Nozawa Onsen 6 - 9 January 2011

We arrived back home in Tokyo on January 2nd. Peter went to the doctor to have his leg checked, it was healing all right and he was hopeful that he would be able to do some skiing after all. The kids still had another week off school and it was time for our last adventure this winter break – skiing/snowboarding in Nozawa onsen, in the Japanese Alps. 

A nice surprise was that our French friends, rang the day before we left to say that they were also going there. Their son Ferdinand is in the same class as Elliot at school. The Shinkansen train was swishing us up to Nagano in under two hours and from there we had another 1 ½ hour bus ride to our destination. It is amazing, after about one hour on the train from Tokyo, there is still no snow on the ground and flat. Then you enter a series of long tunnels and when you come out on the other side there is deep snow and mountains - magic!


We arrived at Nozawa Onsen when it was already dark and it was heavily snowing so we had problems finding our way to Ichiro Lodge, our accommodation. We came across a local man, wearing a cone shaped bamboo straw hat covered in about 10 cm of snow, it looked so cool. We could have been back in old Edo-times! He hadn’t heard of the place but followed us into another lodge where we could get further directions. We dragged our bags in deep snow up a narrow lane, and found our place. 

A lovely Japanese woman ran it. She could have been anything between 70 and 85 of age, very short and stooping and dressed in apron and scarf. She didn’t speak one word of English, but she was constantly talking away to us in Japanese with a big smile on her face. She really looked after us, in the cold mornings she came after us and smacked a heating pad on each of us to keep warm, and she shook her head as she saw our “city boots” and lent us some decent wellington boots, (as hot spring water pours onto the roads, the snow melts and it gets very wet). We think she had a soft spot for blond Elliot, because for breakfast she came with some cereal incase he didn’t like the grilled fish that was starring at him from the plate… We loved her!! 

Nozawa was Japan’s first ski resort. In 1930 Austrian Hannes Schneider, one of the founders of alpine skiing, came to Nozawa and introduced alpine skiing to Japan. Unlike many typical Japanese ski resorts, with big concrete all-inclusive hotels, Nozawa is still very much an old living village with wooden houses and small local restaurants and shops. Nozawa onsen is a very small village, you easily walk through it in 15 minutes.

 At one end of the village is an area called Ogama. Here hot spring water comes up from the ground and into large stone basins where local villagers come to wash and cook their vegetables and boil eggs. It gives the food a very special flavour and I’m sure it is healthy too! 


What also makes Nozawa onsen so special are all the little local wooden shoto-yu, or onsens/hot springs, run by the nearest neighbours and are all free of charge. There are 13 such little wooden shacks in Nozawa. The natural spring water here is scolding hot, about 41-42 degrees Celsius, so it takes the body time to get into the baths. A shoto-yu is a very simple affair, no heating or changing rooms, just some shelves and a bath. You bring you own towel, enter the door undress around the corner where the communal bath is (size maybe 3 x 4 meters), grab a wooden bucket by the side of the bath and slowly poor some hot water over your body to wash and get used to the temperature. Then slowly you enter the water and try not to pull a face while all the local women are watching very carefully every movement you do – very amused! There is also a mug for you to drink the healthy water, where it comes up from the spring, not directly from the bath! My personal record to stay inside a bath was 10 minutes, by then I was cooked, needed some snow and could go back in again.

 This is a perfect way to end a cold day skiing, especially in O-yu shoto, which is the most famous and biggest of them all. 


The skiing was as everywhere in Japan, perfect powder. There were enough slopes to keep us busy for three days, with a few cosy restaurant up in the slopes to have ramen noodles or curry for lunch.

 Up at the top of Mt Kenashi (1650 m) the trees and branches were covered in ice and deep snow making it very pretty! 








In the evenings we met up with our friends again and went to different izakayas, like Japanese pubs.

On our last night there was some taiko drumming performance by the villagers, we watched for a while before we continued to Sakai izakays for dinner. What we didn’t anticipated was that the husband in this family run izakaya part of the taiko drum team, so his poor wife had to cook for the whole place. Well, there were only 3 tables and the seats at the bar-desk, but still, at places like this you normally order lots of different small dishes for everybody to share, and that takes time to cook. 

We waited for about 2 hours, but we didn’t really mind as we had good company, nice cosy atmosphere and lots of beer and sake to drink. One of the customers at the bar-desk got up and started working as a waitress, could she have been a friend or only a nice woman taking pity on the hard working lady cooking. After a while the husband came “home” and started with your yakitori.




The last day, I didn’t bother with skiing, and went on a little sightseeing adventure on my own. I took the bus back to Nagano, had 34 minutes to go (bus and taxi) to the famous Zenko-ji Temple to buy a wooden Ema plaque. I collect these and forgot to get one last time I visited this temple 3 years ago. I just made it back in time to catch the train to Ueda station, change trains again and continue for 40 minutes the last bit to Bessho onsen, my destination in mind. 

Bessho onsen is sometimes called little Kamakura because its dramatic temples and the fact that it served as an administrative centre during the Kamakura period ( 1185 – 1333) and has long been a retreat for writers.
 It was easy to walk around this village and I started with the famous Tendai temple Kitamuki Kannon, busy with visitors offering New Year’s prayers and tossing coins near the shrine entrance. 

I continued to Anraku-ji , a National Treasure temple most famous for its beautiful octagonal wooden pagoda in the middle of old cedar trees surrounded by graves and tombs. By now, it was time to check out how the local hot springs here compare with the ones in Nozawa. I went to O-yu onsen, also in a wooden building but quite modern and large. It had a small rotemburo, outside natural bath, which I had all to my self which was nice, but over all I think I prefer the smaller onsens in Nozawa. Hot spring water in Japan differs in character and quality, depending on its geographical location, and it always amuses me to read the onsen water description when I come to a new place. Here it read: “Bessho’s excellent waters, are reputed to cure diabetes and constipation, while beautifying your complexion”. 


There are also some excellent foot baths in the town which is a popular gathering point for the town's youth.
It was time for me to take the train back to Ueda station and meet up the family on the Shinkansen train back to Tokyo.