Two hours north of Kyoto, on the Sea of Japan coast, sits a town most foreign visitors have never heard of — and that is exactly its appeal. Obama, in the southwestern corner of Fukui Prefecture, lies almost due north of Kyoto, and for centuries it was the starting point of the Saba Kaido, the “Mackerel Road” that carried seafood over the mountains to the imperial capital.
That trade built a port town with a culture of its own. Today, the old quarter known as Obama Nishigumi still holds streets of Meiji-era timber houses, a temple with a cave where an 800-year-old nun is said to have sealed herself away, and machiya townhouses reborn as cafes. Here is how to spend a weekend in a town that Japanese travellers know for winter crab, but which rewards a visit in any season.
Getting to Obama, and Where to Start Walking
Reaching Obama has become considerably easier since the Hokuriku Shinkansen was extended to Tsuruga in March 2024. From Tsuruga, you can change to the local JR Obama Line for an unhurried ride along the coast, or pick up a rental car and drive the scenic shoreline of Wakasa Bay. By car it is roughly 80 minutes from Kyoto, or about 45 minutes from Tsuruga on the expressway.
The Nishigumi district sits about a 15-minute walk from JR Obama Station. The lanes are narrow and deliberately confusing (more on that shortly), so leave the car at the station or a visitor car park and explore on foot or by rental bicycle.
The Saba Kaido (鯖街道, “Mackerel Road”) is not a single road but a network of mountain routes that linked the Sea of Japan coast to Kyoto. Salted mackerel packed in Obama would arrive in Kyoto after roughly a day and a half on foot — perfectly seasoned by the time it got there, according to local lore. The JR Obama Line is operated by JR West; if you are travelling on a rail pass, check whether your particular pass covers this section before you plan around it.
A Key Port on the Kitamaebune Shipping Route
From as early as the Nara and Kamakura periods, fish landed at Obama was carried over the mountains to the emperor’s table in Kyoto. By the Edo period that route had a name — the Saba Kaido — and it functioned as a main artery between the Sea of Japan and the capital.
From the Edo into the Meiji period, Obama also prospered as a stop on the Kitamaebune route, the fleets of cargo ships that worked their way along the Sea of Japan coast between Osaka and Otaru in Hokkaido, buying and selling at each port along the way. Northbound they carried rice, sake, salt, textiles and medicine; southbound came herring, kelp and salmon. Obama, where sea routes met land routes, grew wealthy enough that merchant dynasties built their homes here.
The old quarter of that town is now a nationally designated Important Preservation District for Groups of Traditional Buildings. It escaped both wartime bombing and tsunami damage, leaving the Meiji-era streetscape essentially intact.
What Makes Nishigumi Unusual: Three Towns in One
We were shown around by a member of Obama City’s cultural tourism division. The district covers the western side of the old town, about 15 minutes on foot from JR Obama Station, and the historic street pattern survives almost completely.
The town peaked between the Edo and Meiji periods. A great fire in the Meiji era destroyed many buildings, but they were rebuilt — and because the area then escaped both war and tsunami, the street layout today is essentially identical to a land registry map drawn in 1871. That continuity is rare in Japan.
The old town was historically divided into three parts — East, Middle and West. The western section retained the most old buildings, and in June 2008 it was designated a national preservation district. It covers about 19.1 hectares, and as of 2024, 278 structures are identified as traditional buildings — the fifth-largest number of any such district in Japan.
Those narrow, crooked lanes are not accidental. They are a defensive legacy of the castle town built by the Wakasa Takeda clan during the Warring States period: hook-shaped turns and blind corners made it hard for an attacking force to move through.
What really sets the district apart, though, is that three quite different kinds of town survive side by side within one preservation zone — a merchants’ quarter, a teahouse quarter, and a temple quarter.
The merchants’ quarter is where commerce and craft workshops clustered: wide-fronted shops alongside machiya, the narrow-fronted townhouses that combine a shop at the street and living quarters behind.
Along the broad Tango Kaido, shops opened directly onto the street, their goods displayed so passers-by could see straight in — the shopping arcade of its day. Machiya are sometimes called “eel beds”: narrow at the front, but running a long way back, a form you also see in Kyoto.
Obama also had a moment of national fame: the 2007 NHK morning drama Chiritotechin was set and filmed here, and several scenes were shot in Nishigumi. A sign beside one building still marks the location.
