Tabayama, Yamanashi

The bus from JR Ōme Line's Okutama Station follows National Route 411 — the old Ōme Kaidō — westward until the valley narrows and the light changes. The stop is called "Omaturi," a name that still carries the shape of a festival, and from there Tabayama-mura begins: a mountain village in Yamanashi where most of the land is forest, and the Taba River cuts a gorge that eventually feeds Okutama Lake, and through it, the taps of Tokyo.

That relationship with the capital's water supply gives the village a particular gravity, a sense of stewardship rather than commerce. The festivals here — the Tabayama Gion Matsuri, the Sasara Shishimai lion dance designated as an intangible folk cultural property, the Bon Odori fireworks gathering — feel rooted in something older than tourism, older than the roads. The Sasara Shishimai traces back through the village's documented history to the era of the Kōyachi lords, and the movements of the dancers carry that continuity without announcing it.

Higher up, past the treeline, the terrain shifts into the Chichibu-Tama-Kai National Park. Sanjo-no-Yu sits at elevation in the forest — a simple sulfur cold-mineral spring with mountain hut lodging and tent sites, open to day visitors who have walked far enough to deserve it. Further along the ridgelines, Daibosatsu-Rei rises, and the Nanatsushi-goya hut serves as a staging point for those moving through. These are not resort facilities; they are working mountain infrastructure, and the people who use them are here for the climb, the cold water, the particular silence of deep-mountain Japan.