The key didn’t want to turn. We stood in a parking lot near Tokyo’s eastern edge, a light rain beginning to spot the windscreen, and the ignition of our rented campervan — a modest grey thing with a sleeping platform in the back — refused to cooperate. A man in a hi-vis vest emerged from a small office, wiping his hands on a rag. He didn’t seem surprised. “The battery,” he said, not quite to us. “It does this when it’s been sitting.” Fifteen minutes later, after a jump start and some apologetic nodding, we were rolling. It felt like an appropriately awkward beginning for a five-day run from Tokyo to Kanazawa — the kind of trip where the vehicle itself becomes part of the story. For better or worse.
Day one was never going to feel like we’d left the city. We’d planned it that way: pick up the van, then spend the afternoon in Shibuya and Asakusa before pointing the wheels north. The van smelled faintly of vinyl and recycled air. We parked at a multi-storey near Shibuya Crossing — an absurdly expensive proposition at ¥2,000 an hour — and walked into the scramble. It was a Tuesday, mid-afternoon, and the crowd was still thick enough that you had to commit to a direction and push. Regulars know to find the second-floor Starbucks window for the view, but we didn’t bother. Standing in the middle of it was better, if only because the scale of the thing — the screens, the headlights, the sheer volume of people moving in five directions at once — doesn’t translate from above.
Asakusa felt like a different country. The street leading to Senso-ji was busy in a different way: slower, more deliberate. There were fewer phones held at head height and more people actually looking at things. A woman in a blue apron was grilling rice crackers over a charcoal burner, and the smell — nutty, slightly burnt — drifted past the shop fronts. We bought one, still warm, and ate it leaning against a railing near the temple. A group of schoolchildren in matching yellow hats shuffled past, each carrying a small paper bag from a souvenir shop. Nobody rushed.
By evening we were clear of the city, following the Tohoku Expressway north. The GPS estimated three hours to Nikko, but we knew better. Traffic slowed to a crawl just past Utsunomiya — a three-lane parking lot that stretched into the dark. A truck driver ahead of us got out of his cab and walked back to stretch his legs. “Roadworks,” he said, gesturing vaguely ahead. “Every night this week.” We sat there for an hour, the van’s engine ticking, watching the taillights of the cars in front of us blur into a single red line. It was past ten by the time we found a roadside rest area near Imaichi, pulled into a space between two trucks, and unfolded the bed platform for the first time. The mattress was thinner than it looked in the photos. We slept anyway.
Nikko arrived gray and damp the next morning. The Toshogu Shrine complex sits at the base of a forested hillside, and the mist was still settling between the trees when we walked through the main gate. The buildings are loud — gold leaf, intricate carvings, a palette that seems to reject subtlety entirely. The famous sleeping cat carving, a small wooden panel near the entrance, is almost anticlimactic when you find it: smaller than expected, tucked above a doorway, easy to miss if you’re looking at the crowds instead. A group of French tourists stood beneath it, their guide explaining something about the symbolism — or something like that — their voices carrying in the damp air. We moved on.
The thing that surprised us about Toshogu wasn’t the decoration. It was the scale of the site — not just one shrine but dozens of structures spread across the hillside, connected by stone paths and staircases worn smooth by the decades. The Yomeimon Gate, covered in hundreds of carved figures, was under renovation, half-hidden behind scaffolding and a printed wrap depicting what the gate would look like without it. A sign nearby explained the restoration work in Japanese and English. A woman beside us muttered something under her breath that sounded like resignation.
Kegon Falls is a short drive west, past the lake and into the mountains. The parking lot was full when we arrived just after noon. We circled twice, then squeezed into a spot meant for a smaller vehicle, the van’s rear bumper hanging over a drainage ditch. The falls themselves drop nearly a hundred meters into a basin of green water, and the viewing platform was thick with people holding cameras and umbrellas. The spray carried all the way to the railing. We stood at the edge for a few minutes, feeling the cold settle into our jackets, then walked back to the van.
Day three brought a long drive through the Japanese Alps toward Matsumoto. The roads climbed steadily, the air cooling with every kilometer. We stopped at a roadside rest area near the Nagano border — the kind of place that sells grilled corn and soft serve from a small white truck. The corn was good, the kind that snaps when you bite into it. The woman running the stall wore a wool hat despite the mild weather and told us, unprompted, that the snow had only just disappeared from the higher peaks. “Two weeks ago,” she said, holding up two fingers, “you wouldn’t have seen the road at all.”
