Takayama

Three parallel lanes of latticed merchant houses, with balls of cedar sprigs called sugidama hung under the brewery eaves. A green ball means new sake has just been pressed. Many breweries pour tastings, so the lanes fill up by afternoon.

The only Edo shogunate administrative office in Japan to survive intact. You can walk through the wide tatami rooms and into the storehouse where tax rice was piled, and every morning stalls gather on the square outside its gate.

Farm and pickle stalls set up under awnings along the Miyagawa embankment every morning and pack away around noon. In winter they open an hour later. Red turnip pickles and sarubobo dolls are what most of the stalls sell.

Some thirty gassho-zukuri thatched houses and farmhouses moved here from around Hida and set round a pond as an open-air museum. On many days the hearths inside are lit, so you smell how smoke was used to preserve the thatch.

A mountain village of steep-thatched gassho-zukuri houses, made a World Heritage Site in 1995. Takayama is roughly an hour away by bus, and a shuttle climbs to the Shiroyama lookout above the houses. The winter illuminations need booking in advance.

Inside the grounds of Sakurayama Hachimangu, it shows a few of the floats hauled out for the October festival, rotated through the year. They reach the ceiling, so you look up through glass, and the gilt fittings and carving are close even off festival days.

Right in town, a five-minute stroll from the station, rises the only three-storey pagoda in Hida. The great ginkgo in its grounds is said to have passed a thousand years, and when it yellows in mid-November the leaves carpet the yard below the pagoda.

Japan's only double-decker gondola climbs partway up the Northern Alps. It lies deep in Okuhida, roughly 90 minutes from Takayama by bus, and the deck at the top station is cool enough in midsummer that you will want a jacket.

A path along the eastern hillside strung with temples and shrines, crossing over into Shiroyama Park where Takayama Castle stood. Ten-odd minutes up from Sanmachi the visitors thin out sharply, and plenty of locals use it as a morning walk.

A sake merchant's house rebuilt in late Meiji, with heavy beams left exposed in a lattice under a high skylight. The beams show best in the afternoon when the light slants across them, and the Kusakabe Folk Museum next door is visited in the same go.

A small old town 15 minutes north of Takayama by JR, where some 1,000 carp swim the Seto canal beneath white-walled storehouses. In winter the fish move to a pond and the channel runs empty, and the lanes stay far quieter than Takayama's.

A valley at 1,500m beneath the Hotaka peaks, where the view from Kappa Bridge over the Azusa River is the classic Japan Alps scene. Private cars are barred, so change to a bus at Hirayu, and the season runs late April through mid-November.

An onsen town 45 minutes south of Takayama on the Hida express, named by the Edo scholar Hayashi Razan among the nation's top three spas. The alkaline water leaves skin slick, and free foot baths by the river and on the streets suit even a short stop.

Five spa villages, Hirayu and Shin-Hotaka among them, a bus hour out of Takayama, with one of Japan's highest counts of open-air baths. Many riverside pools face the Northern Alps; winter means soaking amid snow while icy roads slow the buses.