Tokyo to Fukui by E-Bike, Day 2: Over the Usui Pass to Karuizawa and Komoro

I left the container hotel in Kanra at about 8:30 in the morning, a little later than I’d planned. I wasn’t too worried about it, though. After the 125 kilometers of the first day, Day Two looked almost like a day off, at least on paper, with just 62 kilometers to my hotel in Komoro, over in Nagano. The tricky part was hiding in the elevation profile. Somewhere in the middle of those 62 kilometers, the Beast and I had to haul ourselves, plus all my bags, over the mountains that separate Gunma from Nagano, and one look at the map told me some of those hills were going to be very steep.

As I rode west out of Kanra, the mountains started showing up ahead of me almost right away, and they looked nothing like the soft, rounded hills I’d seen on the horizon the day before. These were all sharp teeth and zigzag ridges, the kind of outline a kid might draw if you asked for “scary mountains.” What I was looking at was Mount Myogi. Strictly speaking, Myogi isn’t one mountain at all but a whole cluster of rocky peaks, the highest of which, Somadake, stands at 1,104 meters. They’re what’s left of volcanic activity some four to six million years ago, with wind and rain chewing away at the rock ever since, which is why they look so wild. Myogi is counted among Japan’s three most unusual landscapes, together with Yabakei in Oita and Kankakei on Shodoshima, and it’s also one of the Jomo Sanzan, the three famous mountains of Gunma, along with Akagi and Haruna.

The closer I got to the mountains, the more rural everything became. Most of the rice had already been harvested, and in some fields it was hanging on long wooden racks to dry in the sun. This is called hazakake (or hasagake, depending on where you are), and it’s the old way of drying rice, from before combine harvesters and drying machines took over most of the work. You don’t see it nearly as often as you used to. People say rice dried this way tastes better. I didn’t get to try any, sadly, but I can confirm it definitely looks better.

After Yokokawa, where the train line from Takasaki now simply comes to an end, the road started climbing toward the forest, and it didn’t stop climbing for a long time. This is the old National Route 18 over the Usui Pass. It was the main road between Gunma and Nagano until 1971, when the Usui Bypass opened a few kilometers to the south and took most of the traffic away. The old road is famous for its curves. There are 184 of them packed into roughly ten kilometers, and each one is numbered, so if you really want to, you can keep track of exactly how much suffering is still ahead of you. Funnily enough, all those hairpins are what make the road bearable on a bike. Because it keeps folding back on itself instead of going straight up, you never quite feel how steep it actually is. It was steep, though, I won’t pretend otherwise. I put the Beast in a low gear, and on the worst bits I switched the motor to its highest assist setting and let it do what it was built for. Luckily, most of the road runs through the forest, so I was riding in the shade for much of the climb. That mattered more than you’d think, because the day turned out sunny and about 26°C, pretty warm for the middle of October. There were also more cars on the road than I expected, probably because it was a three-day weekend.

About halfway up, the trees suddenly open up, and there it is, a huge red-brick bridge with four tall arches, standing high over the valley. Everyone calls it Megane-bashi, the Eyeglasses Bridge, because the arches look like a pair of glasses (well, two pairs). Its official name is a lot less fun, Usui Daisan Kyoryo, which just means the Third Usui Bridge. It was finished in 1892, it’s 91 meters long and 31 meters high, and it was built from about two million bricks, which makes it the largest brick bridge still standing in Japan. I’d read that number somewhere before the trip and wasn’t sure I believed it, but standing underneath the thing, I’m not going to argue.

It’s a railway bridge, not a road bridge. It carried the old Shin’etsu Line between Yokokawa and Karuizawa, a stretch that had to climb more than 500 meters through the mountains. In places the gradient was 66.7 per mil, meaning the track rose almost 67 meters for every kilometer, the steepest on Japan’s old national railways. Normal trains simply couldn’t manage that, so the line used the Abt system, with a toothed rack rail laid between the tracks and a cogwheel under the locomotive that bit into it and pulled the train up. Besides passengers, the line carried raw silk from the Tomioka Silk Mill, just down the road from where I’d slept the night before. In 1963 a new line replaced this one and the bridge was retired, and in 1997 the whole section between Yokokawa and Karuizawa closed for good when the Nagano Shinkansen opened. These days the old railbed is a walking trail called the Abt Road, and you can walk right across the top of the bridge. Lots of people had pulled over by the road to take pictures, and I could see a few tiny figures walking along up there. Getting up on top means a short walk up a path from the road. I didn’t really have the time, so I took my photos from below, craned my neck for a while, and got back on the bike.

