Takayama

The sake breweries announce themselves with cedar balls. Sugidama — spheres of fresh cedar boughs — hang above doorways in Takayama's Sanmachi district, turning brown as the sake inside matures. This castle town in Japan's Gifu Prefecture hid behind mountains high enough to keep it half-isolated for centuries, and grew a craft and food culture dense enough to rival cities ten times its size.

Takayama's two morning markets, at Jinya-mae and along the Miyagawa River, have traded since the Edo period. Sanmachi keeps its streets of dark-latticed merchant houses, sake breweries and miso shops as a protected district, and the Takayama Jinya, the old provincial government house, still stands at the end of them. Hida beef, raised in the surrounding mountains, is graded alongside Japan's most famous cattle — served as sushi on rice, grilled on a magnolia leaf, or skewered at a market stall. Twice a year, each spring and autumn, the Takayama Festival parades tall lacquered floats with mechanical puppets through the streets, in what is counted among Japan's three finest festivals; between festivals the floats rest in the Yatai Kaikan exhibition hall.