Sanchomachi: Fukui’s Last Geisha Quarter
The teahouse quarter was the entertainment district, where guests came in the evening for dance and shamisen performed by geisha. Sanchomachi, on the western edge of the preservation zone, was that quarter.
As a port where sailors met travellers coming off the highway, Obama supported the liveliest entertainment district in the Wakasa region. At its height, Sanchomachi held 48 teahouses, and the theatres drew large crowds.
Behind the lattice screens along these streets, teahouses once stood shoulder to shoulder, shamisen music drifting out into a scene not unlike Kyoto’s Gion.
Today one establishment carries that tradition on: Ryotei Harima, the only remaining teahouse of its kind in Fukui Prefecture. Working geisha are still based there — the youngest trained in Kyoto’s Miyagawacho district before returning home to Obama, where her mother also works as a geisha at the same house.
Visitors can arrange a room and request a dance, but it must be booked in advance; turning up on the day is not usually possible. Harima also serves lunch.
A geisha is a professional entertainer trained in traditional dance, music and conversation — not, as is sometimes assumed abroad, anything else. Booking a private room with a performance is normally arranged through the establishment well ahead of time, and in a town this small, advance contact is essential.
The Temple Quarter and the 800-Year-Old Nun
The third element is the temple quarter, a cluster of temples along the foot of the hills on the southern edge of the district. Among them is Kuin-ji, family temple of the Sakai clan who ruled the Obama domain — and home to one of Japan’s stranger legends.
Kuin-ji is a Soto Zen temple at the foot of Otokoyama, and the graves of successive lords of the domain stand in its grounds. What draws visitors, though, is the cave in one corner: the Yaobikuni Nyujodo, where a nun said to have lived for 800 years is believed to have sealed herself away.
The temple keeps an old hanging scroll depicting the tale, which goes roughly like this. A wealthy man of Obama is invited to a banquet at a mansion that recalls the undersea palace of legend. On his way to the washroom he glances into the kitchen and sees something being prepared that looks like a mermaid. He declines the meat at the table — but is given some to take home. His 16-year-old daughter eats it, not knowing what it is. She stops ageing. She outlives her husband, her children, her grandchildren. At 120, with nowhere left to belong, she takes holy orders, wanders the provinces, and finally comes home to Wakasa.
The cave is where she is said to have entered her final meditation. As for what the “mermaid” actually was, theories vary — a Japanese sea lion from the Oki Islands, or a dugong from Okinawa whose story travelled north. Either way, it is a tale that could only have grown in a town where people and goods arrived by sea.
For this article we were allowed inside. The floor is wet and slippery, and the steps are unimproved. The chamber is small — roughly 2m high, 1.5m wide and 5m deep — but the air inside is startlingly cold. It began as a sea cave carved by waves, and the damp on the rock is moisture seeping from the stone itself. On a midsummer walk through town, it was easily the coolest place we found.
Kuin-ji (Soto Zen)
Address: 2 Obama Otokoyama, Obama City, Fukui Prefecture
Admission: ¥400 (yen)
Access: about 10 minutes on foot from JR Obama Station
Tel: 0770-52-1936 (please enquire about viewing hours)
Along the coast there is also Mermaid Terrace, where a statue inspired by the same legend looks out over the Sea of Japan — a fine place to watch the sun go down.
Reading the Streets: A Town That Fought Fire
Here is a way of walking that turns a pleasant old street into something far more interesting: look for the traces of the town’s long fight against fire.
Old as the district looks, most of the houses standing today went up after the great fire of 1888. In a dense timber town, fire could take everything — so the machiya of Obama are full of defences against it.
Look for the well marks. On the outside of many houses you will see a mark shaped like the character 井 (i, meaning “well”).
A house bearing that mark has a well. Where a number appears alongside it, that is how many wells the house has — “2” meaning two of them.
Why advertise it? So that when fire broke out, anyone could see at a glance which houses had water. With the whole neighbourhood turning out to fight the flames, those marks told people where to run with a bucket. Some houses carry a 水 (mizu, “water”) mark for the same reason. Start spotting them, and a row of old houses becomes a record of people who lived with fire at their shoulder.