After the bridge the road got steep again, and it stayed that way until I was up at around 960 meters. Then, almost without warning, it simply leveled off. One minute I was grinding uphill through the forest, the next I was rolling along flat, quiet streets lined with trees, and before I knew it, I was in Karuizawa. The Usui Pass is what’s called a katatoge in Japanese, a one-sided pass, very steep on the Gunma side and almost flat on the Nagano side.

I stopped at an intersection near the station, and right there beside the road was a big pond covered in lily pads, with a little island in the middle, a rounded green hill behind it and, peeking over its shoulder on the right, the bare grey top of Mount Asama. This is Yagasaki Park, a town park only a few minutes from Karuizawa Station, and the view of Hanareyama and Asama together across the water is the one it’s known for. I got lucky with the sky.

Seeing Asama there reminded me of In Lotus-Land Japan, a book I really like by the English photographer Herbert G. Ponting, published in 1910. Ponting traveled around Japan several times in the early 1900s, a few years before he went off to photograph Captain Scott’s expedition to Antarctica, and he called Aso in Kyushu and Asama the two finest active volcanoes in the country. He didn’t think much of Asama’s personality, though. Aso, he wrote, was a “good-natured, even-tempered volcano,” but “Asama is a fretful and irritable mountain, subject to violent outbursts that are over in a moment.” More than a hundred years later, that still holds up. Asama is very much active, with its last small eruption in 2019, and it’s watched around the clock. On that calm, sunny afternoon, though, it was hard to believe the quiet grey peak behind the pond had a temper at all.

I was still standing by the pond when, at exactly twelve o’clock, music started drifting out of the town’s loudspeakers nearby. A lot of towns in Japan play a short melody like this at set times of the day. It goes out over the emergency broadcast system, partly as a daily check that the speakers still work. To me, though, it felt like Karuizawa was welcoming me to town, and also gently reminding me that it was lunchtime.

From there I rode past the station to the south side, where the giant Karuizawa Prince Shopping Plaza outlet mall is, and had lunch at Kua ‘Aina, the Hawaiian burger place. I went for an avocado burger with a pile of thin, crispy fries on the side. After spending the whole morning climbing, I decided that a big burger wasn’t just allowed, it was practically medically necessary.

Since I was ahead of schedule, I treated myself to a side quest I’d been hoping to squeeze in, the Usui Pass. Hold on, didn’t I just ride over it? Well, sort of. The road with the 184 curves crosses what is, historically speaking, the new Usui Pass, opened in the 1880s. The original pass, the one the Nakasendo highway used back in the Edo period, is a few kilometers away, up a narrow road through the forest from the old center of Karuizawa. On the way up I passed some of Karuizawa’s famous villas. It’s a really nice town, and also, let’s be honest, a very rich one. The houses aren’t squeezed together the way they are almost everywhere else in Japan. Each one sits on its own big plot, quite a few of them hidden away among the trees, and no two seem to look the same. Lots of them are wooden, with sharp, steep triangular roofs that give the whole place a mountain feel, and it’s not just the houses. Shops and community buildings tend to follow the same style.

None of this is an accident. Karuizawa’s life as a resort began in 1886, when a Canadian-born missionary named Alexander Croft Shaw came through, fell in love with the cool mountain air and called the place a hospital without a roof. Two years later he built the first summer villa here, and other foreigners living in Japan soon followed. Today the town has more than 16,000 villas. Since 1972 Karuizawa has had its own strict rules to protect its nature, and on many plots a house is only allowed to cover about a fifth of the land, which is why everything feels so spread out. William Merrell Vories, whom you might remember from my Omihachiman article, spent his summers here too and designed quite a few buildings in town, including the Karuizawa Union Church.

The road up to the old pass is only about 3.5 kilometers long, but man, it is steep. The lookout at the top sits at roughly 1,200 meters, so you gain something like 250 meters in a very short distance. Was it worth it? Absolutely. The lookout sits right on the border between Nagano and Gunma, and there’s a big signpost marking it, with Nagano on one side and Gunma on the other, so you can literally step from one prefecture into the other. Of course I did. More than once. A few steps away, Kumano Kotai Shrine sits right on the border too, with the line between the two prefectures running straight through the middle of its grounds.

The view from up there is something else. You look out east over layer after layer of mountains, each one a little paler and bluer than the one in front of it, until the last of them just fades into the sky. On a clear day you can supposedly see as far as the Yatsugatake mountains and the Southern Alps from here. The foreign summer residents of Karuizawa a hundred-odd years ago liked this spot so much that they gave it an English name, Sunset Point.

