Nikko on Foot: Carvings, Forty-Eight Curves and Copper

Arrive in Nikko (日光市) and the first thing in your way is water. The Daiya River (大谷川) comes down off the mountains fast and loud, and above it stands a short vermilion bridge, Shinkyo (神橋), which looks less like a crossing than a piece of lacquerware left out in the weather. According to local legend, the priest Shodo Shonin (勝道上人) stood on this bank unable to get across, prayed for help, and the deity Jinjao (深沙王) appeared and released two snakes; mountain sedge grew from their backs until the pair made a bridge. The bridge is still called the Yamatsuga snake bridge.

What lies past the bridge is larger than the name suggests. The city of Nikko in its present form was assembled on March 20, 2006, out of two cities, two towns and one village: the former Imaichi (今市) City, the former Nikko City, Fujihara (藤原) Town, Ashio (足尾) Town and Kuriyama (栗山) Village. The city's own account says what each had been — Imaichi a post town at the junction of the Nikko, Reiheishi (例幣使街道) and Aizu-Nishi (会津西街道) highways, the old Nikko a gateway town serving its temples and shrines, Fujihara a hot-spring district. Nobody walks all of that in a day.

Five Hundred Carvings and One Upside-Down Pillar

Toshogu (日光東照宮) is where most visits begin, and the Yomeimon (陽明門) is where most visits stall. The gate is a two-storey structure 11.1 meters high, 7 meters across the front and 4.4 meters deep, and more than 500 carvings are worked into it: anecdotes from old tales, children at their games, sages and wise men. The city's tourism pages note a second name for it, Higurashimon (日暮門), said to come from a beauty you cannot tire of in a whole day. Linger at the gate instead of glancing at it and the claim stops sounding like advertising.

Twelve pillars hold the gate up, all carved with the same spiralling gurimon (グリ紋) pattern. One of them is wrong on purpose. The shrine's own account singles out the second pillar from the west on the north, the back side, where the pattern runs upside down, and explains the reason with a proverb: what is complete has already begun to decline. Leave something unfinished and evil passes it by. In May of Showa 62 — Japanese years are still counted in imperial eras — two more reversed pillars turned up among the sixteen that divide the main sanctuary, bringing the count to three.

The Cat Who Is Watching, and the Monkey's Second Year

Deeper in, in the East Corridor, a small panel set into a kaerumata, the frog-leg-shaped bracket between beams, holds the sleeping cat, about 21 centimeters long. Seen head-on, it sleeps. Seen from an angle, the shoulders tighten and it becomes an animal about to spring. On the back of the same panel are two sparrows, read as a world so peaceful that sparrows can play while a cat lies nearby. The carver is traditionally said to have been Hidari Jingoro (左甚五郎); the shrine states outright that this is not certain.

Across the grounds, the Shinkyusha (神厩舎), the stable kept for the shrine's sacred horse, carries the three monkeys who see, speak and hear no evil. They are not a standalone emblem. They are the second of eight scenes following a monkey's life from birth onward, and this second panel stands for childhood. The carvings are on a stable because of an older idea from yin-yang and the five elements: keep a monkey with a horse and the horse is protected from illness and misfortune. Start at the first panel and read all eight in order.

Elsewhere in the same mountain precinct the volume drops. Taiyuin (大猷院), the mausoleum of the third shogun, Tokugawa Iemitsu (徳川家光), is worked in gold and black rather than colour. Rinnoji (輪王寺) explains the restraint as obedience: Iemitsu revered his grandfather Ieyasu and left instructions that Ieyasu's grandeur must not be surpassed. Twenty-two structures here are registered as national treasures and important cultural properties, and 315 lanterns stand among them. The halls run back in the linked gongen plan — worship hall, connecting room, main hall.

Processions That Keep the Old Calendar

Nikko keeps its calendar out of doors. Futarasan Shrine (日光二荒山神社) holds the Yayoi Festival (弥生祭) over five days, April 13 to 17, and a prefectural travel site passes on the local saying that spring in Nikko begins with it. The same page traces the festival's origin to the Jingo-keiun years, 767 to 770, and explains the name by the old lunar calendar, under which the festival fell in the third month.

Twice a year the shrine road fills. Tochigi Prefecture's account of the Hyakumono-zoroe Sennin Musha Gyoretsu (百物揃千人武者行列) says the parade reproduces, just as it was, the procession that carried Tokugawa Ieyasu's coffin from Kunozan (久能山) to Nikko. It goes out on May 18 and October 17, the autumn one at about half the scale of the spring. Toshogu's own listing counts 53 kinds of participants, more than 1,200 people, following the mikoshi — portable shrines that carry a deity through the streets — to the otabisho, a temporary resting place.

