Nagano has eight neighbours and no sea
Nagano has no coastline, borders eight prefectures and is really a cluster of basins wedged between the Japanese Alps. Each valley faces outwards along its own river; what holds them together is a song almost everyone knows and a habit of neighbours looking after one another.
Look at Nagano on a map of Japan and you see a large green patch in the middle of Honshu, without a single stretch of coastline. Travel through it and you find something else: not one prefecture but a sequence of flat lands ringed by mountains, each with its own town, its own river and its own way of making a living, separated from the next by mountain passes.
That shape explains almost everything you feel when you spend a few days there. Life happens below, on the flat valley floors; the peaks mark the edge of each world. And what holds those worlds together shows up in people's habits more than in the roads.
01 A land made of valley floors
Nagano covers 13,561 square kilometres and is Japan's fourth-largest prefecture. It does not touch the sea, and in exchange it borders eight prefectures: Niigata, Toyama, Gifu, Aichi, Shizuoka, Yamanashi, Saitama and Gunma. No other prefecture in the country has so many neighbours.
The reason lies in the relief. All three ranges of the Japanese Alps run through Nagano, the Hida in the north, the Kiso in the centre and the Akaishi in the south, and within its borders stand nine of Japan's twelve highest mountains. Between those ranges lie the hollows where people live: the Zenkōji-daira basin around the city of Nagano; the Matsumoto and Azumino basin; the Ina valley; the Saku basin; the Suwa basin with its lake; and the narrow Kiso valley.
Seen from above, those valley floors look like small countries. Houses, rice fields and apple orchards fill the flat ground; the slopes are left to forest and terraces. From Obasute station, high on a slope above Zenkōji-daira, you can take in the whole basin at once: a plain closed off by low hills, with the river in the middle and the towns spread across the floor.
02 Rivers that leave in opposite directions
If each basin is a world, each river is its door. The Chikuma rises on Mount Kobushi, where Nagano meets Yamanashi and Saitama, crosses Saku, Ueda and Zenkōji-daira, and changes its name on entering Niigata: there it is called the Shinano, and at 367 kilometres it is the longest river in Japan. It reaches the Sea of Japan at the city of Niigata. The Sai, which comes down from the northern Alps through Matsumoto, joins it before it leaves.
To the south, the water leaves the other way. The Tenryū is the only river flowing out of Lake Suwa; it runs down the Ina valley between two ranges and reaches the Pacific near Hamamatsu after 213 kilometres. The Kiso flows down its valley towards the Nagoya plain and Ise Bay. Nagano shares its water between two seas it never sees.
That divide is not just hydrography. For centuries, goods, news and influences reached each basin along its river and its road, and each one looked towards the neighbour closest at hand. The north traded towards Niigata and the Sea of Japan; the south, towards the Pacific coast and the Nagoya region. That is why accents, dishes and customs that do not always resemble each other live side by side in Nagano.
03 Kiso, the valley of guarded trees
The clearest case is the Kiso valley in the south-west. It is so narrow that in many stretches there is barely room for the river, the road, the railway and one row of houses. The Nakasendō, the mountain road linking Edo and Kyoto, ran through it: eleven of its sixty-nine post towns stood in this valley, and life was organised around the travellers coming and going.
In the Edo period the valley was run not by a lord from Shinano but by the Owari domain, based in Nagoya, which valued it for its timber. From the mid-seventeenth century, the people of Kiso were forbidden to fell five tree species, among them hinoki, the Japanese cypress. The saying remembered from that time is blunt: «one tree, one head». Penalties softened over time and the ban ended in the Meiji era, but the forest that covers the slopes today is largely the legacy of that watchfulness.
That guarded forest is still part of the valley's identity. At Akasawa, near Agematsu, Kiso cypresses more than three hundred years old are still standing. In 1970 it became the first natural recreation forest designated in Japan, and in 1982 it hosted the first shinrin-yoku, or «forest bathing», event, a practice that later spread across the country. What was once protected by order of a distant domain is now visited to walk slowly among the trees.
Kiso teaches something that repeats across the prefecture: each basin has learned to live with what surrounds it and to protect it, often with very strict rules. The valley faces Nagoya along its river, but its character is set by the mountains that enclose it.
04 What each basin does with what it has
North of Matsumoto, the Azumino basin lives off something you do not see at first: the water that snow from the northern Alps leaves underground and that wells up again on the plain. At Daio farm, Japan's largest wasabi operation at around fifteen hectares, some 120,000 tonnes of spring water are estimated to flow through every day, at an almost constant temperature of about 12 or 13 degrees all year round. The wasabi grows in gravel beds that this water never stops running over.
