Half day — the round trip from the gangway, with the 60-minute margin kept aside.
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A thousand-year pagoda alone in a cedar forest, up 2,446 stone steps — one of Japan’s great sights, and honest only as a ship excursion or hired car from this port.
Haguro is one of the three sacred mountains of Dewa, a centre of Shugendo mountain asceticism for over a thousand years. Its five-storey pagoda, rebuilt around 1372, stands alone in a cedar forest at the foot of 2,446 stone steps, with no other building near it. It is a National Treasure.
Each of these still lands you back aboard with the hour to spare.
See · ~1hTwelve rice storehouses from 1893 under a double row of zelkova trees — the image of Kitamaebune merchant Sakata, and still the town’s best photograph.
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Do · ~1.5hA restored Edo-era restaurant where maiko still dance every afternoon at two — the rare place outside Kyoto to see it, at a fraction of Kyoto’s price.
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Eat · ~45minFishermen’s seafood bowls inside the working harbor market — open from seven in the morning, which suits a cruise clock perfectly..
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