Karuizawa Summer Travel: The Imperial Mountain Retreat That Never Needed to Announce Itself

St. Moritz empties in summer. Gstaad reinvents itself with music festivals and keeps itself busy. Karuizawa was always a summer place. It did not need to find a reason for the season. The reason has been the same since 1886: it is five degrees cooler than Tokyo, it sits at 1,000 metres in the shadow of an active volcano, and the people who know about it have been coming back every July since before their parents were born.

That continuity is the thing about Karuizawa that no brochure has managed to bottle. There are towns that become resorts and towns that are resorts. Karuizawa is the second kind, and it became one not because a developer arrived with a vision but because a Canadian missionary rode up into the mountains on horseback in the summer of 1886 and decided that the pine forest above Nagano was the most pleasant place he had ever been in August.

Alexander Croft Shaw and the First Villa

Alexander Croft Shaw was a missionary from Toronto working out of Tokyo when the city's summer heat became unworkable. He found Karuizawa by following the mountain roads northwest of the capital and built the first Western-style villa in the area in 1888. He told colleagues. They came. By the 1890s there was a small colony of missionaries and diplomats in the pines, and by the early 1900s the foreign community had grown into something permanent: villas, tennis courts, a social life organised around the cool evenings and the smell of the forest.

The town's identity as a hill station for the diplomatic corps predates its contemporary luxury positioning by a century. That layering is what makes the place feel different from a resort built to specification. The infrastructure of refinement arrived here slowly, over generations, and it shows in the weight of the silence.

The Canadian architect and furniture designer Antonin Raymond came to Karuizawa in the 1920s and returned repeatedly through the 1930s, building summer villas in a style that sat between Japanese materiality and European modernism: rough stone, timber, simple volumes that let the forest in without performing the gesture. Several of these villas are still standing in the Kyu-Karuizawa district. You pass them on the lanes without knowing what they are. That is also characteristic of the place.

The Geography

Karuizawa sits at the foot of Mount Asama, a stratovolcano that rises to 2,568 metres and remains one of Japan's most active. The mountain last erupted in 2019. A small ash fall, no evacuation. It erupted more substantially in 2004, in 1973, and repeatedly through the twentieth century. The locals watch it the way coastal people watch the sea: with attention but without particular alarm. Its presence behind the town is the reason the forest smells the way it does, volcanic soil producing a density of vegetation that closes over the lanes in July and makes the air noticeably different from sea-level pine.

The town itself divides into three neighbourhoods with distinct registers. Kyu-Karuizawa, the old district, holds the villa estates, the historic tennis courts, and the original Ginza shopping street, narrower and quieter than its Tokyo namesake. Naka-Karuizawa occupies the middle ground: newer development, some of the better restaurants, the Harunire Terrace cluster of shops and cafes built among the larch trees. Minami-Karuizawa is the southern district, gentler in elevation, where the golf courses are and where the families with summer homes tend toward the larger estates.

The Royal Tennis Court

In the summer of 1957, Crown Prince Akihito met Michiko Shoda on the tennis courts of Karuizawa during a mixed doubles tournament. She was the daughter of a flour-milling executive, not an aristocrat. The match, and the courtship that followed, became the story that defined the town for a generation of Japanese people who had never been there. The royal tennis court at Kyu-Karuizawa is still there, the surface maintained, the net up in July and August. It is the kind of thing that Karuizawa holds quietly: historically significant, undeclared, functioning.

That story also explains something about the town's social character. Karuizawa was never exclusively aristocratic in the way that European mountain resorts have been. The missionary and diplomatic origins brought a mix of class registers from the beginning. Old-Tokyo money has been coming since the early twentieth century, but so have writers, architects, and musicians who came because the cool air and the quiet were good for work. Soseki Natsume, the novelist whose face was on the thousand-yen note for decades, spent summers here. John Lennon and Yoko Ono had a house here in the late 1970s and came every summer for several years. None of this is advertised at the entrance to town.

