Mount Iimori: a distance you can't judge without binocularsMount Iimori: a distance you can't judge without binoculars
Mount Iimori, known as the site of the Byakkotai's mass suicide, surprises many visitors once they actually stand there: the distance to Tsurugajo Castle is far greater, and the castle far smaller in view, than most expect — without binoculars, it's hard to make out clearly what's happening at the castle. That sense of distance is thought to have contributed to the boys' misreading of where the flames were coming from.
Nanukamachi Street — storehouses and Western-style buildings side by sideNanukamachi Street — storehouses and Western-style buildings side by side
Running west from Aizuwakamatsu Station, Nanukamachi Street once thrived as a post town along the Echigo Kaido, one of Aizu's five historic highways. It preserves a distinctive streetscape mixing traditional storehouse-style merchant buildings with Taisho- and early-Showa-era Western architecture — well known locally, but a somewhat under-covered, connoisseur-favorite area in tourist guides.
Ouchijuku — Aizu's inner retreatOuchijuku — Aizu's inner retreat
About an hour's drive from central Aizuwakamatsu, in Shimogo, Ouchijuku is a settlement that has preserved, almost as it was, the look of an Edo-period post town on the old Aizu-Nishi Kaido. Thatched-roof houses lining both sides of a single road have earned the area designation as one of Japan's Important Preservation Districts for Groups of Traditional Buildings. A short drive from the city takes you into a landscape that feels like stepping outside of time.
Beyond the standard route, another AizuBeyond the standard route, another Aizu
The Innai Mausoleum, resting place of successive lords of the Aizu Matsudaira house, and the former Takizawa Headquarters, essential to any account of Aizu at the end of the Edo period — sites that never make the textbooks are scattered across the city. It's often exactly the places a rushed tour skips past where the answers to Aizu's "why" lie waiting.