Most onlookers go home when the last armour has passed, which is a mistake. According to the prefecture's account, the story carries on past the march: once the three mikoshi from Futarasan reach the otabisho, two old dances are offered there, the Yaotome dance and Azuma-asobi. Walk on to the resting place instead of back to the station and the day ends with music rather than crowds.

Up the Forty-Eight Curves into Oku-Nikko

Above the town the road starts climbing, and the climbing is the attraction. The prefecture's Nikko civil engineering office sets out the arithmetic: the First Irohazaka (第一いろは坂) had 30 curves, and when the Second Irohazaka opened in Showa 40 with 20 of its own, two curves were reportedly taken out of the first so that the pair came to 48. The office calls the 15.8-kilometer route one of Japan's 100 Selected Roads. The descent has a second life in print, too: the manga and anime Initial D (頭文字D) puts the home ground of a street-racing group called Emperor here, feared in the story for its Mitsubishi Lancer Evolutions.

It is worth knowing whose ground you are driving across. Futarasan's sacred area covers 3,400 hectares, centred on Mount Nantai (男体山), Mount Nyoho (女峰山) and Mount Taro (太郎山), and it takes in Kegon Falls (華厳の滝) and the Irohazaka road itself. The buildings down in the town are the small part of it. The mountain, the waterfall and the switchbacks all sit inside the same boundary.

At the top the land flattens into Lake Chuzenji (中禅寺湖), which owes its existence to the peak above it: about 20,000 years ago lava from Mount Nantai came down and dammed the Daiya River. The water still leaves the lake at the eastern end and drops 97 meters into Kegon Gorge, and that drop is Kegon Falls. From the observation deck it reads as a column of water; from the lakeshore, as an outflow.

People were climbing up here early. The monk Shodo, 735 to 817, is said to have crossed the Daiya River in 766 and built a hermitage in the Nikko hills, and in the following year to have raised a shrine to Futara (二荒山), which is Mount Nantai; that shrine is counted as the beginning of mountain worship in Nikko. The account has him reaching the summit in 782 and building an inner shrine on top, then another beside the lake. From the shore the whole route is in view.

North of the lake the ground opens into Senjogahara (戦場ヶ原), the field of battle. Tochigi Prefecture's retelling of the legend has the gods of Mount Nantai and Mount Akagi (赤城山) quarrelling over the territory around Lake Chuzenji, taking the forms of a giant serpent and a giant centipede, and fighting to no result — until Sarumaro (猿麻呂), a descendant of the Nantai god and a master archer, put an arrow through the centipede's eye. The plain where the story places that fight is the one under the boardwalk.

The documented history is quieter and nearly as odd. Senjogahara was a lake before it became a marsh, and it now covers 400 hectares, with some 350 species of plants growing on what used to be the lakebed. Together with Lake Yunoko (湯ノ湖), the Yukawa (湯川) and Odashirogahara (小田代原) it is registered under the Ramsar Convention, an international agreement on wetlands, as the Oku-Nikko Wetlands; the registration was made at the convention's ninth meeting of the parties, in Kampala, Uganda. The boardwalk exists to keep your boots off all of it.

Copper Out of Mount Bizendate

The southern reach of the city has a different story under it. Copper was first found at Mount Bizendate (備前楯山) in 1610, and Nikko City's account describes the Ashio Copper Mine (足尾銅山) as prospering from then on as a mine the Edo shogunate ran directly. In 1877 it was privatised under Furukawa Ichibei (古河市兵衛), after which, the city says, the newest technology and equipment carried it into rapid development.

You can go inside. On the Ashio Copper Mine tour (足尾銅山観光), the trolley runs one way only, outward from the station into the tunnel; passengers get off 150 meters in and continue roughly 300 meters on foot. The ride is the short part and the walking the long one, which is the right proportion — most of the visit happens at your own pace, underground, inside a mine the shogunate once operated itself.

The copper had to leave the valley, which is why a railway exists here at all. Watarase Keikoku Railway (わたらせ渓谷鐵道) describes its predecessor, the Ashio Railway (足尾鐵道), as having carried the core of modern Japan's copper traffic: the licence was granted in 1910, and the stretch from Sawairi (沢入) to Ashio opened on December 31, 1912. The mine closed in 1973, freight on the line ended in 1987, and in 1989 the present company took over the 44.1 kilometers and seventeen stations between Kiryu (桐生) and Mato (間藤). Take a seat on the gorge side.

