A Day Trip to Niigata to Capture Its Beautiful Landscapes — A Day Spent Capturing Niigata’s Scenery
From the beams of a world-renowned master’s light to the simple smile of a local grandmother, the landscapes and culture rooted in Niigata’s nature spread a singular energy across the land of snow. We head to a place that stirs the senses and invites rest.
Words Hur Taewoo
Photos Park Shinwoo
The Spirit of the Earth, the Art of the Earth
About two hours by Shinkansen from Tokyo’s Ueno Station, the train passes through quiet suburban scenery and several long tunnels before arriving at Echigo-Yuzawa Station (越後湯沢駅) in Niigata. In the novel ‘Snow Country,’ this is described as an unknown region beyond the border, but it is not really that far. Stepping out of the station, I find a tranquil town center ringed by mountains and the deep green of high summer. It will be months before the hot spring town of Yuzawa is buried in snow like the setting of ‘Snow Country.’ Until then, Yuzawa is full of summer charm.
Just across from the station, I escape the heat for a while at the first-floor café of Hatago Isen (HATAGO 井仙; a hatago (旅籠) is a type of inn that appeared in Japan’s Edo period, offering meals and a place to sleep). Hatago Isen opened in 1925, the year Echigo-Yuzawa Station began operating, and bills itself as the ‘gateway to Snow Country.’ The first floor is a café and shop, the second a restaurant, and the third through fifth floors hold guest rooms and a hot spring. What stands out is how actively it draws on Niigata’s local resources, from the food to the interior décor. The café is called Mizuya (水屋), ‘Onsen Coffee.’ On a midsummer weekday, travelers occupy many of its seats. Are they here for its signature items: coffee brewed with hot spring water, onsen pudding, and Yuzawa roll cake? The ekiben (station bento) I ate on the train is quickly forgotten as the sharply acidic coffee and sweet desserts linger in my mouth.
In a rental car, I follow roads that wind between mountains and forests and enter the countryside. When the snow that blankets Niigata all winter melts, what emerges on the land is art. This is the product of the Echigo-Tsumari (越後妻有) Art Triennale, formally Daichi no Geijutsusai (大地の芸術祭; Echigo-Tsumari is held every three years as a large-scale international triennale, and in the years in between, it hosts Art Field events across spring and autumn). The festival, which turned Niigata into a vast field of art, is often cited as a leading example of regional revitalization.
In the mid-1990s, the Echigo (越後) and Tsumari (妻有) areas of southern Niigata decided to use art to stem population decline and revitalize the region. It was one of the earliest such attempts in Japan. Starting with the Echigo-Tsumari Triennale in 2000, artworks have settled one by one across roughly 760 square kilometers of land. Rice paddies and fields, old farmhouses, schools, museums, even tunnels: no space or place was off limits. With each triennale, Niigata became a region where art breathes alongside daily life. Today, more than 200 permanent works (the official Echigo-Tsumari website offers a Google map marking the location of every work) have become part of the land. Travelers from Japan and around the world set out in search of them, poking through the nature of Echigo and Tsumari and exploring every corner as if on an expedition.
The Light That Illuminates Niigata
From its very first edition, the Echigo-Tsumari Triennale in Niigata presented astonishing works that fused architecture with the art of world-class masters. One is Hikari no Yakata (光の館, House of Light), which combines James Turrell’s light with traditional architecture. Set on a mountain slope overlooking the city of Tokamachi (十日町市), the work is said to have been inspired by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s (谷崎潤一郞) essay ‘In Praise of Shadows’ (陰翳礼讃). To realize the concept of a ‘house for meditation,’ Turrell drew on the region’s traditional architectural style and filled the interior with a sense of light. The house is raised 2.7 meters off the ground, reportedly to withstand Niigata’s heavy snowfall.
Standing like a solitary, solid temple at the top of a winding uphill road, Hikari no Yakata’s greatest appeal is that you get to stay inside Turrell’s work. (Hikari no Yakata operates as a private-house stay. Up to three groups can stay at the same time. The use fee for the entire facility is ¥50,000, shared among the groups depending on their number, and lodging is an additional ¥10,000 per person. Those not staying overnight can visit individually during the daytime, 12–3 p.m., for ¥800 per person.) The retractable ceiling of the main room, Outside In, opens at sunset and sunrise, and each time, LED lights installed on all sides slowly shift in color to answer the light of the sky. The sight of sky and light blending in silence offers a moment of visual meditation. Turrell also left works in several places beyond the main room. Fiber-optic lighting installed in the floor of the basement bath creates a dreamlike atmosphere in which the bathwater seems to glow on its own, and with the lighting that illuminates the corridors and rooms, the entire house functions as a Turrell artwork.