What the Summer Is

The Shinkansen connects Tokyo Station to Karuizawa in seventy minutes. You board in the heat of the city and arrive in a different climate: the temperature difference is real, five to ten degrees cooler than the capital in July and August, and the humidity drops with the altitude. The combination that makes Tokyo summers genuinely difficult, high heat plus high humidity, does not exist here. The evenings require a layer.

The Harunire Terrace opened in 2009, a cluster of small shops and restaurants built on a terrace above the Yukawa River among mature larch trees. The construction preserved the existing trees and the terrace is designed so that the canopy remains overhead. At midday in August, it is shaded and cool. The shops are independent, the food is local, the crowd is the kind of crowd that found out about this place from people who found out about it from people. No tour buses.

Kumoba Pond, at the edge of Kyu-Karuizawa, sits in a depression surrounded by birch and willow. The surface reflects the trees and the light changes the reflection every hour. In the early morning, before the first visitors arrive, there is mist on the water. A walking path circles the pond in about twenty minutes. At one point the path passes under a canopy where the birch branches touch overhead and the light is filtered to something close to green. The pond does not need to be explained. You walk around it once and then again.

Shiraito Falls, on the north edge of the plateau, runs over a basalt shelf seventy metres wide. The water at Shiraito comes from snowmelt filtering through the volcanic rock of Mount Asama and emerges at the base of the shelf as hundreds of thin threads rather than a single curtain. The falls give the name: shiraito means white thread. The water is clear and cold in July and the basalt is dark green with moss and the spray keeps the air around the falls noticeably cooler than the path that approaches them.

The Hoshinoya and the Architecture of Restraint

Kengo Kuma's Hoshinoya Karuizawa opened in 2005 on the banks of the Yukawa River, in the forest above the town. The approach is by river taxi: a flat-bottomed boat that carries guests from the lobby through the trees to the room buildings on the opposite bank. The rooms are built into the hillside, timber and stone, the proportions borrowed from the ryokan tradition but the materials and the light handled in the way Kuma handles them: with a bias toward disappearing.

The Hoshinoya has an onsen fed by a local spring. The outdoor baths are on the river level, open to the canopy above. In the evening, the forest air above the hot water is cool enough that the steam is visible and the contrast between the heat of the water and the air on your shoulders is the specific pleasure of mountain bathing. The dress code for dinner in the main dining room requires something that works with forest air in August: the fabric that matters most is the one nearest your skin. A silk dress, worn without the structure that makes London or Paris evenings feel formal, is correct here. If the dress is cut without a back, the invisible layer that lets it hang as it was cut to hang is what the evening asks for. Silicone adhesive wears easily in this altitude and temperature, which is cooler than the cities where most guests use it, and the result is that the dress behaves all evening.

What to Know Before You Go

The town is walkable if you stay in Kyu-Karuizawa or near the Harunire Terrace. A bicycle is better. Rental shops are near the station and the lanes that connect the villa districts are not designed for cars. The best hour for the lanes in the villa district is early morning, before seven, when the light comes low through the pines and the air is cold enough that you walk faster than you planned to.

The high season runs from late July through the Obon week in mid-August. During Obon, the Shinkansen fills and the town is as close to crowded as it gets. The weeks before and after Obon are the correct answer: the restaurants are open, the air is the same, and the roads through the forest are quiet enough to hear the wind in the larch canopy above them.

For visitors who have done the European mountain summer circuit, the contrast is worth naming. The mountain summers of Gstaad and Aspen in July involve performance: conspicuous sportswear, visible wealth, the social calendar of a resort that needs its guests to see each other. Karuizawa does not perform. The people who have been coming for thirty years arrive in the same villas their parents used and go to the same fish restaurant in Naka-Karuizawa and are not interested in being seen doing any of it. The architecture of this kind of quiet is different from austerity. It is the confidence of a place that has been doing the same thing for a very long time and does not need to explain what it is. For the full sensory logic of mountain-altitude dressing, the principles that apply to Alpine evenings in Switzerland translate here, adjusted for a forest that smells of volcanic soil rather than pine resin.

The Evening

The Karuizawa evening is cool in a way Tokyo cannot be. The pines smell different in altitude. You sleep with the window open.