Sakegawa Village: The Totoro Tree Is Just the Beginning — Yamagata

There’s a cedar in Sakegawa Village that stands about twenty metres tall with a trunk over six metres around, forked low enough that from the right angle it reads unmistakably as Totoro, ears and all. People drive up from Shinjo, park in the gravel lot below the Kumakawa district, and walk the short path up to stand under it for ten minutes with their phones out. Then most of them turn around and drive back the way they came.

What they don’t see, unless they glance the other way, is the rest of the village going about its business around that one tree: a farm co-op stand nearby stacked with more nameko mushrooms than one person could carry home, a river with salmon working upstream every autumn, and on certain June weekends, a drum and shamisen drifting from a shrine courtyard where a kabuki troupe has performed since 1773. The tree is real and worth the trip, but treating Sakegawa as one roadside photo stop misses a village built around two bigger stories: a river that gave it its name and still feeds it, and a mushroom industry that quietly grows more than half of everything Yamagata Prefecture produces. The tree is the doorway. It isn’t the house.

Why This Village Is Different

Search for the tree in English and the answer is fairly consistent: a 1,000-year-old cedar that looks like a Studio Ghibli character, covered by Yahoo, Japan Today, and a few other outlets. Search the same question in Japanese, closer to the source, and the figure you’ll usually find is 700 to 800 years instead. Nobody local treats this as a live argument — but it’s worth stating plainly rather than repeating whichever number travelled further. My guess is that “1,000 years” is simply the rounder, more shareable figure that stuck once the tree started circulating in English. Either number puts it well before the Edo period, and either way it’s a genuinely striking tree.

The bigger, less-told number here is about mushrooms. Sakegawa grows seven commercial varieties — nameko, shiitake, enoki, buna-shimeji, maitake, yamabushitake, and tamogitake — and accounts for something like half to sixty percent of everything Yamagata Prefecture produces in that category, a serious concentration for a village of under four thousand people. It is not, despite how some local marketing likes to round it up, Japan’s single biggest mushroom producer; Nagano and Niigata still outproduce it nationally. Within Yamagata, and within Tohoku more broadly, it’s close to unmatched — a strong enough claim without needing to inflate it.

The quieter number underneath both of those is population. Sakegawa counted just over 3,900 residents in the 2020 census, down from a peak of roughly 9,056 in 1950 — less than half. That decline is written into a lot of small Tohoku villages, and Sakegawa isn’t pretending otherwise; there’s a visible push toward new residents through akiya (vacant house) listings and relocation subsidies. It’s the same undercurrent running through Makkari Village up in Hokkaido, another small place whose name is inseparable from what the land does — there it’s spring water and yuri-ne lily bulbs, here it’s a river the salmon still climb. Places like this aren’t frozen in time; they’re working, at a smaller scale.

What to See and Do

Start at the Tree, Then Keep Going

Kosugi no Osugi, the tree’s formal name, sits in the Kumakawa district and has been called a “married couple’s cedar,” a matchmaking tree, and a tree for blessing children, depending on who’s telling you. There’s a small shrine to the mountain god tucked into its roots, easy to miss if you’re focused on the shape overhead. In winter the road past the parking area typically isn’t cleared, so plan on this being a warm-season stop. What almost none of the English write-ups mention is where to go next: a short drive back down toward the village entrance to Sake no Ko Park, where the village starts telling you the rest of its story.

Follow the Salmon to Sake no Ko Park

The park sits along Route 458 near the village’s entrance, its centrepiece a pond shaped, seen from above, like a salmon — civic humour for a village whose name literally means “salmon river.” In autumn there’s a salmon festival here with hand-catching in shallow water, drawing families rather than tour buses, plus a farm stand called Sakemarukun selling produce and mushrooms alongside a small ramen and coffee counter. What’s easy to miss is the season on either side: once the run finishes and the coldest, driest stretch of the year sets in, whole salted salmon get strung up under farmhouse eaves to cure — a rural still life you can genuinely stumble across on a December drive, though I’d treat the timing loosely, since it depends on the year’s cold snap as much as the calendar.

Watch a Kabuki Troupe That’s Never Stopped

Sakegawa Kabuki traces back to around 1773, and unlike a lot of rural performing arts stories, it isn’t framed locally as something on the verge of disappearing. Four districts — Kyozuka, Ishinasaka, Kami-obuchi, and Kawaguchi — each maintain their own troupe, performing on an earthen stage inside its own shrine or temple grounds as a votive offering rather than a scripted tourist show. A regular public performance is held each June. Go in with the right expectations: this is a community event built around a shrine calendar, not a theatre evening — people bring their own seating, and the mood is closer to a local festival than a performance hall. Because the date shifts year to year and isn’t heavily promoted outside the region, check with the village before a June visit.

Eat Under the Trees at Kinoko no Mori

Sakegawa Village Eco Park runs a small café called Kinoko no Mori — literally “mushroom forest” — with a menu built almost entirely around the village’s main crop: mori no kinoko spaghetti, mori no kinoko pizza, and a reservation-only mushroom shabu-shabu at lunch. It’s a low-key, wooden-tabled place rather than a destination restaurant, but eating here after hearing the production numbers earlier makes the connection concrete. This is what half of Yamagata’s mushroom output looks like on a plate.

