History
Tochigi’s identity runs through two very different small towns: Nikko, a shrine town built around the mausoleum of the man who founded the Edo shogunate, and Mashiko, a pottery town whose quiet 20th-century collaborations helped reshape ceramics on the other side of the world.
Tochigi and the wider world
In the early 1920s, the English potter Bernard Leach moved to Japan and worked closely with Shoji Hamada, a young Japanese potter from Mashiko, before the two traveled together to set up Leach’s pottery studio in Cornwall, England. That collaboration — and Hamada’s subsequent decades of work in Mashiko, where he became a government-designated Living National Treasure — is widely credited with introducing Japanese folk pottery aesthetics (mingei) to Western studio ceramics, an influence still visible in “wood-fired,” “wabi-sabi”-inflected pottery made across Europe and North America today.
Nikko had its own, earlier brush with Western attention: the British travel writer Isabella Bird visited in 1878 during her journey through rural Japan, and her book “Unbeaten Tracks in Japan” gave English-language readers one of their first detailed accounts of Nikko Toshogu’s carved buildings — including, most famously, the “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” three monkeys carved into the shrine’s stables, an image that would go on to become one of the most reproduced pieces of Japanese iconography anywhere in the world.
Neighbors: Tochigi and the rest of Kita-Kanto
Tochigi, Ibaraki, and Gunma are often grouped together informally as “Kita-Kanto” (North Kanto) — Tokyo’s less-famous northern neighbors, sharing a similar rural-commuter-belt identity and, often, similarly low rankings in Japan’s national prefectural “attractiveness” surveys, which locals across all three tend to shrug off with matching irony.
Getting there and getting around
Utsunomiya is a Tohoku Shinkansen stop, about 50 minutes from Tokyo; Nikko is reached from Utsunomiya by a further local or limited express train, or directly from Tokyo via the Tobu Nikko Line.
