Takayama

Takayama sits in the Hida basin, a bowl of rice land enclosed by mountains, and its people have always been known for what they made rather than what they grew. Hida's carpenters, the hida no takumi, were sent to the ancient capitals at Nara and Kyoto in place of tax from the 8th century, and the province's 8th-century provincial temple, Hida Kokubun-ji, still stands in the middle of the town.

The town as it looks now was laid out from 1588, when Kanamori Nagachika built a castle on Shiroyama hill and set his merchants and artisans in a grid of streets below it, moving temples to the eastern slope in conscious imitation of Kyoto. The Kanamori ruled for a century. In 1692 the Tokugawa shogunate took Hida into its own hands for the timber and the ore of the mountains, governing it from the Takayama Jin'ya office in the town; the castle was dismantled a few years later. Direct rule by distant officials left the merchant families in charge of daily business, and it is their houses, storehouses and breweries that survive.

Isolation preserved the town and impoverished it. Peasant protests against the shogunal administration ran through the 18th century. A railway reached Takayama only in 1934, and the modern town grew around the station on the western bank. In 2005 Takayama absorbed nine surrounding municipalities and became the largest city by area in Japan, most of it forest and mountain. Since then tourism, at first Japanese and increasingly foreign, has become the business of the centre.

Takayama's identity rests on carpentry, festivals and sake. The reputation of Hida's joiners runs from the ancient capitals through the merchant houses of the old town to the float builders of today, and the town keeps a strong tradition of woodwork, wood carving, lacquerware and furniture-making.

The two festivals are the year's fixed points: the Sannō festival of Hie Shrine in April for the southern half of the town and the Hachiman festival in October for the northern half. Each parades tall lacquered and gilded floats built by neighbourhood associations, several of them carrying karakuri, mechanical puppets worked by hidden operators on strings. The autumn festival is counted among the three largest festivals in Japan, and the floats themselves, built in the 17th century and after, are the town's chief treasures.

Everyday custom shows the mountains. The sarubobo, a faceless red cloth doll made as a charm for children, is the town's emblem and its souvenir. Morning markets have been held by the river and in front of the government house for well over a century, and the hanging cedar balls above brewery doors still announce the season's new sake. Hospitality is formal in the ryokan sense — dinner served in the room, the bath before the meal — and visitors are expected to fall in with it. Residents are used to crowds but attached to the quiet of their streets after the shops close.

About 82,000 people live in the city, most of them in the basin around the old centre, and the population has been falling as young people leave for Nagoya and Tokyo. The municipality is vast, stretching to the Northern Alps and the border with Nagano and Toyama, but almost all of that is forest.

Tourism, forestry, woodworking and food processing carry the local economy, with furniture and precision components made in small factories on the edge of town and sake, miso and pickles sold well beyond Hida. Farming in the basin runs to rice, tomatoes, spinach and the cattle that become Hida beef. The working day starts early: market stalls are set out at dawn, and restaurants in the old town often close before nine in the evening.

Life divides between the two banks of the Miyagawa. The eastern side is the preserved quarter, where families still live above shops in houses a visitor cannot enter; the western side has the station, the supermarkets, the schools and most of the newer housing. The pressure of visitor numbers on narrow lanes, the shortage of workers in hotels and restaurants, the cost of maintaining timber buildings and the steady ageing of the outlying valleys are the issues discussed in the town. Snow clearing takes up much of the winter budget.

Hida beef, the wagyu of the surrounding district, dominates the eating streets: grilled as steak, seared and served as nigiri sushi on a prawn cracker, minced into buns, skewered over charcoal at shop fronts and simmered at the table. The farmhouse dish of the region is hōba miso, sweet miso with spring onion and mushroom grilled on a dried magnolia leaf over a small clay burner and spooned on to rice.

Noodles are the everyday food. Takayama ramen, called chūka soba locally, is a thin curly noodle in a light soy broth, sold in small shops rather than grand ones. Soba is eaten as it is throughout the mountains, and the winter table runs to nabe stews and preserved mountain vegetables, sansai, gathered in spring and salted for the cold months. Sukiyaki here is made with Hida beef.

Street food centres on mitarashi dango, rice dumplings grilled over charcoal and brushed with soy sauce — savoury in Takayama, unlike the sweet version common elsewhere — and on skewers and steamed buns sold along the Sanmachi lanes. The morning markets sell pickles, miso, apples and the small red Hida tomatoes.

Sake is the town's drink. Several family breweries work on the old lanes, using rice grown in the basin and soft water from the snowfields, and they open to visitors in turn during the winter brewing season. Doburoku, a cloudy unfiltered rice brew, belongs to the mountain villages nearby, and coffee houses in the old town serve it out of a long local habit of slow, formal cafés.