrator who recalls the special day each year his parents devoted to washing pickles. "My favorite thing to do when I was growing up was to go out into the mountains on my bike to collect edible vegetables."
Around this country core are clusters of modern amenities, including stunning Olympic arenas worthy of a next-millennium Star Trek episode, and suburbs, as in America, liberally appointed with giant cowboy hats, huge eggs, sporting caps and cars protruding from the side of four-story buildings. At night the streets around the central station burst into color-a pink neon c'est chic sign, a Trend Shop, a Twinkle Sound Pub, a Razzle Dazzle computer land. A central square has been set up downtown so that Olympic ceremonies can be brought into the heart of town, but all around it-subversively-is a bustling entertainment district alive with Police 90 Show Pubs and "ethnic live" bars and some buildings containing more than 50 boOtes each, a few of them advertising their charms in Thai.
Next to the feminine grace notes of a Kyoto, say, Nagano still feels a decidedly masculine place. Its colors are brown and black, its aesthetic one of straw and stone. On the southern edge of town is Matsushiro, a castle town of old samurai houses and the remains of a military academy; to the north is Togakushi, a sacred, templed mountain favored by ascetics and home still to a ninja museum.
And everywhere the 2,000-m mountains and the apple and peach and apricot orchards give a bell-like invigoration to the air. Nagano is actually on almost the same latitude as Rome or San Francisco-the southernmost city to be host of a Winter Games-but its mountains nearby are famous for their clear rushing streams and sharp blue skies. "This is the most beautiful place in Japan," says an American professor at a local university. "I'll be happy if I never see Tokyo in my life again."
If Nagano is the unpretentious town you learn to like, Hakuba, an hour away by bus (and site of most of the outdoor events) is the practiced charmer who grabs you instantly. This is, in part, no doubt because Nagano is a city with 360,000 people-more populous than Iceland-while Hakuba is a village of just 9,400 residents, a picture-perfect poster site for the Japan Alps with its Chalet Heidihof pensions and white birch forests encircled by a string of glorious snowcaps.
Like many Japanese resorts Hakuba is, essentially, a world of foreign fantasy, and can have the air at times of stage sets from 15 different movies all crowded into the same small block. There is everything here, from a pink pension to a Pluck House art museum, to a "Tyrolian Burgers" shop, to a "Tyrolian" convenience store. All told, roughly 800 rococo hotels, inns and pensions crowd the village (or 1 for every 12 residents), and at night the timbered buildings are full of trendy young couples sipping wine over gourmet French food after a long day of snowboarding wearing the latest gurobu and goguru. "This is Youngtown," marvels a Kyoto woman as she surveys a corner of the Echoland area where the Shop Jah Jah shares space with the Natchez "American pub," with the Magic Mushroom surf shop and Tijuana CafE next door and the Groovy Art Space hair salon across the street. Where the shopping streets end, time-share log cabins are set along straight, tree-lined lanes with American-style mailboxes at the end of every driveway and even basketball hoops above the garage door. This is the ultimate Japanese dream: to live in a Swiss chalet in Montana (with a 7-Eleven around the corner).
Nonetheless, when the thick flakes begin to fall, Hakuba can feel enchantingly like a toy town inside a shaken-up glass bubble, and the rest of the world another universe hidden behind walls of snow. Lights shine from the slopes in the blue-gray dusk, and the new Olympic ski-jumping tracks are lit up against the mountain like bold strokes of calligraphy. One reason why nearly 4 million people descend upon the village every year (most days there are more out-of-towners here than locals) is simply that Hakuba remains a holiday Sunday to Nagano's workaday Wednesday. By the same token, a plush new five-star hotel room can be had in Nagano for $65 a night; in Hakuba an indifferent mock-European room may set you back $250.
Page 1 | Page 2 | page 3
|
Nagano
