Karuizawa

Karuizawa was a declining post town on the Nakasendo when Alexander Croft Shaw, a Canadian Anglican missionary, built a summer house here in 1886 because the altitude of about a thousand metres made it cool and dry compared with Tokyo. Other missionaries followed, then Japanese elites, and the place became a villa town - the wooden Shaw Memorial Church and several early chapels survive among the larch woods, along with the Mampei Hotel of 1894. Shinkansen access since 1997 put it seventy minutes from Tokyo and changed it again: a large outlet mall sits directly beside the station, and the town now runs on day trippers as much as villa owners. The older half is still there in the trees - the Kyu-Karuizawa street, cycle paths through larch, Shiraito Falls, and the raw lava field of Onioshidashi on the flank of Mount Asama, an active volcano immediately north.

History

In the Edo period Karuisawa-shuku was a post station on the Nakasendō highway between Edo and Kyoto. In 1886 the Canadian Anglican missionary Alexander Croft Shaw and James Main Dixon, an English professor at Tokyo Imperial University, introduced it as a summer resort, and the Shin'etsu Line, opened in 1888, turned it into a Western-style hill station; from the 1910s it drew other foreigners and Japanese, Germans especially, and academics held annual conferences here. The village became the town of Karuizawa in 1923. It was named an International Cultural and Tourism City in 1951, hosted the equestrian events of the 1964 Olympics and the curling of the 1998 Winter Olympics, and Mount Asama erupted in 2004 (Wikipedia, Karuizawa, Nagano).

The main sights

• A missionary's resort - founded by a Canadian who built here in 1886 for the climate.
• Larch woods and villas - early chapels and the 1894 Mampei Hotel among the trees.
• An outlet mall - a large one beside the station, and the day-trip economy round it.
• Onioshidashi - a raw lava field on the flank of the active Mount Asama.

When to go

May to October; December to March for skiing. Two days.

What to expect

Summer weekends and the outlet mall bring heavy traffic and congestion. Prices are high for Japan. Winter is very cold and many villa-area businesses close. Asama's alert level occasionally restricts access on its flanks.

Nearby

Onioshidashi is north; Nagano and Zenkoji are west.

Key facts