EVERY COUNTRY should have its Shangri-la. Perhaps this is Japan’s. Thrust upward 3,000 feet by Earth’s tectonic mischief, the highland Eden of Kamikochi, tucked into Nagano prefecture in the center of Honshu, Japan’s main island, attracts millions every year. They come to sniff its sylvan air and escape the soupy humidity of a Japanese lowlands summer. Cool, green larch woods flank the slight but lively Azusa River that plunges through an erratic necklace of precipitous granite known in Japanese as “the mountains of the standing ears of corn.”
So pristine are Kamikochi’s habitats, so dreamy its peaks, that access has to be limited by banning private cars and coaches. That doesn’t stop thousands of visitors arriving each day to tramp its gentle, narrow trails. Everywhere it scintillates with the bright colors of hikers in top-to-toe Lycra; there’s little room to breathe.
The crowds are inevitable. Japans 127-million-strong population is crammed largely into super-cities: Greater Tokyo holds a staggering 38 million souls. Much of its hinterlands have been ruthlessly cemented, blasted and laid to waste by a combination of apathy, bad planning and pork barrel laws passed in the name of regeneration. What’s left is a deeply mountainous backyard—80 percent of Japan is valleys and hills—often either too steep to explore or filled with dam water. So, with near 90 percent humidity in August and little in the way of appealing country retreats close by, unspoiled Kamikochi is the go-to glen for Tokyoites.