Imaichi is the low-key gateway to Nikkō, a town on the plain where three old roads meet before the mountains begin. Officially it has been part of Nikkō city since a municipal merger in the 2000s, but locally it keeps its own name and character: a railway town, a market town, lots of ordinary streets and convenience stores, with the Nikkō mountains rising to the north-west and the Kinugawa river running nearby. For riders heading to the Irohazaka hairpins, it is where you sort out fuel, lunch and the last coffee before the climb.
The great sight here is the Nikkō cedar avenue. In the seventeenth century a feudal lord planted Japanese cedars along the roads converging on Nikkō, reportedly as an offering to the shrine of Tokugawa Ieyasu, because he could not afford a grander gift such as the stone lanterns offered by other lords. Some twelve thousand trees still survive along roughly thirty-five kilometres of road, many of them enormous, and the avenue is listed as the longest tree-lined road in the world. Riding beneath them is a strange, cool experience, the light dimmed and the air smelling of resin and damp bark, even on a hot day.
Steam trains run on a line out of Imaichi towards Kinugawa Onsen, and on weekends you can see the old locomotive puffing past the rice fields. The area is also known for its water: springs from the Nikkō mountains feed sake breweries and soba shops, and yuba, the delicate skin skimmed from soy milk, is a regional speciality you will find on menus all around Nikkō.
The riding beyond is the main event. From Nikkō the road climbs steeply along the river, and the Irohazaka is actually two one-way roads, one up and one down, with forty-eight hairpins between them, one for each syllable of the old Japanese iroha poem. At the top is Lake Chūzenji and the Kegon Falls. In autumn the maples make the climb famous and the traffic dreadful, so go early on a weekday. Expect speed limits that feel very low, polite but strict policing, and drivers who stop to admire the view in surprising places. Imaichi is the place to fill up, because services thin out on the way up and become tourist-priced at the lake.