Kusatsu Shiga Highland Road
A 903 km loop
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Why this ride
A rider’s loop: clean exit, memorable middle, calm return. A 903 km loop that starts and ends near Tokyo, about 16 h 25 of riding. On the way it passes Ryūō, Seto and Kusatsu. The highest point is about 1,150 m.
Roadbook
- Tokyo
start
Every ride from Tokyo begins with a negotiation. The roads are good and the drivers are disciplined, but traffic lights are many and the pace is steady rather than fast, so patience is part of the toolkit. A Sunday dawn is the easiest time to slip away.
Tokyo is a city of more than thirteen million, and the metropolitan area around it is the largest in the world. It was once the fishing village of Edo, and it became the seat of the Tokugawa shogunate in the early seventeenth century, then Japan's capital in 1868. That history is visible in odd places: a small shrine tucked between apartment blocks, a stretch of old canal, a temple with incense drifting over a car park. For a rider, it is worth looking up between traffic lights.
Practicalities are simple, because everything is close. Fuel stations are everywhere, with attendants at many of them, and the city's convenience stores sell hot coffee, rice balls and sandwiches at any hour. The expressways are tolled, and an electronic toll card makes them smoother, though paying at the booth works. Parking for motorcycles is trickier than in many places, so choose a hotel with a bike space in advance and check the rules before leaving the bike anywhere on the street.
Once you reach the open road, the contrast is striking. Heading south-west along the coast toward the Izu Peninsula, the landscape changes from concrete to hills, tangerine groves and sea views, with Mount Fuji appearing on clear days. The best time to ride is autumn, when the air is dry and cool and the visibility is highest, and spring, when the cherry blossom runs up the coast. Summer is hot and humid, and the rainy season in June can be grey and heavy, so pack proper waterproofs.
- Ryūō
fuel
In the sixteenth century, the warlord Takeda Shingen built a series of levees and stone barriers along the Kamanashi river at Ryūō to tame its floods, and the system, called Shingen-zutsumi, still protects the Kōfu basin today. The levee is planted with bamboo and trees, and a park along the river commemorates the work. It is a reminder that Shingen, famous as a general, was also a canny administrator.
Ryūō lies on the western side of the Kōfu basin, in Yamanashi, where the flat valley floor is covered with orchards of grapes and peaches. Yamanashi is Japan's fruit bowl, and the roadside stalls sell fruit in summer and autumn. It is also the heart of Japanese wine, with wineries scattered through the valley.
The views are spectacular on a clear day. To the west, the peaks of the Southern Alps rise steeply from the basin, and to the south, Mount Fuji peeks over the hills. The Misaka pass, south of Kōfu, was made famous by the writer Dazai Osamu, who stayed at a tea house there and wrote about the view of Fuji.
The riding around Ryūō is a mix of busy national roads and quiet orchard lanes, with the mountains always in view. Route 52 heads south towards the Fuji river, and the roads into the Southern Alps are steep and winding. Ryūō is a practical stop, with fuel and konbini along the national road. In late summer, pull in at any orchard stall with grapes stacked on the counter; a bunch of Kyohō grapes, dark, sweet and cold from the cooler, is the best thing you will eat all day.
- Seto
town
In Japanese, everyday pottery is called setomono, things from Seto, and that says everything about this town. Potters have worked here for more than a thousand years, using the fine clay of the surrounding hills, and in the Edo period Seto supplied ceramics to the whole country. The kilns still smoke, and the town is full of workshops, galleries and shops selling everything from rice bowls to garden ornaments.
The Kamagaki-no-komichi, a narrow lane in the old pottery district, is lined with walls built from broken kiln furniture and pottery shards, a charming relic of the old industry. The Seto-gura museum tells the story of the town's ceramics, with old kilns, workshops and a reconstructed station.
Seto is also the hometown of Fujii Sōta, the young shogi player who broke record after record and became a national hero. His success brought a wave of visitors and a boom in shogi across Japan.
The town lies in the hills north-east of Nagoya, and the roads around it wind through forests and valleys, with tight bends and little traffic. Sanage-yama, to the south, offers fine views over the Nagoya plain. Fuel and convenience stores are easy in town. The pottery shops are dangerous for anyone with soft luggage: bubble wrap is cheap, and a single handmade cup wrapped in a spare T-shirt has crossed many a mountain pass intact. In September the town holds a big ceramics festival, when the streets fill with stalls.
- Kusatsu
sight
Two of the great roads of old Japan met at Kusatsu. The Tōkaidō, running along the Pacific coast from Edo, and the Nakasendō, crossing the mountains of the interior, joined here before the last stretch to Kyoto, and the town grew rich on travellers. The honjin, the official inn where daimyō lords stayed on their journeys, survives as one of the largest and best preserved in Japan, with its long wooden halls, gardens and a register of the famous guests who stayed.
This is not the hot-spring Kusatsu of Gunma, but a busy city on the south-eastern shore of Lake Biwa, in Shiga prefecture, between Kyoto and Nagoya. The lake, the largest in Japan, stretches north to the horizon, and the Lake Biwa Museum, on a peninsula near Kusatsu, tells the story of its ecology and the people who lived around it.
The local sweet is uba-ga-mochi, small rice cakes topped with sweet bean paste, shaped to resemble a nursing mother. They have been sold to travellers here since the Edo period, and the shop near the old junction still sells them.
The riding around Kusatsu is mostly urban, with heavy traffic on the national roads. The lakeshore road offers views over the water, and the hills to the east have quieter roads through forests and tea fields.
Fuel and food are no trouble in a city of this size. Give yourself half an hour in the old post-town street, with its signpost marking the fork of the two great roads, and walk where four centuries of travellers did, then buy a box of uba-ga-mochi for the road. They do not survive a pannier well, so eat them quickly.
- Tokyo finish