Sasagamine Pastures was added to Your Favorites!
Myōkō-Togakushi Renzan NP, Niigata
Claim this place to tell your story your way.
Inside the pasture, Uda-no-Shimizu gushes about 4,800 m³ a day at a steady 6°C. It once powered electricity generation; its stream flows toward Shimizugaike, and locals still use the water for tea and cooking.
Shinshu woodturners helped open Sasagamine from 1811. In 1851, 24 households tried growing potatoes, but disease wiped out the crop; by 1904, the failed fields had become grazing pasture.
Japanese Black and Japanese Shorthorn cattle graze here, and their beef is marketed as Kubiki beef, named for the low-lying Kubiki Plain. The local meat’s name points downhill, not to the mountain pasture.
In 2022, one of the 64 cattle sent up for summer had been raised by children at Itoigawa’s Minami-Nō Elementary School. Fourteen pupils came to watch their school-raised cow join the highland herd.
After winter snow melts by late May, Japanese buttercups spread a yellow carpet across Sasagamine; the highland’s main bloom arrives around mid-June. For a short while, the working pasture becomes a flower meadow.
Today’s cattle aren’t the pasture’s only hoofed chapter: a Niigata University regional archive catalogs a photograph of a herd of horses grazing at Sasagamine in late July 1951.
In 2025, cattle from farms in 4 Niigata cities were split into 3 herds and rotated among 17 paddocks as the grass grew. This summer boarding builds the animals’ strength and eases daily work for farmers.
Research traces Sasagamine’s open grassland to woodcutting, farming, and hundreds of freely ranging cattle and horses. When fencing confined grazing to about 100 hectares in 1975, forest quickly returned outside the grazing area.
Researchers first confirmed a troop of Japanese macaques in the Sasagamine area in 2002, but did not document its activity during the snowy season until March 2019. The troop’s winter behavior remains under study.
Sasagamine’s summer pasture can reach 28°C, while winter temperatures can fall to −28°C and snow can exceed 5 meters. The cattle’s highland summer is a brief chapter in a much more extreme mountain year.
