As the inn’s elegant, English-fluent general manager, Jiro Takeuchi, served us tea on arrival, he explained, “This tea is grown on the mountain. Actually,” he added modestly, “we own the mountain.” For a break from classic kaiseki (multicourse) fare, the Alla Contadina restaurant is a few minutes’ drive away; here, a Japanese chef, trained in Venice, serves up delectable pasta. A five-minute walk across Shirasagi (White Heron) bridge is Enuma Station, a French restaurant associated with Kayotei, where I was greeted with a photo of two recent visitors: Mr and Mrs Roger Federer.
I’d come here on a pilgrimage of my own. I’ve lived around Kyoto for 37 years, and in the past decade I’ve seen its quiet, narrow lanes overwhelmed with foreign tourists. By 2023, more than 75 million visitors were crowding into its temples and tiny restaurants every year, and friends were writing to me every day asking how they could escape the hordes and find something traditional. So on a warm, blue week in late spring, I’d decided to explore two of the lesser-known corners of Japan – Ishikawa-ken and Fukui-ken in the Hokuriku region of northwestern Honshu – in the hope of uncovering overlooked treasures.
Yamanaka has long been beloved of the Japanese, but in 2023, it had barely 36 foreign visitors a day; a Japanese magazine recently placed Fukui 46th among the 47 prefectures of Japan in terms of international arrivals, noting that in 2023, it received fewer than one foreign visitor for every 600 pouring into Tokyo. Yet Yamanaka – the name means “in the mountain” – is just an hour south of the cool and very sophisticated town of Kanazawa; only two hours from Kyoto by train, and three from Tokyo. I’d been drawn to Yamanaka in part by one of the warmest and most evocative books on Japan I’d read of late, Water, Wood & Wild Things. It describes how a young American woman, Hannah Kirshner, came to work for two months at a sake bar in the little village of 7,500 people. She so lost her heart to the area that she returned and bought a house here. She joined her new neighbours in making sake, in learning wood turning, in watching how to catch ducks in Y-shaped nets (while acknowledging how a Buddhist monk leads a prayer service, next to a large tombstone, every autumn for the poor creatures).
Entrance to Heisenji Hakusan ShrineAndrew Urwin
AloJapan.com