Narai-juku to Mount Fuji Drive
From an Edo-era post town deep in the Kiso Valley, over the mountains toward Mount Fuji.
Moving camera: its position on the map is approximate.
About this view
This drive, live from the past, begins in Narai-juku, the best-preserved post town on the Nakasendō, the Edo-era inland highway between Kyoto and Edo, where a full kilometre of dark wooden inns and shopfronts earned it the name "Narai of a thousand houses".
From there the road climbs out of the Kiso Valley and works east through hinoki cypress forest, farm hamlets and mountain passes, the piano keeping pace with the switchbacks, until Mount Fuji, at 3,776 m Japan's highest mountain, finally stands up over the ridgelines.
The Kiso Valley is at its best in late October, when the maples turn; this drive catches the green season. Watch it slowly: the whole point of the Nakasendō was that the journey took days.
