Word: nagano
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Nagano, though only 120 miles northwest of Tokyo, has long been the provincial capital farthest in time from the center of Japan since unlike the cities on the outlying islands of Hokkaido and Okinawa, it has never had an airport. Even now, with a million Olympic visitors expected, the nearest airport to the Main Press Center consists of a modest, two-story box appointed with exactly four check-in counters and one baggage carousel, 75 min. away by (very occasional) bus. As your plane takes off from Matsumoto, the technicians all line up on the tarmac to wave goodbye...
Throughout its history, Nagano has been renowned as a temple town, home to one of Japan's most ecumenical Buddhist centers, Zenkoji, a 40-structure complex set against the mountains. The cypress-roofed temple is the city's center of gravity, marked on all the highway signs. Zenkoji announces itself with the shock of pounding drums, the smell of burning incense, the flutter of white-paper prayers. Somewhere inside its main hall is what is said to be the first Buddha image ever to arrive in Japan, so precious that only a replica is displayed once every seven years...
...Buddhist pilgrims, Zenkoji is approached past a long line of shops selling religious artifacts (though, this being Japan, they also offer pink bunnies and nudie telephone cards). Sidewalks brim with tables full of dried apricots and pumpkin seeds and sachets of apple tea. For all its modern accessories, Nagano remains a farmers' town sought out for its pickles, its horseradishes and its homemade buckwheat noodles. Next to the feminine grace notes of a Kyoto, say, the northern city feels a decidedly masculine place. Its colors are brown and black, its aesthetic one of straw and stone. On its southern edge...
...everywhere the 7,000-ft. mountains and the apple and peach and apricot orchards give a bell-like vigor to the air. Nagano is actually on almost the same latitude as Rome and San Francisco--the southernmost city ever to be host of a Winter Games--but its nearby mountains are famous for their clear, rushing streams and sharp blue skies. "This is the most beautiful place in Japan," says an American professor at a local university. "I'll be happy if I never see Tokyo in my life again...
...Nagano is the unpretentious town you learn to like, Hakuba, an hour away by bus (and site of many of the snowy events) is the practiced charmer that grabs you instantly. This is in part, no doubt, because Nagano is a city with 360,000 people--more populous than Iceland--while Hakuba is a village of just 9,400 residents, a picture-perfect poster site for the Japan Alps with its Chalet Heidihof pensions and white birch forests encircled by snowcaps reflected in the Princess River...