Places to seeWhere to go in Niigata
Start with the first of these. Each is worth half a day.
Niigata新潟県
Niigata faces the Japan Sea, and what falls on it in winter is snow — several metres of it, reliably, every year.
Niigata faces the Japan Sea, and what falls on it in winter is snow — several metres of it, reliably, every year.
Start with the first of these. Each is worth half a day.
The tunnel out of the mountains from Tokyo is the border: you go in on a clear day and come out in a white country.
That snow is why the rice and the sake here are what they are. Niigata has around ninety sake breweries, more than any other prefecture, and many of them pour tastings. At Echigo-Yuzawa station, on the shinkansen, there is a tasting room where a coin buys you a small cup from any of about a hundred local sakes — which makes it the easiest sake stop in Japan, on the way to somewhere else.
Getting in: Niigata Airport · Niigata Station (shinkansen, about 2 hours from Tokyo)
Pick the season first and the days will arrange themselves.
Snow lasts into April in the mountains. Rice paddies are flooded and mirror-flat in May.
Wet in June, hot in August, and the rice is green to the horizon.
Harvest, new rice and new sake. Autumn colour in the gorges in late October.
Several metres of snow. The closest reliable powder to Tokyo, and the reason to come.
