Four Aizu days: a red-roofed castle, a thatched post town, the Tadami Line

The Tōhoku Shinkansen runs north through Fukushima without ever showing you Aizu. To reach the basin you step off at Kōriyama (郡山), carry your bag down to a low local platform, and wait for a two-car train that pulls out when the conductor is ready rather than when a screen finishes counting down.

Where the fast train hands you over

From Kōriyama the Ban'etsu West Line (磐越西線) takes about seventy minutes to Aizu-Wakamatsu (会津若松), climbing over a low pass and dropping into a rice basin ringed by mountains. The through fare from Tokyo runs to roughly ¥8,000 on the Shinkansen plus about ¥1,170 for the local leg, and unlike the bullet train the second stretch is unreserved — you sit where you like and watch the paddies widen.

There is a slower way in, and some travellers prefer it. The Tōbu and Aizu railways run up from Asakusa in Tokyo through the Kinugawa gorges, changing at Aizu-Tajima before reaching the same city in about four hours. Either route ends at the same modest station, where a red papier-mâché cow the size of a footstool sits by the exit and the tourist desk hands out timetables printed on paper.

A castle with red tiles and a hall built as a spiral

Tsurugajō (鶴ヶ城), the reconstructed keep at the centre of town, is the only castle tower in Japan roofed in red tiles — akabe — glazed to survive the Aizu winter, and against a grey November sky the colour reads almost brown until the sun catches it. Admission to the keep is ¥410, it opens at 8:30 and stops letting people in at 16:30, and the top floor gives you the whole basin, mountains on every side.

Across town on the wooded rise of Iimoriyama (飯盛山) stands Sazaedō (さざえ堂), a wooden hall from 1796 built as a double helix: you climb one spiral ramp and descend another and never meet anyone coming the other way. Entry is ¥400. Below it, Nanukamachi-dōri (七日町通り) keeps a row of Taishō-era shopfronts where Aizu lacquerware — Aizu-nuri (会津塗) — is sold beside racks of the red akabeko (赤べこ) cow that nods on a loose-jointed neck.

Soba you eat with a single leek

Ouchi-juku (大内宿) is a former post town on the old Aizu-Nishi Kaidō (会津西街道), a single unpaved street lined with kayabuki (茅葺き) thatched houses that once put up travellers walking between Aizu and Nikkō. To get there you take the Aizu Railway (会津鉄道) south to Yunokami Onsen (湯野上温泉), a station with its own thatched roof, an irori (囲炉裏) hearth smouldering inside, and a free foot bath out on the platform.

From the station the Sarunyū-go (猿游号) shuttle runs to the village and back for about ¥1,100, roughly hourly from April into November; outside that season you phone for a taxi. The dish to order is negi soba (ねぎそば) — buckwheat noodles served with a whole raw naganegi (長ねぎ) leek laid across the bowl, which you use as both chopstick and garnish, biting the sharp end between mouthfuls. A bowl runs ¥1,300 to ¥1,500. Climb the stone steps to the shrine at the top of the street and the thatched roofs line up below you in two grey rows.

The slow line along the Tadami River

The Tadami Line (只見線) leaves Aizu-Wakamatsu and follows the Tadami-gawa (只見川) west toward Koide (小出) in Niigata, crossing the river again and again on green steel trusses. A 2011 flood tore out three of those bridges, and the last stretch did not reopen until October 2022; for eleven years the timetable simply stopped in the middle of the mountains.

The view everyone comes for is the first bridge, the Daiichi Tadamigawa Kyōryō (第一只見川橋梁), seen from a hillside path above the Michi-no-Eki Oze Kaidō Mishima-juku (道の駅 尾瀬街道みしま宿) in Mishima (三島町). You climb ten minutes through cedar to a railed clearing, and when the two-car train crosses the water below — mist rising off the reservoir, hills doubled in the still surface — it is over in fifteen seconds. There are only about three trains a day, so the small crowd knows exactly when to look up.

会津は、急がない旅人にだけ姿を見せる。

Getting there, and the timetable that runs your day

Come in late October or the first days of November for the kōyō, when the maples along the Tadami reservoir turn, or in February if you want the bridges under snow and the onsen town quiet. The single mistake that ruins an Aizu day is treating the Tadami Line like a metro: miss one of its three departures and the next is two or three hours off, with nothing at the rural stations but a vending machine and a bench. Photograph the timetable at Aizu-Wakamatsu before you set out, and plan the village and the bridge around it rather than the other way round.

One more stop earns the early start. Kitakata (喜多方), fifteen minutes north on the Ban'etsu West Line, eats ramen for breakfast — asa-ra (朝ラー), a habit left over from the days when farmers came in after the morning's work; shops open by 7:00 and serve flat, curled noodles in a clear soy broth for ¥700 to ¥900. Have a bowl, catch the local back, and you will still reach the first Tadami bridge before the afternoon light goes flat.