BAR - YU: A bar in Hida Takayama
where foreign tourists gather night after night.
- Part 1 -

We got information that there is a house bar on the outskirts of Hida Takayama, a popular "old town" with merchant houses over 100 years old and retaining traces of the Edo period, where foreign guests gather night after night! Why is it so popular? To find out the secret, we went to Hida Takayama.

writer：Drink Planet　撮影：Tateha Sakamoto

By the way, what kind of town is Hida Takayama!

Takayama City, located in northern Gifu Prefecture, is a popular tourist destination, generally known as 'Hida Takayama', as it is the centre of the Hida region.

It is the gateway to the World Heritage Site Shirakawa-go, and Takayama itself is often referred to as 'Hida's Little Kyoto' or 'a town that preserves the original landscape of Japan' due to its landscape of castle towns and merchant towns that have remained intact since the Edo period.

It has been awarded three stars in the French Michelin travel guidebook and is extremely popular, especially among overseas tourists.

Because it is in Gifu Prefecture, if you thought it was just "a bit beyond Nagoya", you were naive. ......

It takes about 2.5 hours from Nagoya by express train.

Surrounded on all sides by 3,000 m mountains, Takayama is a completely different cultural zone from Nagoya and Gifu City.

This is probably why the 'old townscape' has remained intact and a unique tradition and culture has been nurtured.