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Minami Alps NP, Yamanashi
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A 2025 Minami-Alps City feature spotlighted “roast-ritch” at Hirogawara Sanso: roast made with local ostrich meat. It’s a playful surprise at this mountain gateway.
Hirogawara’s forests once supplied timber for the capital: logs floated down the Norogawa, Hayakawa, and Fujikawa rivers, and the wood was used to repair Edo Castle in 1834.
At Hirogawara’s opening ceremony, a guide dressed like a Meiji-era mountain porter chops through a woven vine gate. The “tsuru-harai” ritual symbolizes clearing the trail, purifying the mountain, and driving away evil.
In 1904, British climber Walter Weston crossed Hirogawara on his way from Ashiyasu to Kitadake and beyond. A memorial here honors him as the first foreigner to summit the peak.
The former Hirogawara Sanso opened in 1985. Its founder’s son trained as a cook, took over at 26, and made local-produce dishes such as Hirogawara veggie curry and Koshu wine-beef bowls hut favourites.
Hirogawara’s katsura grove offers a little-known autumn treat: heart-shaped leaves carpet the ground, and the local Hiroha-katsura’s fallen leaves give off a faint, sweet fragrance.
At a 2014 event in Hirogawara Garden, organizers served 150 portions of venison—cutlets, roast, and karaage—from deer hunted in nearby Hayakawa, connecting local food with awareness of deer impacts on plants.
Hirogawara’s park mixes evergreen Nikko fir with deciduous katsura and beech. In autumn, the changing leaves stand out against the conifers’ deep green, creating a striking patchwork of colour.
Hirogawara’s forest shows signs of deer even when none are in sight: browsing keeps some ground plants short, and antlers rub bark from the occasional tree trunk.
Hirogawara’s mountain-hut history reaches back to at least 1924, when it was among 9 shelters built by Yamanashi Prefecture. The early hut was free to use and had no resident caretaker.
