Akita, Japan — Towns & Travel Guide

What is Akita known for?

Two things carry Akita's name nationwide: a dog and a demon. The Akita dog was bred as a hunter around Ōdate, and the ogre-masked Namahage still stamp door to door through the villages of Oga each New Year's Eve, scolding the lazy. Rice runs deeper.

The Sea of Japan slopes and the Yokote basin grow prized short-grain rice that feeds the prefecture's celebrated sake breweries. Summer belongs to the Kantō Matsuri, whose performers balance tall bamboo poles strung with paper lanterns on palm, hip, and forehead. Kakunodate guards its Edo-era samurai quarter, and Lake Tazawa holds the deepest water in Japan.

Where is Akita?

Akita occupies the northwest of the Tōhoku region, the deep-north end of Honshu. Its whole western flank is the Sea of Japan. Four prefectures ring the rest: Aomori closes the north, Iwate rises along the east, and Yamagata and Miyagi hold the south.

The eastern border with Iwate runs the crest of the Ōu Mountains, the longest range in Japan, while the Dewa Mountains fold through the interior. Mount Chōkai, an active volcano and the tallest peak on Akita's rim, straddles the southern border with Yamagata. The coast is far from straight.

The Oga Peninsula hooks out into the Sea of Japan, almost an island tethered by a low neck of rice land. Inland, water gathers in the Yokote basin and runs down the Omono River to the sea. Lake Tazawa, a near-perfect caldera and the deepest lake in Japan, holds cobalt water below the ridges that rise east of the plain toward the Ōu crest.

Forest covers most of the prefecture. Along the northern border with Aomori lies Shirakami-Sanchi, one of the last great virgin beech forests in East Asia and a wilderness of ravines.

What is Akita like?

Akita keeps its old winters loud. On New Year's Eve, straw-caped Namahage burst into homes on the Oga Peninsula, growling for lazy children and idle grown-ups, a folk rite the whole prefecture claims. Come August the mood shifts to the Kantō Matsuri, where men shoulder bamboo frames hung with dozens of paper lanterns and walk them balanced on hip and brow through Akita city.

Snow returns the theatre indoors. In Yokote, children hollow kamakura snow huts and wave passers-by inside for rice cakes and cups of sweet amazake. The prefecture reads as farm country with courtly manners at its edges.

Kakunodate preserves the black-walled samurai residences of the Satake domain, shaded each spring by weeping cherries. Rice runs through everything. The Akita komachi strain feeds a wall of sake breweries, and Ōdate turns its harvest into kiritanpo, pounded rice toasted on cedar skewers.

That same town gave the world the Akita dog, the thick-coated breed remembered through loyal Hachikō. Japanese is the language, though the local Akita dialect, thick and clipped, softens the vowels into something even other Japanese strain to follow.

What is the history of Akita?

Akita began as a frontier. The Yamato court pushed north against the Ezo and built a fortified stockade at Akita in the year 733, on the rim of Dewa Province. Its modern shape was set in 1602, when the Satake clan moved here from Hitachi after Sekigahara and built Kubota Castle.

For roughly 260 years the Satake ruled the Kubota domain from that castle town. The old han was dissolved in 1871, and the new prefecture took the castle's name.

What is the climate of Akita?

Akita is snow country in the fullest sense. Winter winds off the Sea of Japan hit the Ōu Mountains and unload, burying the Yokote basin under some of the heaviest snowfall in the country. Drifts pile several metres deep inland, which is why Yokote frames its winters around snow huts rather than fighting them.

Summers are short and humid, warm enough to ripen rice on the coastal plains. Rain and cloud are constant companions the rest of the year.

How do you get to Akita?

Most visitors ride the rails in. The Komachi service of the Akita Shinkansen runs from Tokyo, racing to Morioka before slowing onto the single mini-shinkansen track that threads the mountains by way of Tazawako and Kakunodate. It takes about four hours end to end.

Flying is quicker, and Akita Airport links to Tokyo's Haneda in little more than an hour, with buses down to the capital. From there, local lines trace the Sea of Japan coast north and south.