A few mountains to the south-east, the Suwa basin found its trade in the air. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Okaya area on the lakeshore was one of Japan's great silk centres. When that industry collapsed, the lake kept drawing factories, but of another kind.
On 18 May 1942, Hisao Yamazaki, the owner of a local clock shop, opened a workshop by Lake Suwa with nine employees in a former miso warehouse. They assembled watch parts. The idea was that Suwa, with its clean air and low summer humidity, could become «the Switzerland of the East». That workshop grew into the company that in 1969 launched the Astron, the world's first quartz wristwatch, and that is now known as Epson.
That a precision industry was born in a miso warehouse is not just a charming coincidence; it is a good summary of Nagano. Shinshū miso, named after the region's old name, holds the largest market share in the country. Fermentation and watchmaking share something: both ask for patience, steady air and people willing to do a small task well many times over. Each valley makes use, in its own way, of the climate, the water and the isolation it was given.
05 One song for so many valleys
With so many valleys facing outwards, the question is what makes people in Nagano feel they belong to the same place. One surprising answer is a song. «Shinano no Kuni», «The Land of Shinano», was written in 1899 by Asai Retsu, a local teacher, and set to music in 1900 by Kitamura Sueharu for the primary school attached to Nagano's teacher-training college. The teachers trained there carried it into classrooms across the prefecture.
The lyrics work like a sung geography lesson. They describe a land of mountains with four fertile plains, Matsumoto, Ina, Saku and Zenkōji, name its peaks and follow its rivers: the Sai and the Chikuma to the north, the Kiso and the Tenryū to the south. Choosing the old provincial name, Shinano, rather than that of the city of Nagano, meant nobody was left out.
In 1968 it became the prefecture's official song, and its roots are real: more than half of the adults who grew up there can sing at least one verse. It is heard at school baseball games, at meetings and on some tour buses; in 1998 it was played at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics, and since 2014 it has been the departure melody for trains at Nagano station.
It is not a unity without friction. Between the north, with the city of Nagano, and the centre, with Matsumoto, there is an old rivalry that locals themselves acknowledge with humour, and some describe the prefecture, half jokingly, as «a collection of basins». That is exactly why the song matters: it is what those basins share when everything else keeps them apart.
06 Health as a neighbourhood task
The other shared habit is less visible and more revealing. In 1965 Nagano had the highest stroke death rate in Japan, and one of the reasons cited was too much salt: pickles, soups and miso in generous amounts, in a land of long winters where preserving food was a necessity.
The response did not come from hospitals alone. In 1945, in the village of Kōho, now part of Suzaka, a group of local women began helping the overworked public health nurse on their own initiative. From that grew the role of the hoken hodōin, volunteer neighbours who take turns by household, usually for two years, to carry health information from door to door. In 1967 a network of food volunteers also emerged, made up of women who had taken nutrition courses.
From 1981 the prefecture ran a salt-reduction campaign with slogans anyone could follow: one bowl of miso soup a day, leave half the broth of your soba or ramen. The volunteers repeated them in kitchens and neighbourhood meetings. In 2010 Nagano topped Japan's life expectancy tables for both men and women.
It is not a story of perfection. In the 2019 survey, residents still ate more salt than the national average, 11.3 grams a day for men and 9.8 for women, and the prefecture keeps campaigning to bring it down. But the way the problem was tackled says a lot about the place: in basins where outside help was slow to arrive, health also became a task for neighbours.
07 What it feels like to cross it
Crossing Nagano is a series of thresholds. You leave one basin up a winding road or through a tunnel, cross a stretch of forest and come down onto another plain with different light, a different river and different mountains on the horizon. Straight-line distances are short; real ones are not. That is why each valley keeps its own rhythm, and why the trip makes more sense taken slowly, sleeping in more than one basin.
At the highest point, the prefecture's logic becomes almost a rule. Kamikochi, a valley some fifteen kilometres long at about 1,500 metres along the Azusa River, within Matsumoto, is closed to private cars: you arrive by bus or taxi, and it only opens from mid-April to mid-November. It is another agreement to protect what is there, like the one that protected the Kiso trees for centuries.
By the end of the trip what stays with you is the image of many valley floors, each with its own way of living: the water of Azumino, the watches of Suwa, the guarded cypresses of Kiso, the great Zenkōji-daira plain seen from Obasute. Nagano cannot be understood from a single city. It is understood by moving from one basin to the next and noticing that, although the river and the horizon change, people keep singing the same song.
