Due to a condition called Raynaud’s disease that renders my hands and feet numb in the cold, I am not on good terms with snow. This was fine growing up in Los Angeles, but then I moved to Paris and fell in love with a skier. You may have heard that they have a lot of vacation time in France; the idea of spending mine in the French Alps with only stew-making to entertain me never struck me as a win-win. So last winter I looked farther afield for our couple’s particular wintry ideal: There had to be plenty of powdery snow for him and, for me, a winning trio of comfortable warmth, some proper culture, and a lot to eat—preferably not waistline-destroying fondue. Our Shangri-la was Nozawa-Onsen, a tiny village in Japan’s Nagano Prefecture, known for Olympic-level skiing, abundant natural hot springs, and such a deep love of its own produce that its mascot is a Nozawana cabbage on skis.
Unlike the Alps, Japan’s rural mountainous zones are not five-star hotbeds. In Nozawa-Onsen, it’s about ryokans, or traditional Japanese B&Bs. And the rustic Kiriya Ryokan, on one of the village’s main streets, came straight out of central casting. Ko Katagiri, whose family has run the inn for five generations, comforted me like a long-lost auntie when the airlines separated me from my luggage for four days. Our spare, simple room, with tatami mats and a futon, provided snowy views of the town, its lantern-lit split-timber houses trailing up the mountainside. The daily rhythm of ryokan living was easy: Upon entering, shoes and Western clothes were exchanged for cotton yukatas (kimonos)—a godsend when I was approaching day four of soy sauce–stained jeans.
Each morning at Kiriya Ryokan began with an artful Japanese-style breakfast: bite-size portions of grilled salmon or mackerel, soy-and-sugar-stewed carrot, white miso soup warmed tableside, a small school of tiny candied wakasagi fish, steamed vinegared potato, white rice, and an addictive treat of soy-and-sugar-boiled hamburger, which was unexpected, especially in spoonful size. While my monsieur skied, I took twice-daily trips to the in-house onsen, or natural hot spring, which became as central to my experience as my beef breakfast bonbon. The rest of the time I wandered, I nibbled, I bathed again, struck by how quaint this village remained despite its world-renowned skiing and how, despite a yearly onslaught of Australians, so little English was spoken.
The slope-side view from Nozawa-Onsen.
Chefs at Club Restaurant in Obuse, a town known for all things chestnut.
Kiyoko Tomii blanches greens for pickles in the public cooking onsen, or natural hot spring.
The Japanese-style breakfast at Kiriya Ryokan is worth eating on the floor in a hotel kimono.
Traditional house in Nozawa-Onsen.
Gyoza at Yonetaro Izakaya.
View from Sakurai Kanseido Tearoom.
Mackerel at Tatsuya Izakaya.
Soba at Kanoe Ryokan.
Mont Blanc at Sakurai Kanseido.
Hot spring in Nozawa-Onsen.
Local greens.
A skier en route to the mountain.
At the same time, Nozawa-Onsen was so easily navigated, so immaculate. (Never in a decade spent on European trains will I again come across a bathroom so welcoming as the one on the bullet train from Tokyo, outfitted with a hypermodern Toto toilet.) The town was humble—strangers greeted me in the street—but it was brimming over with quality, its only markedly “outside” establishment the tiny Libushi bar leading up to the foot of the covered ski-up conveyor belt that theoretically took one up to the slopes. The bar was opened in 2014 by Tom Livesey, a bright-eyed English snowboarder and home-brewer, and his Japanese wife, who makes a mean Scotch egg; it features both his own brews and rotating guest beers. A pint into his delicate, smoky Soba Stout—brewed with buckwheat, a Nagano staple—and I realized that though I quite like my boyfriend, temporarily losing him to the slopes was not going to be a problem.
The rules at Kiriya Ryokan’s sulfury onsen were the same as at hot springs all over Japan: women to one side, men to the other; everyone shampoos and soaps down in the changing room before entering the bath—always nude—for a long, mineral-y soak. The Japanese may have a reputation for being standoffish, but in an onsen they will get into your business. Directions for outsiders are liberally dispensed. One evening, when I spent too long in the hottest of three pools at Asagama-no-yu Onsen, in an Edo-period-style wooden house, one of the old ladies who had been hanging out at the pharmacy that day basically kicked me out. (Naked, she mimed concern for the extreme heat, and she was right.) The boyfriend, who spent his days snowboarding, routinely spent too long in there during our evening bath dates too, but he was never in any rush, whether for an obvious lack of nosy old ladies on his side, or for lack of motivation, having eaten really big rice and egg lunches at the top of the piste a few hours before.
