Story and photos by Gerard Ramos / Lifestyle & Entertainment Editor
Somewhere on this page is a report about how the Republic of China (Taiwan) is endeavoring to make it easier for Filipinos to visit, for business or leisure, this lovely and robust East Asia island state—and by “easier”, we mean the government is working to implement a visa-free policy for Filipinos in the not-too-distant future.
We bring this up because on our first visit to Nagoya in Japan a few years back, we remember an official from its tourism agency happily telling us the government, obviously spurred by an increasingly robust tourism economy, was continuously seeking to ways to make acquiring a visitor/tourist visa more expedient while making no sacrifices to maintaining Japan’s security.
True enough, the time between our first-ever trip to Japan—a whirlwind two-night stay in Tokyo that brought us no farther than the confines of our hotel room and the offices of the global company hosting our trip—and our more leisure-oriented visit to Nagoya a few years back may have spanned well over a decade, but we have returned several times since then to this island nation of imperial palaces, wondrous and imposing winters, breathtaking cherry blosssoms and sublime beauty.
We returned to Nagoya in late April courtesy of Jetstar Japan (www.jetstar.com/ph), which is part of the Jetstar Group of value-based carriers that transport people across Australia, New Zealand and the Asia-Pacific region daily. In March 2016 Jetstar Japan’s international footprint extended to Manila, making it the first Japanese value-based carrier to operate in the Philippines. It now offers Filipinos with a yen for going Japanese three routes to address their wanderlust: Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya, and
from there to 11 domestic destinations including Sapporo, Fukuoka and Kagoshima. Yes, all this means that on a single booking, Filipinos can “see more of Japan for less”.
To be sure, Nagoya isn’t the top-of-mind destination for Filipinos planning a trip to Japan. That would be Tokyo, always Tokyo, the country’s insanely busy capital city and one of the most populous, most expensive and most modern metropolitan areas in the world. The capital of the Aichi Prefecture, Nagoya does boast of the modern amenities that Tokyo offers, but the pace would seem a beat slower, a beat or two removed from the whirling dervish of modern living—and that may be on account of its proximity to the laidback Gifu Prefecture, whose sublime attractions include the impossibly beautiful Shirakawa-gō and its historic village which has been declared by Unesco as a World Heritage Site.
Located in the Ōno District in Gifu, the village is comprised of gassho-zukuri farmhouses with incredibly densely thatched roofs that may date back to hundreds of years but have lost none of their precious quiet beauty. Some continue to serve as homes while others have been opened as attractions to tourists. Surrounded by water systems and farmlands, The Wada-ke House is both: part home and part museum, through which one gets a quick history lesson—though your tour guide or Mr. Masato Wada, the silverfox curator of Wada House—n how this 300-year-old home was, by turns, the residence of local politician and a silk production facility, among others.
Also in Gifu is Magome-juku in Nakatsugawa City, a post town carved on a clifflike terrain with cobblestone streets lined by residential homes, tea houses, restaurants, retail and souvenir shops that offer both the tacky, touristy stuff and more thoughtful things to bring back home. But tourists, there will be not a few here because, as in Shirakawa-gō, its like being transported back to the Japan of the Edo period, an authentic slice of traditional life. In millennial-speak, Magome-juku is as Instagrammable as Shirakawa-gō.
More destinations that are Instagram-ready await those flying to Nagoya, and one of these is Nagashima Resort in Kuwana, Mie Prefecture, which can take a full day and more to thoroughly explore as it offers four facilities that provides a slew of sensory sensations. One is the Mitsui Outlet Park Jazz Dream Nagashima, a sprawling mall of two floors and row after row outlet shops of famous foreign and local brands. Attached to the outlet park is the Nagashima Spaland, which should delight thrillseekers with its plethora of rides not for the faint-hearted, including the Steel Dragon 2000 rollercoaster that spans the entirety of the park with a couple or three forbidding loops.
There is, as well, the Nabana no Sato flower park that has achieved global popularity for its outstanding winter illuminations that run from mid October to early May. Our favorite, however, is its massive green house known as the Begonia Garden because of the outsized begonias arrayed in rows and hanging from the high ceiling. There’s a café in the middle of this wondrous explosion of dazzling color, and quiet late afternoons amid such a breathtaking beauty are how we’d like to spend ours.
A three-hour ride from Nagoya is the Toyama Prefecture, renowned for its Hida Mountain Range and, of course, the Tateyama-Kurobe Alpine Route, which straddles Toyama City and Omachi Town in the Nagano Prefecture.
The Alpine Route has become a major draw among tourists and locals, but it must be said that it requires strong legs and good lungs, apart from good winter clothing. While a configuration of trolleybuses, funicular cars and cable cars will transport you to the world-famous snow walls, there’s a not-inconsiderable amount of walking to be done. That and the high elevations (Murodo, where the snow walls are found, is at 2,450 meters above sea level) can leave one breathless and not just figuratively.
We didn’t mind the long walk through the imposing corridor of snow that towered as high as 20 meters. To borrow from Frozen’s Elsa, the cold never bothered us anyway. What did was the need to use the bathroom to relieve our bladder midway through our alpine walk, but that’s another story.
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