Japan’s Niigata prefecture: a winter wonderland turned summer holiday hot spot

The area around Yuzawa, in the southern part of Niigata prefecture, was the setting for Snow Country, a novel by Yasunari Kawabata published in complete form in 1948, just after the second world war. The mournful isolation the Japanese Nobel laureate masterfully conveys in his tale of a hot-spring geisha and a Tokyo urbanite doesn’t make the locale sound appealing for tourists: the word “cold” appears at least 60 times in the book.

It does snow a lot here in the winter, but Kawabata’s Yuzawa didn’t have an 80-minute Shinkansen connection to Tokyo and modern heating. Today, rooms at the many ski resorts in the “Japanese Alps” fill up fast, as skiers flock to an area made even more synonymous with the cold when the 1998 Winter Olympics were held on the nearby slopes of Nagano.

But there are at least three good reasons to visit during the warmer months: rice, art and music.

Mention Niigata to a foodie and they will probably think of the plump, firm Koshihikari rice, especially that from the fields around the city of Uonuma. Here, the terroir – the long hours of sunlight, the wide diurnal temper­ature range and the sparkling water that flows down from surrounding mountains – has a supposedly positive effect on taste and texture.

You don’t need to go all the way to Niigata to buy its rice, of course. Bags of Koshihikari can be found easily in shops in Hong Kong, and fast-expanding Japanese rice-ball chain Hana-Musubi sells small packets sourced directly from independent farmers in Niigata. But here, the seed is omnipresent – green paddy fields colour every street corner; vending machines devoted to rice ensure no household goes without, whatever the time of day; and the variety of products derived from rice makes this a danger zone for the waistline.