Chubu-Sangaku

Chubu-Sangaku was declared in 1934, in the first group of Japanese national parks, and protects the Hida massif, known internationally as the Northern Japanese Alps. It is shared between the prefectures of Nagano, Gifu, Toyama and Niigata, and has the greatest concentration of peaks above 3,000 metres in Japan, among them Hotaka, Yari with its characteristic spear silhouette, Tateyama and Norikura.

Its most famous gateway is Kamikochi, a flat-bottomed valley at about 1,500 metres crossed by the clear waters of the Azusa River, with the Kappa Bridge, its larches and birches and, in the background, the walls of Hotaka. Access by private vehicle has been banned for decades, a pioneering visitor-management measure in Japan. In the northern sector runs the Tateyama-Kurobe Alpine Route, an itinerary combining cable cars, funiculars and buses to cross the range, and which in spring passes between walls of snow more than ten metres high.

The landscape is glaciated high mountain, with cirques, moraines and some of the very few glaciers recognised in Japan. The vegetation is tiered from the beech and mixed forests of the valleys up to the alpine scrub of dwarf pine, and on the summits lives the rock ptarmigan, a bird protected as a Special Natural Monument whose Japanese population has been isolated since the last glaciation and is especially vulnerable to warming. It is joined by the Japanese serow, the macaque and the black bear. Mountaineering has its Japanese epicentre here, with a highly developed network of mountain huts.