Nagano

Nagano exists because of a statue. Tradition holds that an image of Amida Buddha, said to be the oldest Buddhist statue in Japan, caused a dispute between clans and was thrown into a canal, then rescued and carried to this valley by Honda Yoshimitsu, whose name read in Chinese characters gives Zenko-ji. A temple stood here by the 7th century, and because it was founded before Japanese Buddhism divided into schools, it has always admitted worshippers of every sect — and, unusually, women, at a time when many mountain temples refused them.

Pilgrimage built the town. Inns, shops and lodging temples lined the approach, and travelling preachers carried copies of the image around the country to raise funds. The plain below was fought over in the 16th century by Takeda Shingen and Uesugi Kenshin at Kawanakajima, and the temple's image was moved repeatedly for safety during those wars. Under the Tokugawa the Sanada family held the neighbouring castle town of Matsushiro.

Disaster and modernity followed. The earthquake of 1847 destroyed much of the town and killed thousands, many of them pilgrims. After 1868 the temple town became the prefectural capital; silk and later precision industry grew, and in 1944 tunnels were dug at Matsushiro to shelter the wartime government, largely by conscripted Korean workers. The 1998 Winter Olympics brought the Shinkansen from Tokyo, new arenas and international attention, and the city has since traded on the mountains, the temple and the macaques that bathe in a valley to the north-east.

The temple sets the city's rhythm. A service is held each morning before dawn, and the abbot and abbess pass along the paved approach blessing those kneeling there; local people as well as visitors attend. Beneath the main altar runs a completely dark passage where pilgrims feel along the wall for a metal key said to grant salvation. Once in roughly seven years the Gokaicho opens a substitute image to view and raises a tall wooden pillar before the hall, and the city fills for weeks.

Mountain religion is the other strand. Togakushi's shrine, strung along a pilgrimage path under giant cedars, belongs to the old tradition of ascetics in the peaks and is tied in folklore to a school of ninja and to the myth of the sun goddess's cave.

The 1998 Games left a visible legacy — the wave-roofed skating arena, the Shinkansen line from Tokyo, and a habit of hosting winter events — and the prefecture's identity as Shinshu, a highland province of soba, miso, apples and hardy people, is asserted strongly against Tokyo. Locals are said to be plain-spoken and educationally ambitious; Nagano has a long tradition of rural schooling and of literary and study societies.

Manners follow the national pattern with a pilgrimage overlay: quiet in the temple grounds, patience in queues, shoes off indoors, and a general expectation that visitors treat Zenko-ji as a place of worship first.

About 370,000 people live in the city, which since mergers in the 2000s stretches from the basin floor up to the Togakushi highlands and the border with Niigata. The population is slowly declining, as across rural Nagano, and the outlying mountain districts are ageing fastest.

The economy rests on prefectural government, hospitals and schools, precision manufacturing inherited from the wartime dispersal of industry into the mountains, food processing — miso above all — and tourism through the temple and the ski valleys. The Zenkoji plain is farmland: rice on the flats and apples, peaches and grapes on the slopes, with roadside stands through the autumn.

Life is organised around the straight street from the station to the temple and the covered arcades beside it. Cars are normal for anything beyond it, snow tyres go on in late autumn, and roof and pavement clearing occupy the winter. Households in the valleys keep vegetable plots and make their own pickles.

Recent issues are those of a provincial capital: shops closing on the arcades as trade moves to roadside malls, the cost of maintaining a great wooden temple, flood defences on the Chikuma after the 2019 typhoon damage, a shortage of workers in the resorts, and managing the crowds that the macaques and the temple now attract.

Soba is the food of Shinshu, and Togakushi soba is its best-known form: cold buckwheat noodles laid in small coiled bunches on a woven bamboo basket, with grated wasabi, a dipping broth and often mountain vegetables. Many shops on the temple approach mill and cut their own, and the coarse, dark country style is served alongside the refined one.

Northern Nagano's snack is oyaki, a dumpling of wheat or buckwheat dough stuffed with nozawana pickled greens, aubergine, pumpkin, mushroom or sweet bean, seared on an iron plate and then steamed. Sansai, the wild greens of spring, are pickled, boiled or fried as tempura, and preserved foods carry the winter: nozawana greens, dried persimmons and miso.

Shinshu miso, pale and salty and brewed from rice and soybeans, is made in this basin and flavours soup, grilled skewers and vegetables; shops on Nakamise-dori sell it by weight. Freshwater fish — iwana, ayu and carp, the last stewed in miso in the Saku area — appear on local menus, and inago, grasshoppers simmered in soy and sugar, are a traditional protein still sold in the old shops.

Chestnut sweets come from Obuse, apples from the surrounding orchards, and the prefecture is one of Japan's larger sake producers, using highland rice and snowmelt water. Roasted soba tea and soba-flour confectionery round out a local menu that leans on grain, pickles and the mountains rather than on the sea.