It is undeniable that Japan has recently grown into a global tourism superstar. The numbers look tremendous on paper: arrivals increasing year after year, bringing money and energy into the country. Yet, this process has not been without its drawbacks. Despite the familiar complaints about overtourism that might readily come to mind, I would like to offer a less common perspective.

Most of those millions of visitors rush between Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka, with perhaps a short excursion to Hiroshima or Okinawa in the South, leaving the rest of Japan’s vast and extraordinarily beautiful archipelago painfully neglected. Debating what to do with my mom’s final days in the country, I decided to break that pattern and take her along the Narrow Road to the Deep North.

Tohoku simply means “northeast” in Japanese, which makes it easy enough to find on a map. It’s a shame so few do. The region, twice the size of my home country Belgium, lies directly above Tokyo, but is home to only about eight million people, compared to the capital’s staggering thirty-five million. Vast national parks stretch across the land, dotted with chain-smoking volcanoes and the occasional small but homey town, ringed by neat rice fields, destined to become sushi and fruity sake.

In the far north of Aomori, the local dialect sounds like an entirely different language from the Japanese I’ve been studying the past years. It is something I can barely make sense of. Winters bring three to four meters of snow to the lowlands, and several times that to the mountains. We expected to meet people turned blue and silent from the cold, surly and gruff, closed off to tourists from the noisy south. Fortunately, and despite the foreign speech, we were dead wrong.

Nowhere else in Japan were we welcomed so warmly, friendly, and outright joyfully as in Aomori. At dinner, the locals kept the jokes flowing, always good-natured, never at anyone’s expense but their own, breaking the ice over a steaming meal. Elsewhere, they handed us cans of pure apple juice, or simply sliced an apple in half to share their autumn harvest with strangers from far away. We were offered home-distilled drinks from tiny home towns, the freshest fish from the busy morning market, and stories about the snowstorms that were soon to arrive.

They all agreed: Tokyo might be sunny, but the people are often frigid. Here, the frost might crack the trees and split rocks, but the people are warm.