The floats of Kanuma Imamiya Shrine appear only once a year, pulled through streets that once served pilgrims and post-road travelers heading toward Nikko. That procession — registered with UNESCO as an intangible cultural heritage — gives some measure of how long this town has been staging its own life alongside the famous road that passes through it. Kanuma sits roughly a hundred kilometers north of Tokyo, where the Nikko Nishi Kaido once carried traffic between the capital and the mountain shrines, and the city's older bones — castle town, post station — still organize its geography in ways you notice before you understand them.
The crafts here have their own specificity. Kanuma-gumi-ko, the joinery tradition, produces latticed woodwork of interlocking pieces without nails or glue, a technique sustained by the region's long relationship with timber and carpentry. Kanuma-boki, brooms made locally, sit in a different register — functional, undecorated, quietly persistent. In the fields, strawberries and leeks grow on the terraced plateau east of the Ashio mountains, and the soba particular to this area carries the name of the town itself. At Nasahara, a puppet theater tradition survives — the only ningyo joruri in Tochigi Prefecture, kept alive by the Nasahara Bunraku-za. These things coexist without ceremony, each continuing in its own lane.
Where to stay
A day is rarely enough.
Booking through these links supports AURA at no extra cost to you.
What converges here
1 in this city. 21 within 25 km of the city hall.
- Kanuma Municipal Art Museum of Kawakami Sumio
- Ōya History Museum
- Tochigi Science Museum
- Tochigi Prefectural Museum
- Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts
See 16 more
- Utsunomiya Museum of Art
- Shōwakan
- Utsunomiya Fairy Museum
- Mibumachi Toy Museum
- Bandai Museum
- Nikkō Museum of History and Folklore・Ninomiya Sontoku Memorial Hall
- Okada Memorial Hall
- Tochigi City Literature Museum
- Tochigi Float Hall
- Shimotsuke Fudoki-no-Oka Material Museum
- New Ginger Museum
- Sakura City Museum — Arai Kanpō Memorial Museum
- Kuzū Fossil Museum
- Yoshizawa Memorial Museum of Art, Sano
- Kosugi Hoan Museum of Art, Nikko
- Trick Art Pia Nikkō
Distances are straight-line from the municipal office. Each website was checked in September 2026.
- Nikko
- Mount Yokone
- Kanuma
- Shin-Kanumaichi
- Momiyama
- Niregi
- Kita-Kanuma
- Itaga