Three days on the Shonai plain, the coast the shinkansen never reached

The Jōetsu Shinkansen ends at Niigata and the Yamagata Shinkansen turns inland at Shinjō, and between the two lies a rice plain with a coastline that neither of them touches. To reach it you change at Niigata to a limited express called Inaho (いなほ, an ear of rice) and ride north for roughly two hours with the Sea of Japan on your left, past wind turbines and flooded paddies. The cost is time. What the time buys is a region that has never had to absorb a shinkansen crowd, where three days is enough to see things properly rather than at a jog.

Day one, Sakata and the warehouses

Sakata was a port before it was a town. Rice from the Shōnai plain left here by ship for Osaka on the Kitamae route, and the Sankyō Sōko warehouses, built in 1893, still stand in a low row behind a screen of keyaki (zelkova) planted to shade the walls and keep the grain cool. Some bays hold a museum and a produce shop now; others are still storage, which is why the row does not read as a monument.

A short walk toward Hiyoriyama park brings you to Somarō, a former merchants' teahouse with a red staircase and afternoon maiko dances, and to the Homma Museum of Art, whose garden was laid out for a daimyo's rest stop. Neither needs more than an hour. Sakata rewards a slow loop on foot better than a full itinerary.

Nothing on this plain was built to be looked at. It was built to keep rice dry, and it has.

Day two, 2,446 steps

Buses run from Tsuruoka station to Haguro-san, the most accessible of the Dewa Sanzan (出羽三山, the three mountains of Dewa). From the Zuishinmon gate the stone stairway climbs 2,446 steps through cedars several centuries old, and a five-storied pagoda stands near the bottom, well before you have earned the view. Allow two hours up, take water, and expect the cedars rather than a summit to be the thing you remember.

Stay the night in a shukubō, a pilgrims' lodging, and eat shōjin ryōri: mountain vegetables, sesame tofu, nothing loud. Dinner is early and the building is quiet by nine.

Day three, Tsuruoka without a plan

Tsuruoka joined UNESCO's network of creative cities for gastronomy in 2014, which in practice means heirloom crops still grown in small volumes — Atsumi kabu turnips in autumn, dadacha-mame edamame in August. Spend the morning at the Sanno market, then take the local line twenty minutes down the coast to Atsumi Onsen before the return train.

庄内は、急がない人のためにできている。