History
Gifu splits neatly into two regions that don’t always feel like the same prefecture: mountainous Hida in the north, home to Shirakawa-go’s snow- country villages and the old town of Takayama, and flatter Mino in the south, historically the seat of real political power and today closely tied to nearby Nagoya’s economy.
Gifu and the wider world
That political power ran through Gifu City itself. In 1567, the warlord Oda Nobunaga — one of the three men credited with unifying Japan out of over a century of civil war — captured the castle town then called Inokuchi, renamed it Gifu, and ruled from its hilltop castle as he began the military campaigns that would eventually put most of Japan under central authority for the first time in generations. Nobunaga was also unusually receptive, by the standards of his era, to the Portuguese Jesuit missionaries and traders then arriving in Japan, welcoming their presence and adopting European firearms technology that reshaped how Japanese warfare was fought going forward — an early, consequential point of contact between a powerful Japanese ruler and the West.
Neighbors: Gifu and the rest of Chubu
Gifu’s internal Hida/Mino split extends outward into its regional relationships: mountainous Hida shares more culturally with neighboring Toyama and the Japan Alps prefectures, while Mino’s economy runs largely on its proximity to Aichi and the industrial Nagoya region just south of it.
Getting there and getting around
Gifu-Hashima Station is a Tokaido Shinkansen stop, and Nagoya (a 20-minute train ride away) is the more common gateway for most visitors. Takayama and Shirakawa-go are reached by highway bus from either Takayama Station or Nagoya, as neither is directly served by rail.
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