Things to do
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Akechidaira Ropeway
Forty eight hairpins climb four hundred and forty metres between the town and the lake, one for each syllable of the old alphabet, with its syllable posted on every curve. This cable car leaves a rest stop partway up and reaches the one platform that holds the waterfall, the lake and Mount Nantai in a single frame. Ride it on the way up: the road below has been one way since 2019.
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Cedar Avenue
Thirteen thousand cryptomeria line thirty five kilometres of three old highways into the town, planted by the shogunate along the approach roads, and the Guinness book once listed the result as the longest tree avenue on earth. It is the only property in Japan designated both a Special Historic Site and a Special Natural Monument. It runs east toward Imaichi, away from everything else.
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Futarasan shrine
This one comes in three separate pieces: a main hall between the other two precincts, a middle shrine on the lake shore, and an inner shrine on the summit of Mount Nantai at two thousand four hundred and eighty six metres. The mountain is not owned by the shrine, it is the shrine, the body the deity is held to live in. Far quieter than its neighbour.
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Kanmangafuchi
Old lava squeezes the Daiya into a short gorge here, with a row of stone jizō along the bank, known locally as the ghost jizō because the count is said never to come out the same twice. A priest laid it out in 1654. A flood in 1902 took the hall and part of the row, and what stands now was rebuilt in the 1970s.
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Kegon Falls
Lake Chūzenji drains over a ninety seven metre lip in a sheet about seven metres wide, with a dozen smaller leaks working through the cracks between rock and old lava behind it. The cliff is live: a rockfall killed four at a teahouse below in 1935, and part of the lip collapsed in 1986. A lift cut down through the rock reaches the plunge pool.
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Lake Chūzenji
Nantai erupted twenty thousand years ago and dammed the river, leaving eleven square kilometres of water at twelve hundred metres and a hundred and sixty three deep. European legations built summer villas along this shore from the Meiji period, and the Italian and British houses can be walked through. It was closed to women, horses and cattle until 1872.
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Nikkō Tōshō-gū
Five thousand one hundred and seventy three carvings cover this shrine and five hundred and eight of them sit on one gate, nicknamed the all day gate because exhausting them takes that long. Forty two of its structures are in the World Heritage nomination and five are National Treasures. What stands is the 1636 rebuild, not Ieyasu's own, and the gate came out of a four year restoration in 2017.
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Rinnō-ji
A priest called Shōdō founded its ancestor in the eighth century after crossing the river at the bridge, which gives this temple the older claim on the mountain and makes it the Buddhist third of the World Heritage listing. Its Sanbutsudō holds three gilded Buddhas two storeys high. Iemitsu's mausoleum belongs to it: three hundred and fifteen lanterns, and a retainer who guarded the precinct for forty seven years.
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Shinkyo
Lacquered vermilion and thrown across the Daiya, built in a way no other protected bridge in Japan is: beams buried into the bank, cantilevered upward, their tips resting on stone piers. Replacing them counts as a rite and not a repair, and a dapple grey horse walks each new bridge first. Crossing it is ticketed and dead ends on the far side.