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Chichibu-Tama-Kai NP, Tokyo
Claim this place to tell your story your way.
Hisashi, Minami and Kukizawa once stood on this park’s ground. The dam submerged much of old Ogouchi, while some land remained above water; severed roads isolated those settlements, and residents moved away, leaving traces along today’s trails.
A 15-minute, 28°C egg bath gives Okutama yamame 3 chromosome sets—not through genetic modification. Unable to mature, the fish can exceed 2 kg; Yama-furu’s café serves this giant trout fried.
Six men in patterned kimono and jeweled crowns dance to flutes and drums, preserving traces of early kabuki dance. Ogouchi Kashima Odori was nationally protected in 1980 and became part of UNESCO’s Furyu-odori in 2022.
One trail passes the old Kamo Shrine site, abandoned wasabi beds and charcoal-kiln remains—clues that this apparently wild hillside was once cultivated and worked for fuel, as well as being a place of worship.
Ogouchi’s dance may take its name from a lyric rather than a deity: the opening Sanbaso includes the words “Kashima odori.” How the dance reached the villages is unknown; local tales credit an exiled court noble or a traveling monk.
Dam displacement interrupted the dance, but former villagers formed a preservation group in 1970. Their descendants carried it on, and the troupe has performed at Yama-furu’s spring and autumn festivals, back on the old villages’ ground.
Yama-furu interpreters report that monkeys and deer now visit facility grounds more often than in years past. They suggest that untended, formerly managed forest is blurring the old buffer between wildlife and people.
Park guides note 10 cicada species in summer, squirrels gathering at streamside walnut trees in early autumn, and rutting deer calls in late fall. The forest’s cast changes with the season—even when its animals stay out of sight.