It’s not surprising that “onsen” is contained in the town’s name. Its unofficial city hall, Ogama Onsen, is an even-hotter spring next to Asagama-no-yu, where villagers go to boil eggs and blanch vegetables in the open air. (Nonmembers aren’t permitted, ostensibly to protect those fresh off the slopes and out of the bar from falling to their deaths: Where most onsen hover between 40 and 80 degrees Celsius, the pools here are nearly 100.) Ogama Onsen’s open-air pools are ringed by worn concrete steps and weathered wooden decking; against the wall of a beautiful old house was a stand filled with long-handled utensils, bits of vegetable fiber still caught in their mesh. During the day it was an active meeting place, where old ladies stood watching onsen tamago, or bath eggs, take form in purpose-built wooden boxes. (These are the eggs whose jiggly yolks inspired David Chang’s Momofuku Noodle Bar.) In autumn, when the local Nozawana cabbage is in season, it’s here that its pickling journey embarks. Late on the night of our arrival, we walked past it as the mist rose from the bubbling pools surrounded by snow. It stopped us in our tracks as we looked for the moon.
Nozawana cabbage is now grown all over Japan, but Takako Takei, the head of the Nozawa-Onsen Local Food Preservation Committee and proprietor of the raucous Yonetaro pub, explained to me that when locally grown, it’s bigger, softer, and sweeter. (The town’s Shinto monk is the guardian of the heirloom seeds.) When Takei visits schools to teach traditional recipes, she sautés it with sake lees. Back in her pub, all cigarette smoke and bottomless wooden boxes of barrel sake, her spicy fried Nozawana pickle winds up in bowls with teriyaki chicken and onsen tamago, stuffed into buns, or enjoyed on its own. Sometimes it’s served alongside bowls of soy-boiled bee larvae. (Did I mention Takei is old-school?)
Thanks to a childhood spent haunting Sawtelle Boulevard, West L.A.’s little Japantown, I had always known the Japanese were some of the truly elite food lovers of the world, easily rivaling—if not outclassing—the French. But the local pride in seasonality here was a revelation. If area specialties are like gangs, then the Jets to Nozawa-Onsen’s pickled Sharks would be the chestnuts of the beautifully restored town of Obuse, about 45 minutes south by car, where patrician chestnut-confectioner families reign supreme.
When the fruit is in season from mid-September to mid-October, there are three-hour waits to buy sweet chestnut-stuffed pancakes or varieties of paste made with the skins off (silky-smooth) or on (nuttier and almost woody) at the elegant flagship of Sakurai Kanseido. (At 207 years old, it was the first sweets-maker in town. Now there are three major players.) Seated at the company’s hybrid English-Japanese-style tearoom across from its sweet shop, I dove into the definitive version of the Mont Blanc, the chestnut pastry loosely adapted from the French. While the version I tried at longtime confectioner Obusedo failed to wow me (what was that sharp red fruit doing there?), its chicly cavernous Club Restaurant—dominated by a wood-fired clay rice cooker that turned out bowls and bowls of chestnut sticky rice—did not. In this regional staple, the rice is normally peppered with sweet chestnuts, but here they use raw, like home cooks do, and the result is a master class in the subtle possibilities of layered, perfumy starch. Lunch was washed down with a flight of refined artisanal sakes by Obusedo’s sister company, Masuichi-Ichimura, ranging from crisp and cucumber-like to cloudy and yeasty-sweet. The sakes are produced around the corner in a distillery using 19th-century methods: The only ingredients are rice and water, with house-cultivated moss as the fermenting agent. The smell of it permeated the four-room space when I visited. Overall, Japan’s sake consumption is waning as beer gains ground. Here, like the bee larvae served up-country by Mrs. Takei, you’d never know it.
Returning home after a week was a bit of a rude shock. The long faces and public disorder that I was normally used to in Paris life stood out in surly relief. A month or so later, when I was on a road trip with the boyfriend and his kids through the beautiful Massif Central at the heart of France, even its pastoral charm suffered by comparison. During a stop in one gray stone village for a bathroom break, he whipped out the Opinel knife he keeps in the glove compartment to cut through some donkey-meat salami we’d bought a few towns ago and served it to the kids, who gobbled it down like hungry birds. It was lovely and delicious, but then I had to knock on a deserted town square café door to use the facilities. I told myself I missed the Totos. But really, I missed Nagano.
Alexandra Marshall is a Paris-based writer for Vogue, The New York Times, and Travel + Leisure.
