Chichibu, Saitama

Where it sits. Chichibu is a city of around fifty-five thousand people in the far west of Saitama, occupying a basin ringed by mountains at the head of the Arakawa river. It is the largest municipality in the prefecture by area and the only part of it that feels genuinely remote, despite being under ninety minutes from Ikebukuro by limited express. The basin floor sits at 200 to 250 metres; the ridges around it climb past 1,000, and the landmark is Mount Bukō at 1,304 metres directly south of the centre — a limestone mass cut into visible horizontal terraces by nearly a century of cement quarrying, which makes it the least picturesque and most honest mountain silhouette in Japan.

The old town. Chichibu grew as a silk town and a pilgrimage town, and both are still legible. Chichibu Shrine at the centre was rebuilt in 1592 under Tokugawa Ieyasu, and its main hall carries dense polychrome carving on all four sides, including a bound dragon and a panel of three monkeys who see, hear and speak rather than the more familiar three who do not. Around it, the grid of streets holds a scatter of early twentieth-century merchant houses and Western-influenced facades from the silk boom. The Chichibu circuit of thirty-four Kannon temples, established in the medieval period, threads the basin and the hills for roughly a hundred kilometres and still draws walking pilgrims in white; together with the Bandō and Saigoku circuits it forms the hundred-temple Kannon pilgrimage of Japan.

The Night Festival. On 2 and 3 December, Chichibu Shrine holds the Chichibu Yomatsuri, one of the three great float festivals of Japan and inscribed by UNESCO in 2016 as part of the Yama-Hoko-Yatai group of festivals. Six enormous wooden floats — two kasaboko and four yatai, some weighing in excess of ten tonnes and carrying travelling kabuki stages — are hauled through the streets by teams on ropes, lit by lanterns, and dragged up the steep slope in front of the town hall in the closing hours while fireworks go up over the winter sky. It is cold, extremely crowded and genuinely one of the best nights out in Japan; paid grandstand seating is balloted well in advance and the surrounding streets are closed.

Shibazakura and Mount Bukō. Hitsujiyama Park occupies a rise on the southern edge of town, and its lower slope is planted with moss phlox in blocks of white, pink and magenta — several hundred thousand plants across an area of roughly one and a half hectares. The bloom runs from mid-April to early May and is timed so that the flowering carpet sits in the foreground with the terraced grey wall of Mount Bukō filling the background: an unusually frank composition that puts an industrial landscape behind a flower garden. The park charges a small entry fee during the bloom, and weekend traffic backs up on the approach roads; the walk from Seibu-Chichibu Station takes about twenty minutes and is faster than driving.

On screen. Chichibu is the single most concentrated anime-pilgrimage landscape in the Kantō region outside Kamakura. Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day (2011) is set here explicitly and unaltered — the old Chichibu bridge over the Arakawa, the riverbank where the children build their hideout, the shrine, the station, the residential streets. Two further films from the same creative team, The Anthem of the Heart (2015) and Her Blue Sky (2019), use the same city, so locals speak of a Chichibu trilogy. The rocket festival that closes Anohana is a real event: at Muku Shrine in the Yoshida district each October, competing local teams launch home-built black-powder rockets from bamboo towers. The city, the Chichibu Railway and the shopping streets have all worked with the material for over a decade, with wrapped trains, illustrated shutters and a permanent fixture at the tourist information centre.

Getting there and timing. Seibu's Laview limited express reaches Seibu-Chichibu from Ikebukuro in about eighty minutes; the JR route via Kumagaya and the Chichibu Railway is slower but connects to the steam-hauled Paleo Express, which runs on selected days between Kumagaya and Mitsumineguchi. Within the basin, buses are infrequent and a car helps for the outlying temples and the Mitsumine ridge. April to May and October to November are the strongest months; the December festival is worth the cold; midsummer in the basin is hot and thundery. The town centre is walkable and mostly flat, but the shrine circuit, the ridges and Hitsujiyama's upper slopes all involve gradients and steps.