Hida-Furukawa

Where it sits. Hida is the northernmost city in Gifu Prefecture, a 792-square-kilometre municipality of forest, river terraces and mountain villages pressed against the Toyama border, with a population of only about 24,000. It was created on 1 February 2004 from the merger of the town of Furukawa with Kawai, Miyagawa and Kamioka, and Furukawa remains the centre — a compact former castle town on a flat terrace where the Miyagawa and Araki rivers meet. Confusingly for visitors, the city is often called Hida-Furukawa to distinguish it from Hida-Takayama, the far larger tourist town 15 kilometres south. Most of the city is forested and mountainous, with the north-eastern edge of the Hida range exceeding 2,000 metres, and the settlement pattern follows the valleys.

The old town. Furukawa's historic quarter is small enough to cross in fifteen minutes and unusually intact. The Setogawa canal runs a few hundred metres along the base of a line of white-plastered storehouses with black timber trim, and holds around a thousand carp from April to November — they are netted out each winter and kept in a pond until the snow clears. Behind the canal, the Shirakabe-dozō street preserves merchant frontages, and two large temples anchor the town: Enkōji, whose carved dragon is credited by local tradition with keeping the building standing through the 1858 Hietsu earthquake, and Honkōji, whose main hall is among the largest wooden temple structures in the Hida region. The town's carpenters, the Hida no takumi, have been famous since the eighth century, when the province paid its taxes to the imperial court in skilled labour rather than rice; the kumo bracket carvings under the eaves of the older houses are a signature of individual carpenter families.

Festivals. The Furukawa Festival on 19 and 20 April is the annual rite of Keta Wakamiya Shrine and one of the more physical festivals in central Japan. During the day, nine lacquered and carved yatai floats — part of the group of float festivals inscribed on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2016 — are drawn through the streets, some carrying mechanical puppets or children's kabuki. On the night of the 19th the Okoshi-daiko takes over: a huge drum is carried on a wooden frame through the town by hundreds of men in loincloths, while teams from each quarter charge in with smaller drums on poles, trying to force their way to the frame. It is loud, unruly and closely policed by tradition. In late September the quieter Kitsune-no-Yomeiri, a staged fox wedding procession with white-painted faces and lanterns, moves through the same streets.

On screen, honestly. Furukawa's built environment supplied several key locations for Your Name (2016), and the connection is documented rather than rumoured. The most recognisable are the station and its surroundings, the modern Hida City Library where Taki reads about the comet disaster, and the Ochiai bus stop, a plain rural shelter on a mountain road served by only a handful of buses a day, where the search party is set down. The town of Itomori itself is invented — there is no crater lake, no Miyamizu shrine and no such settlement — and the film assembles its village from several sources. Hida City responded to the resulting wave of visitors with pilgrimage maps and a short list of requests, mainly about the library's working reading room and about the residents who live along the routes that fans walk. Neighbouring Takayama absorbs most of the region's tourism, which means Furukawa still feels like a town rather than an exhibit.

The other Hida. The Kamioka district, up the valley to the north-east, is an old mining town that became one of the more important sites in modern physics: the Kamioka Observatory operates a kilometre underground in the Mozumi mine, where the Kamiokande and Super-Kamiokande neutrino detectors produced results that led to Nobel Prizes for Masatoshi Koshiba in 2002 and Takaaki Kajita in 2015. The detectors themselves cannot be visited, but the town's small science displays explain the work. Kamioka and Furukawa are also the city's sake districts, and Furukawa still supports a workshop making warōsoku, hand-dipped Japanese candles from plant wax.

Getting there and timing. The Takayama Main Line reaches Hida-Furukawa Station from Nagoya via Takayama in about two and a half hours by limited express, or from Toyama in roughly an hour; buses from Takayama take a little under an hour. Drivers use the Tōkai-Hokuriku Expressway and National Route 41. Mid-April is the festival, late April to June brings snowmelt and green terraces, and October colours the surrounding mountains. Winters are long and snowy, with the town at its quietest and the sake breweries at their most active.