Tochigi Kura Town & Mt Ohira - Private Day Tour from Tokyo

Kawagoe is called Little Edo and gets the crowds. Ninety minutes north, Tochigi City was the richer of the two – the river port that shipped goods to Edo – and it keeps a longer street of black-plastered kura storehouses along a canal, with almost no foreign visitors on it.

We collect you at your Tokyo hotel and drive north. In Tochigi your guide takes you first onto the canal: a flat wooden boat poled slowly along the Uzuma River between the storehouse walls, past willow trees and thousands of carp, with the boatman singing the old boat song. Then we walk the merchant street – Kura no Machi – where the storehouses are now cafes, sake shops and small museums. The Tochigi Kura Museum shows what a shipping merchant’s house looked like inside, and the Yokoyama family’s former hemp warehouse still has its stone walls and iron doors.

Lunch is in a converted kura. In the afternoon we drive up Mount Ohira, a low mountain on the edge of the plain, to Ohirasan Shrine and the Kenshin-daira lookout, where the view runs across the Kanto plain to Tokyo’s skyscrapers on a clear day. The tea houses along the road serve the local speciality: tamago-yaki (thick omelette), fried tofu and dango together, a set that has been served to pilgrims here for 200 years.

If time allows we stop at the Iwashita New Ginger Museum – Japan’s strangest museum, bright pink and entirely about pickled ginger – on the way home.

What you pay is what you pay

The price is one fixed amount for your whole group: the private van, fuel, tolls, parking and your driver-guide for the day. There are no per-person supplements and no booking fees. The canal boat ride is included in the price. Optional museum entries and lunch are paid by each guest on the day.

Good to know

The canal boat runs from March to November and stops in rain. If the boat cannot run on your date, we replace it with the Ginger Museum and a longer canal walk, or you can choose a full refund of your booking, guaranteed. Mount Ohira has about 1,000 stone steps to the shrine; the van goes to the top car park so the steps are optional. The Ginger Museum is free and closed on Tuesdays.