There’s also a very old and rather sad story tied to this pass. According to the Nihon Shoki, one of Japan’s oldest chronicles, the legendary prince Yamato Takeru stopped here on his way home from his campaigns in the east and looked back toward the sea where his wife, Princess Ototachibana, had thrown herself into the waves to calm a storm and save his ship. He sighed “Azuma haya,” which means something like “oh, my wife,” and that’s said to be why eastern Japan came to be called Azuma. The Kojiki, the other great old chronicle, places the same scene at Ashigara Pass instead, and even the Usui of the old story may have been a different crossing a little further south, so nobody really knows where it happened, or whether it happened at all. Still, standing up there and looking east over all those fading ridges, it wasn’t hard to picture someone missing somebody very much.

Going back down was when I really understood how steep that road was. I had my brakes squeezed pretty much the entire way. Climbing a hill like that is hard work, but at least you feel in control. Going down, you mostly just hold on and hope your brake pads are in a good mood.

At the bottom I made a quick detour to Kumoba Pond, which I’d visited a couple of times before. It’s one of Karuizawa’s best-known spots, a long, narrow pond in the woods, fed by a stream that starts at a spring called Gozensui. The spring got its name in 1878, when its water was used for the meals of Emperor Meiji during his stay in Karuizawa. The early foreign residents called the pond Swan Lake, since swans used to come here in winter. The autumn leaves here usually peak in late October and early November, so I was a little early, but quite a few of the maples had already turned. Back in Tokyo, the trees were still stubbornly green. Red and orange maples were reflected in the water, and a duck was standing in the shallows right in the middle of all those colors, busy preening itself and completely unbothered by the crowd. I kept snapping away, trying to catch a moment when its beak wasn’t buried in its feathers so you could actually see its head. Ducks, it turns out, are not very cooperative models. The path around the pond was pretty crowded too, it being a long weekend. I’d have loved to walk all the way around the pond, which only takes fifteen or twenty minutes, but I still had riding to do, so I took my pictures and headed back toward the station.

From the station I turned west toward Komoro, about 22 kilometers away. Because of the long weekend, the road was packed with cars, crawling along one behind the other. One of the small joys of traveling by bike is riding past a long line of stuck cars, and I’ll admit I enjoyed it a little more than I probably should have. By now the sun was getting low, the mountains to the north had gone soft and hazy, and the fields along the road were full of pink cosmos and silvery susuki grass swaying in the breeze.

Over these first two days I’d crossed paths with the Hokuriku Shinkansen a few times without ever really seeing it. It runs up on viaducts or disappears into tunnels, and it doesn’t come by nearly as often as the trains on the Tokaido Shinkansen, so mostly I just heard it rushing past somewhere nearby. Me against the shinkansen, the race continues. To be fair, it has to climb over the Usui Pass too. Between Annaka-Haruna and Karuizawa it goes up gradients of 30 per mil, which is very steep for a shinkansen line, and a train that doesn’t stop at Annaka-Haruna gets from Takasaki up to Karuizawa in about fifteen minutes. It took me the whole morning. Then again, I’d like to see the shinkansen stop for a burger.

About nine kilometers before the hotel, Komoot struck again. It sent me off the main road into a quiet neighborhood, where the route squeezed between a few houses until the asphalt gave up and turned into gravel. I was already suspicious at that point, but I kept going. Then the gravel turned into rough, rocky ground leading straight into a forest, and I knew exactly how this was going to end. I kept going a little further anyway, because apparently I don’t learn. The Beast, to its credit, rolled over the gravel and the sharp rocks without a single complaint, and without a puncture either. The track finally ended at a house with an excavator parked out front, and that was that. Two days, two dead ends. I turned around, found my way back to National Route 18, the normal road anyone sensible would have taken from the start, and followed it the rest of the way.

I made it to Komoro just before six. It was already getting dark, so I was glad I hadn’t wasted any more time in that forest. My bed for the night was at the Grace-Land Hotel. First a Hawaiian burger for lunch, now Grace-Land for the night. The day was slowly turning into an Elvis tribute tour, and all that was missing was Blue Hawaii playing in the background.

After dropping off my bags, I went over to the nearest supermarket, which happened to be a Tsuruya. If you’ve spent any time in this part of Nagano, you probably know the name. It’s a local chain that was founded right here in Komoro back in 1892, and its own-brand jams, juices and snacks are so popular that plenty of visitors treat it as a souvenir shop. I picked up some dinner and headed back to my room, where a framed poster on the wall had a quote usually credited to the French poet Paul Valéry. “The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.” I really liked that one. Considering I’d set off later than planned that morning, it also felt a little bit personal, so I made a mental note to take its advice seriously the next day.

Then I spent the rest of the evening going over the route. Day Three would be another long one, about 92 kilometers, but roughly two thirds of it would be downhill. After 184 curves, a burger, and a mountain pass I climbed purely for fun, I couldn’t wait. I love going downhill.

Elvis used to end his shows with the same few words, and after a day like this, they felt just right. Thank you. Thank you very much.