RotW is my Railways of the Warrior project. Visiting all the Japanese train stations with Fuji in the name & the 12 castles with the original keep still standing wasn’t enough to satisfy my love of lists, so now I’m working through all the stations with Musashi in their name.

Click this link for more info.

Name in kanji : 武州中川
Kanji meaning: middle river
Station opened : 15th March 1930
Trainlines: Chichibu Main Line
# Passengers daily : 463
Distance from CityHillsAndSea HQ: 142km
Located in: Arakawa, Chichibu, Saitama Prefecture

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Things to Do

Senjukannondo – a pretty unusual temple with a dohyo (a sumo ring) at the front entrance & paintings of sumo figures adorning the exterior. There’s an annual sumo wrestling festival there too.

Wakamiko Shrine – a cool little shrine that has wolves instead of dogs for komainu. (This isn’t all that unusual in Chichibu, just everywhere else in Japan.)

Wakamiko Fault – a little gap in the mountain side where you can see right down into the centre of the earth. (Umm, kinda.)

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All About Bushu Nakagawa Station

Bushu-Nakagawa is the station before Bushu-Hino on the Chichibu line to Mitsumineguchi. My original plan had been to walk from there to here, but the weather was damp and miserable, I had a train pass and, for once, I was at the station mere moments before a train showed up.

It’s pretty hard to find any information about Bushu-Nakagawa in English on the internet, which is a shame. Although it’s a sleepy little place there are a couple of standout points that might make it worth a trip if you were in the area.

First up, and closest to the station, is the Senjukannondo, a temple with a sumo wrestling ring at the front entrance. This is used for a festival every year, although I’m honestly unclear on the whys and wherefores of the connection between this area and sumo.

The temple is also decorated with a great number of paintings of sumos in the throes of… well, throwing one another. I suppose.

The temple is named for the kannon statue within, but as it’s not always on display, you’ll just have to imagine what it looks like. (She’s usually a friendly lady in a head dress with a beatific smile, so start with that.)

Down the road from Senjukannondo a little bit is our next stop, Wakamiko shrine. The shrine is tucked away at the bottom of a hill, nestling at the edge of a forest. On a wet grey morning, with the mist swirling at the mountain peak and very few visitors, it was like a trip to another world.

As you can see from the picture above, there is something a little different about this shrine. The guardians either side of the torii above aren’t the usual dogs or foxes. They’re wolves. This isn’t uncommon in Chichibu, but it’s the only region in Japan that has them, as far as I’m aware.

You can probably make out the little turn up and to the left at the top of the stairs in the rear of that picture too. If you follow this route, it’ll take you up the hill a little, to our next interesting local attraction – the Wakamiko Fault.

A short walk uphill brings you to an unassuming cave with some information boards outside. You can peek inside to get a glimpse of where two points of a fault are rubbing together. (It’s not really all that easy to see: you’ll need a light of some description.)

After this little diversion, I wasn’t really sure what to do next. There was plenty of time left in the day, so I thought I might try walking up to the top of Wakamiko Mountain and then down to Urayama Dam on the other side.

Getting up was quite a slog, but the air was fresh and the few monkeys I saw didn’t attack, so that was good.

A lot of trails throughout Japan were thoroughly messed up by typhoon Hagibis / #19 in October 2019, and some of them have been repaired… some of them, well… haven’t. Turns out this undervisited little peak and its little park probably needed some repairs to the trails. The quick way down to Urayama Dam was blocked off.

The other way was open so I thought I’d just follow the trail a little and see where it took me… which was nowhere good, if we’re being honest.

I thought I had lost the trail at several points but then it turned out that I hadn’t, it was just so covered with debris that it might as well have not been a trail. I made it up to what I thought was the peak of the mountain to find a ruined shrine.

Eerie, sinister and beautiful all at once.

I’m not sure this was the peak of Wakamiko – I have a feeling that was the next slope I got about halfway up before I came to the conclusion that descent under my own terms was probably a better choice.

Sliding uncontrollably downhill through gravel, perhaps even cartwheeling out into space for a bit, before tumbling smack bang into some big rock at breakneck speed? I decided that all of that would be quite a silly end to my day out, particularly as I was all alone and nobody knew where I was.

I opted instead to make my way back down the trail, come down the other path and make it back to the station.

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Station Rating

Although it does get bonus points for a quirky sumo temple, monkeys, a peek into the centre of the earth & a spooky crushed shrine at the top of a mountain, there’s not really a whole lot happening in Bushu-Nakagawa. A fun diversion if you’re in the area but I wouldn’t trek out here just for the craic unless you’re on some kind of “bananas-checking-things-off-a-list” mission.

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Bushu Nakagawa Station Gallery

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