The drive into Matsumoto follows a valley between steep ridges, and the castle appears suddenly as you round a curve — a black silhouette against a backdrop of hills, the roofs curving upward like a hand closing. We arrived in late afternoon, the light turning the castle’s dark wood a shade deeper. Matsumoto Castle is one of the few original castles left in Japan — not a reconstruction, not a concrete replacement. You can feel the difference inside. The staircases are steep enough that you climb with both hands, the wood creaking underfoot. The arrow slits let in narrow bands of light that light up exactly nothing. It’s a defensive building, not a palace. A guard near the top floor, an older man in a blue uniform, gestured at the view through a window. “This is where they would have watched for enemies,” he said. “Now we watch for tourists.”
We spent that night parked at a rest area on the outskirts of the city. The van’s heater worked better than we expected, though the condensation on the windows was a problem we hadn’t anticipated. We wiped the glass with a cloth before bed, and by morning it was wet again. A man in the next parking space, traveling alone in a slightly newer van, saw us struggling and offered a tip: crack the windows an inch at night, no matter how cold it gets. “The air has nowhere to go otherwise,” he said. “Learned that the hard way.” We tried it the next night. It helped.
Takayama on day four was a different pace. The old town, Sanmachi Suji, runs along three narrow streets lined with wooden merchant houses from the Edo period. The morning was quiet — shops still closed, the streets washed clean by an overnight rain. A woman knelt by a small shrine near the Miyagawa River, arranging flowers in a stone basin. The water in the river was clear enough to see the pebbles at the bottom, the color of tea. We walked the length of the street twice, once on each side, before the first shop shutters began to roll up. A baker emerged from a doorway and set out a tray of rice flour cakes. The steam rose into the cool air.
Hida Folk Village sits on a hill outside town, a collection of thatched-roof farmhouses moved from surrounding mountain villages and reassembled like a living museum. The buildings are dark inside, the floors packed earth, the ceilings blackened by centuries of smoke from open hearths. In one of the larger houses, a woman sat by the fire, stirring a pot of miso soup. She didn’t seem to be performing for visitors — she was just there, cooking, as if the building were still a home. We didn’t stay for a workshop, but we sat on a wooden bench near the entrance and watched a group of schoolchildren run through the grounds, their laughter carrying across the valley.
That afternoon, we drove the remaining stretch to Kanazawa through farmland and low hills. The road was empty. We passed a rice paddy where a single heron stood motionless, and a convenience store where we bought onigiri and hot tea for dinner. The van felt smaller than it had five days ago — not in a bad way, but in the way a space becomes familiar when you’ve slept in it, eaten in it, argued about directions in it. We pulled into Kanazawa as the last light left the sky, the city’s streetlights flickering on in sequence.
Kenrokuen Garden opened at seven the next morning. We were there at ten past, the gate still quiet, the gravel paths damp from an overnight sprinkler system. The garden is designed to be walked in a specific order — a circuit that reveals different views of the central pond and the surrounding hills — but we wandered off the path almost immediately. A group of zelkova trees near the eastern edge, their branches touching overhead, made a tunnel of green light. The water in the pond was still, reflecting the sky in patches. An older couple sat on a bench, not talking, just watching. We walked past them, then circled back ten minutes later, and they were still there, still silent.
The Higashi Chaya district, a short walk from the garden, is the kind of neighborhood that feels curated without feeling fake. The wooden buildings along the main street house tea houses and shops selling gold leaf — a local specialty — pressed into sake cups, lacquerware, even ice cream. We stopped at a small shop where a man was hammering gold leaf into a thin sheet, the metal so delicate that he worked it between sheets of paper. “It takes years to learn,” he said, not looking up. “And you still ruin half of them.” We bought a single gold-leaf-covered cookie from the shop next door. It tasted like sugar and felt like nothing at all — the gold dissolved on the tongue without flavor, a texture that was barely there.
The campervan’s key turned without resistance when we drove it back toward the rental office that afternoon. Five days, one jump start, a cracked window, and a growing collection of convenience store receipts in the glovebox. The man at the office said something in Japanese we didn’t fully catch, then smiled and waved us off. We left the keys on the counter and walked toward the station, the van’s smell of vinyl and damp cloth fading as we moved on foot through the streets of Kanazawa.
📷 Photos: Glen Zi 加侖子 (Pexels), Tayawee Supan (Unsplash)