Tokamachi holds another work that drew global attention thanks to the Echigo-Tsumari festival: the Kiyotsu Gorge Tunnel, built in Kiyotsu Gorge (清津峡), counted among Japan’s three great gorges. The sightseeing tunnel, opened so that visitors could safely view a gorge closed off because of rockfall accidents, reached a new turning point just as worries over dwindling visitor numbers grew. The 2018 triennale transformed it into a vast art space. MAD Architects, led by Chinese architect Ma Yansong (马岩松), remodeled the gorge tunnel into a work called Tunnel of Light. The 750-meter tunnel is divided into five sections (the tunnel is composed around the five elements of nature: wood, earth, metal, fire, and water), and each section reinterprets its space according to its theme. The ‘Panorama Station’ at the innermost end of the tunnel is the highlight of Tunnel of Light. The scenery reflected in the shallow mirror of water on the floor connects with the actual valley, blurring the line between reality and illusion.
Style and Flavor Embracing Nature and Art
A simple boxed lunch is laid out, filled with side dishes of cucumber, eggplant, mushrooms, and carrots. The women gathered in small groups to prepare lunch are busy at work. Ubusuna House, which I came upon on a country road in Higashi-Shimogumi (東下組), is an exhibition space and farm-to-table restaurant in a farmhouse built in 1924 in the gasshō-zukuri (合掌造り) style, a traditional house type found in the snowy regions of Japan, characterized by steeply pitched roofs. It opened in time for the 2006 Echigo-Tsumari Triennale, and it is also a place of exchange, run directly by local women who pooled their efforts. According to Grandmother Higuchi Michiko, one of its operators, most villagers were skeptical of the art festival in the early days, but with each passing year they came to take pride in both the festival and their village. Higuchi herself first took part in 2006, at age 60, as a local guide for the festival, and now she cooks at Ubusuna House.
On the first floor of Ubusuna House, ceramic works are woven into spaces of everyday life. Traditional kilns, hearths, washbasins, and bathtubs made by leading Japanese ceramic artists serve as working facilities, staying faithful to the original purpose of craft. Guests can sit around the irori (囲炉裏, a heating fixture used in traditional Japanese farmhouses, usually a square cut into part of the floor and filled with ash to serve as a hearth) or settle on the tatami to enjoy a meal made with local care, and even the tableware is the work of ceramic artists. The second floor is an exhibition room that preserves the original layout of three small rooms (tea rooms), where ceramic works are arranged as naturally as decorations in a parlor. In a space that combines the beauty of ceramics with warm hospitality, you can’t help wanting to linger and rest a while longer after the meal.
In Minami-Uonuma, Satoyama Jujo (“satoyama” is a distinctly Japanese concept of mountains and people living in coexistence, and “jujo” means ten stories) weaves art in with even greater precision and refinement. In 2012, Iwasa Toru, the former publisher of the magazine “Jiyujin” (a magazine on Japanese food culture and lifestyle), took over an old wooden ryokan and reborn it with a contemporary sensibility. The inn captures the nature and culture of Niigata through ten perspectives spanning art, architecture, design, and cuisine, offering a refined experience that feels like a single issue of a magazine. In other words, it brings the content that “Jiyujin” once covered to life in physical space. Matsuura Yuna, manager of Satoyama Jujo, explains, “Readers of Jiyujin who actually stay here come away deeply satisfied, and more than 70 percent of our guests are repeat visitors.” Beyond this property, Jiyujin also operates Airbnb-style stand-alone stays in Niigata’s traditional farmhouses (minka) and has opened design ryokan in Hakodate, Shiga, and Matsumoto in Japan.
The main building of Satoyama Jujo, built with zelkova pillars and beams, preserves the original form of the old house as much as possible. In the lobby, where the timber frame supporting the high ceiling is left exposed, designer furniture by the likes of Isamu Noguchi and Finn Juhl and works of art welcome guests. The thirteen minimalist guest rooms are likewise furnished with carefully chosen pieces and artworks, and the grand Niigata landscape seen through the wide windows is like a painting. The open-air bath, filled with hot spring water from Mount Osawa and the energy of the surrounding cedar forest, revives the traditional Japanese hot spring therapy known as “toji” in a modern way. Another distinctive feature of the rooms at Satoyama Jujo is that everything, from the amenities to the furniture, is for sale. To that end, the ryokan runs a separate select shop on the premises.
The guests’ five senses are completed at the ryokan’s restaurant, Sanaburi. Executive chef Kuwakino Keiko, a Michelin-starred cook, has earned a singular standing with fine dining that transplants the flavors of the region. Her vegetarian cuisine, made with local seasonal produce, wild mountain greens, and Koshihikari rice from Uonuma, the finest in Japan, is nature distilled to its purest form. The menu changes every five days as a rule, so a new dish arrives at the table almost every day. Flavor and elegance become one, expressing the life and aesthetics of the land. It is a story that leaves nothing wanting as a way to close a day spent in the landscapes of Niigata.