Stop at Niwatsuki Kannon and the “Okagesama” Gate

Niwatsuki Kannon dates to 1546 and serves as the final temple, the kechigan-dera, of the Mogami Thirty-Three Kannon pilgrimage route. There’s a custom of saying “okagesama desu” — roughly, “thanks to you” — while passing through its main gate, a small habit that’s easy to pick up as a visitor. On August 18th the temple holds a toro nagashi, a lantern-floating ceremony as part of the obon send-off for ancestors, said to be among the larger Buddhist-style lantern floats in eastern Japan — a quiet, unhurried event that rarely makes travel itineraries, and exactly why it’s worth building an August trip around if the date lines up.

For Those With More Time: Yozo Pond and the Phantom Waterfalls

With a full extra day, two further-flung spots reward the effort. Yozo Pond, roughly a two-hour walk from the Hanezawa trailhead, carries a local legend about a charcoal burner named Yozo who drank from it so long he turned into a giant serpent — an unpolished folk story passed down rather than written up for tourists. Further out, the Maboroshi no Taki waterfalls, deep in the Oashisawa valley, weren’t discovered until 1993 and take about an hour’s drive plus thirty minutes on foot. Both close in winter — fittingly, hidden spots inside an already hidden village.

When to Go

Autumn, September through November, is when Sakegawa makes its strongest case: mushroom picking at its peak, the salmon festival at Sake no Ko Park, and hillsides colouring up around a village whose identity is tied to what’s growing in its forests. Summer brings river play, the walk to Yozo Pond, and the August 18th lantern-floating at Niwatsuki Kannon. June is the month to time a visit around Sakegawa Kabuki’s regular performance. Winter brings proper heavy-snow country, with the Totoro tree and the phantom waterfalls off-limits, but also salted salmon under the eaves and, in years when it runs, the Sakegawa Snow Festival at the Eco Park with snowmobiles, snow-tubing, a food market, and fireworks — an event that doesn’t appear in a single English-language roundup of Tohoku’s winter festivals, unlike Yokote’s kamakura or Hirosaki’s snow lantern event. I’d confirm dates with the village before a February trip, since the last confirmed running was early 2024.

Getting There

From Tokyo, the Yamagata Shinkansen “Tsubasa” runs to JR Shinjo Station in about three and a half hours. From Shinjo, the village centre is twelve to twenty minutes by car; the Totoro tree, out toward Kumakawa, is a separate thirty to forty minutes from the station itself, not an add-on to the village centre drive. Driving the whole way, the Shinjo-Sakegawa interchange off Route 13 puts you seven to ten minutes from the village centre, with Route 458 running straight through.

Be honest about public transit here: the village bus runs between Hanezawa Onsen and Shinjo Station and not much else — essentially one route covering one corridor of the village. Sake no Ko Park, the Eco Park, and remote spots like the phantom waterfalls are out of reach without a car. There’s one narrow exception: the tree alone can technically be reached by train and bus, via the Ou Main Line to Uzen-Toyosato Station and a local bus to the Kosugi stop, about a six-minute walk from there. But that route gets you the tree and nothing else; seeing the rest of Sakegawa means renting a car.

Where to Stay

Hanezawa Onsen’s Bijin no Yu Matsubaso is the village’s most established option — a saline sodium-bicarbonate spring, mildly alkaline at pH 8.4 and drawn at 47°C, marketed locally as a “beauty bath,” with rooms from around 16,000 yen for two people. It’s a proper old-fashioned onsen inn rather than a boutique property, which suits the village around it.

The other realistic option is a cottage at the Eco Park itself — the Kitsutsuki Cottages, from around 15,050 yen per unit, right next to the Kinoko no Mori café. Staying here means your evening meal and morning coffee are both mushroom-forest adjacent — the right way to close out a day that started under a tree everyone photographs and ended somewhere almost nobody who takes that photo ever reaches. Sleep here, and the picture that started as one famous cedar has, by morning, turned into an entire small village — river, mushrooms, and all.

Quick Summary

Location	Sakegawa Village, Mogami District, Yamagata Prefecture (adjacent to Shinjo City)
Population	~3,900 (2020 census), down from a 1950 peak of 9,056
Main industry	“Mushroom kingdom” — 7 varieties (nameko, shiitake, enoki, buna-shimeji, maitake, yamabushitake, tamogitake); roughly 50–60% of Yamagata Prefecture’s total production
The tree	Kosugi no Osugi (“Totoro tree”) — 700–800 years old per Japanese sources, often cited as 1,000 years in English coverage; trunk circumference ~6.3m, height ~20m
Sakegawa Kabuki	Traces to c. 1773; 4 districts, 4 troupes (Kyokyoku-za, Hoseki-za, Obuchi-za, Kawamura-za); regular performance each June
Niwatsuki Kannon	Built 1546; final temple of the Mogami 33 Kannon pilgrimage; lantern-floating (toro nagashi) each August 18
Access	~4 hours total from Tokyo (Shinkansen to Shinjo + car); one village bus route only, so a rental car is effectively required
Where to stay	Hanezawa Onsen Matsubaso, from ~¥16,000/2 people; Eco Park Kitsutsuki Cottages, from ~¥15,050/unit
Best season	Autumn (Sep–Nov) for mushrooms, salmon festival, and colour; also June (kabuki), August 18 (lantern floating), and winter (snow scenery, salted salmon under the eaves, snow festival if held)