Cedars, a Cottage Inn and Three Eras Under One Roof

The old approaches to the town are lined with trees. The Nikko cedar avenue runs 37 kilometers in all along three highways — 19.2 kilometers of the Nikko Kaido, 13.9 of the Reiheishi, 3.9 of the Aizu-Nishi — planted by Matsudaira Masatsuna (松平正綱) and his son Masanobu (正信), who began in 1625 and kept at it for more than twenty years. The avenue carries two national designations at once, as a Special Historic Site and as a Special Natural Monument. Even at driving speed the trunks arrive in a rhythm you can feel.

Near the river stands the Tamozawa Imperial Villa (日光田母沢御用邸), built in 1899 as a place for the crown prince Yoshihito, later the Emperor Taisho, to rest, then enlarged and rebuilt on a large scale between Taisho 7 and Taisho 10. What stands now is a single assembly of buildings of 4,471 square meters holding construction techniques from three ages — Edo, Meiji and Taisho — and it was made a national Important Cultural Property in 2003. Move through the rooms slowly and the joinery changes around you.

Foreign guests have been sleeping in Nikko for a long time, and the start of it is on record. The Kanaya Hotel History Museum's account describes Kanaya Zen'ichiro (金谷善一郎) as a gagaku musician — a player of the old court music — at Toshogu who, in 1870, put up an American missionary physician, Dr. Hepburn, in his own house. Hepburn expected more foreigners to follow and urged him to open lodgings for them. In 1873 Kanaya converted his house in Shikenmachi (四軒町), today's Honcho (本町), into the Kanaya Cottage Inn (金谷カテッジイン); in 1893 he opened a thirty-room hotel on the rise above the Daiya River.

Two Layers of Yuba and the River That Sounds Angry

Back down in the town, the local specialty is spelled its own way. According to Nikko's tourism site, Kyoto writes yuba, the skin that forms on simmering soy milk, as 湯葉, while Nikko writes it 湯波. The distinction is not only on paper. Kyoto's is lifted from the pot in a single sheet, thin and delicate, a supporting player in a meal; Nikko's is lifted doubled, which gives it body, and here it takes the lead — simmered in broth, or served raw as a kind of sashimi.

Two other sweets run against the season you would expect. Mizu yokan, a soft, water-rich jelly of sweet bean paste, reads as summer food in most of Japan; in Nikko it was once a winter one, eaten with your legs under a kotatsu, the heated table people sit around in the cold, and it even appeared among osechi, the dishes served at New Year. Summer belongs instead to shaved ice made from natural ice, which the tourism site describes as pure, hard and slow to melt — so it can be shaved thin enough to come out fluffy, without the usual stab of cold behind the forehead.

The souvenir shelves run the walk backwards, turning the sights into food. Nikko Castella Honpo's description of its gold-leaf Nikko castella (金箔入り日光カステラ) explains the design: the 24-karat gold powder laid over the surface stands for the Yomeimon, and the green matcha sponge beneath it for the cedar avenue. The box carries the hollyhock crest. Having walked both the gate and the trees, you can see what was meant.

Trains take over from here. Tobu Railway explains that its SL Taiju (SL大樹) has run almost daily between Shimo-Imaichi (下今市駅) and Kinugawa-Onsen (鬼怒川温泉駅) since August 10, 2017, bringing steam back to the company's lines after its steam working was discontinued on the Sano Line in June 1966. The name is explained twice over: taiju is an old honorific for a shogun, which points straight back to Toshogu, and it also calls up Tokyo Skytree (東京スカイツリー), carrying the wish that the train grow strong and tall.

The river at the end of that line has an argument about its name. The land ministry's Shimodate river office explains that Tochigi and Gunma were once called the land of Keno (毛野国), and the river running through it Kenogawa (毛野川); a dialect habit of swapping the sounds i and e turned that into Kinugawa, written for a time as 絹川 and 衣川. The office also records the other story: that a river normally so quiet runs so violently in flood that people said it was like a demon in anger, which is what the present characters 鬼怒川 say.

The hot-spring town puts its water into sweets. The product description for Kinugawa Onsen manju (鬼怒川温泉まんじゅう) — steamed buns with a bean-paste filling, the standard souvenir of a Japanese hot spring — says they are made with good natural water from Nikko and plenty of brown sugar kneaded into the dough, to bring out its flavour and richness. At the Baumkuchen workshop Hachiya (バウムクーヘン工房はちや), the smoothness of the Kinugawa Onsen pudding is credited to slow cooking at a low temperature, which the shop says lets the eggs and the milk melt on the tongue.

By then you will have been listening to the local speech for days. One travel account introducing Nikko glosses the Tochigi word daiji not as "important", which is what the characters suggest, but as "all right" — daiji ke?, "are you all right?" The same account offers ijiyakeru for the feeling of being irritated, as in a muttered "ah, mo ijiyaken na." Stumble on a step at your inn and someone may ask you the first; if the switchbacks ever back up on the way down, the second is ready and waiting.