It was time to get back on the road and we had rented from Nippon Rent a Car for the first time. We were staying near Tokyo station so I booked from the Tokyo Station Yaesu South Exit branch, which was in the basement parking structure underneath the station. The Google reviews had said it was very hard to find, so the day prior we had located the Nippon office and plotted our way back for an easy way to get our luggage down. We managed to get our bags there prior to our 9am pickup and wanted to purchase an Expressway Pass to lessen the cost of our two-week road trip. The Toyota Rent a Car in Sapporo was able to set this up for us, which saved us a good amount of money. The staff in the shop had never heard of an Expressway Pass, even when I showed it to them on their Japanese website, so we had to give up on that. Once we were loaded up in our car, it was time to get on the expressway for the 250-mile drive to Nagano City.

To break up the journey I found an amazing stop off about halfway on the route: Takasaki. One of my husband’s favourite things is the daruma, the round, red representation of the Bodhidharma who was a Buddhist monk from the 5 or 6th century. The tale goes that he was very good at meditation, and sat for years on end in a cave in meditation. The tale splits here, some versions say that he sat for so long that his arms and legs fell off, while others say he cut off his arms, legs, and eyelids to improve his meditation technique. Despite the somewhat gruesome tale the daruma is a good luck charm and helps to make wishes come true. When you purchase a daruma you are meant to make your wish or goal, colour in one eye, and when it comes true you colour in the other eye and return it to be ritually burned. Our first stop was Shorinzan Daruma-ji Temple, a Buddhist temple that is famous for daruma, and the ritualist burning of the daruma each year. We were a bit late in the month for the burning, and yet the temple was covered in daruma, it was beautiful.

Our next stop was across the road at Daimonya, an artisan store that produces daruma for nearby temples. There were so many different daruma available, with different sizes too. We purchased a few different daruma and were able to choose the kanji that were handpainted on the back. I’d highly recommend a visit.

We got back on the road to complete our journey to Nagano City, it was quite a long and boring drive on the expressway, but we started driving through long tunnels and were back into the mountains! We got into Nagano city and found that the parking lot for the hotel was a 5-10 minute walk from the hotel, which was a shame. It had started snowing on our arrival, and so we had a slushy time dragging our bags to the hotel. Before it got dark we decided to head off to the must-see temple of Nagano, Zenkō-ji.

It was a nice long walk to the temple, up a hill that was lined was stores selling traditional goods, although we were too late in the day and the shops were all closed. The temple was stunning with the falling snow and the fading light.

There was also a really interesting pink pagoda on the grounds, I’d never seen a pagoda in this colour in all my trips in Japan. There was also, interestingly, two statues of cows near by, which had no explanation. It was lovely to walk around the practically empty temple grounds in the snow.

After our long journey and walk in the snow, we got Uber Eats, snacks for tomorrow and went to bed, excited for our snowy adventure in the morning.