Fire Walls and Wave-Patterned Roof Tiles
The buildings themselves were built to fight fire too. Look for the sode-udatsu — a wall projecting out at the boundary between neighbouring houses. It is a firebreak, there to stop flames jumping from the house next door.
Look up, and the roofs are laid with Wakasa tiles — distinctively coloured tiles bedded in earth. Made around Obama, they travelled widely on the Kitamaebune ships, and houses roofed with Wakasa tiles can still be found as far away as Otaru in Hokkaido.
Some roof ornaments carry a wave motif, another charm against fire: the power of water guarding the house from flame.
Nobody fires Wakasa tiles any more. The last craftsman closed his workshop in 2010, and production ended with him. Only the beehive kiln remains, looked after by a local non-profit. The tiles overhead are, in that sense, a record of a craft that has already gone.
Why a Kyoto Custom — and a Kansai Accent — Turn Up in Fukui
Walk the lanes and you will notice small cloth figures hanging under the eaves, brightly coloured, their arms and legs bound. These are kukurizaru, “bound monkeys”.
They belong to the Koshin folk faith, and are best known from Yasaka Koshindo temple in Kyoto, where they hang in their hundreds. The belief runs that three worms living inside the body slip out on the night of Koshin while you sleep, and report your misdeeds to the gods — so people would gather at someone’s house and stay awake all night to prevent it. The bound monkey represents desire held in check, and is said to take on misfortune in the household’s place. In Obama, most of them are handmade by local residents.
So why is a Kyoto custom alive in Fukui? Because Obama has been tied to Kyoto for centuries. Culturally the town looks south to Kyoto and Nara, and the local speech is essentially Kansai dialect — the accent of Osaka and Kyoto, not of northern Fukui, which sits in a different cultural orbit closer to Ishikawa.
When a 2026 Fuji TV drama set in Obama went to air, some viewers reportedly wondered why characters in a Fukui story were speaking Kansai dialect. The drama had it right.
Japan’s regional accents differ far more than most visitors expect. Kansai dialect — spoken around Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe — has its own intonation, vocabulary and rhythm, and is instantly recognisable to Japanese ears. Hearing it in a Fukui port town is a genuine surprise, and it tells you which way this town has always faced.
Coffee and Warabi Mochi in a 100-Year-Old Townhouse
39 Shokudo (pronounced “san-kyu”, a play on the numbers 3 and 9) is a cafe and restaurant set in a converted machiya of the kind that fills Nishigumi.
The building is actually two neighbouring machiya frontages knocked into one. Step inside and the entrance opens into a void reaching up to the second floor.
True to the “eel bed” plan, the room runs a long way back, tables receding into the depth of the building, with a raised tatami area on the left — and beyond that, a glimpse of open air.
Past the tatami room is a tsuboniwa, a small courtyard garden set within the building. It was once shared by the two households under this roof; now it gives diners a patch of greenery in the middle of the town.
Lunch runs to hamburg steak and curry. We came in the afternoon and ordered from the cafe menu: house-made grilled warabi mochi with tea, ¥780 (yen) at the time of our visit.
The mochi comes grilled, in three flavours — roasted soybean flour, matcha and sesame — soft but with a satisfying chew.
Warabi mochi is a jelly-like sweet made from bracken starch, usually served cold and dusted with roasted soybean flour. Grilling it, as here, is less common — it firms up the outside while the centre stays soft.
39 Shokudo
Address: 27-1 Obama Asama, Obama City, Fukui Prefecture (Nishigumi district)
Open: 11:00–17:00 (last orders 16:30)
Closed: Mondays and Tuesdays
Obama rewards slow walking. The devices against fire, the Kyoto customs carried north over the mountains, the cave with its impossible legend — the longer you stay, the deeper the town goes. It is easy to reach from Kyoto or Tsuruga, and it makes an excellent short trip.
In the next article, we visit an aquarium run by university students inside a townhouse, and dig into the food culture that made Obama famous.
(*Locator map: Tetsudo Channel, using the National Land Numerical Information (Administrative Zones N03-2024; Railway Data N02-25; Road Data N06-2023; Lake Data W09-05), MLIT Japan.)
Originl source (Japanese) : https://tetsudo-ch.com/13033162.html
Story and photos by Keigo Kamada (Travel Writer)
Tetsudo Channel (Railway Channel) — Japan Travel & Weekend Outings