I have been walking the old Nakasendō road this year, trying to catch up to my old walking group, which has been difficult as I have been busy and away from Tokyo for much of the past few months. But I finally made it to Karuizawa, a hike that included climbing over the Usui Pass, an elevation gain of some 700 meters through a forest full of bears. We did not see any bears, but they had been in the area a couple of hours earlier.
Until reaching Karuizawa, the Nakasendō had offered few options for eating aside from picking up something to eat at a supermarket. If I was lucky. But Karuizawa has hundreds of restaurants, many of them quite good. Among the best and most common type are soba restaurants, restaurants serving the local version known as Shinshū soba, Shinshū being the traditional name for the modern-day Nagano prefecture. Before the modern period it was difficult to grow rice in the region, so people ate lots of soba, which is easy to grow at higher altitudes. Shinshū soba also uses Shinshū shōyu in the dipping sauce, a variety of shōyu that seems to me to have a deeper and richer flavor (more umami), especially when compared to Edo/Tokyo shōyu (very salty) or shōyu from western Japan (very sweet). I’m not sure what gives Nagano shōyu its unique flavor, but I can always recognize it when I taste it.
From past experience, I knew that there were a lot of soba restaurants in the main part of Karuizawa, as well as along the highway on the south side of town. And there are more in Nakakaruizawa, more along the stretch of the old Nakasendō as it passes through Oiwake, 9 km west of “downtown” Karuizawa. So I was hoping to be able to walk for a few hours and then find a soba restaurant to stop at for lunch. However, after I passed Gensui, a soba restaurant in Oiwake, there were no more. Nothing. I didn’t see any more soba restaurants along the Nakasendō the rest of my walk, about 24 more km. I saw a couple of udon restaurants, and a couple of ramen joints. But no more soba. Which was disappointing as I had hoped to eat soba for lunch along the way. There maybe be some soba restaurants that are not visible for the Tōkaidō, and I didn’t have the time, nor energy to explore Mochizuki, not that any would have been likely to be open at 4:00 on a Sunday afternoon. I know there are soba-ya on the highway to the north, and also around the city of Komoro (which ironically doesn’t have any branches of the chain soba Komoro Soba).
Good thing I packed some things to eat for this day’s hike!