100 Night Views of Japan: Ubasute Night View Tour

The beauty of the night view of Zenkoji Plain has been well known among local residents and those using the Nagano Expressway. When the night view from Ubasute Service Area (rest area) on Nagano Expressway’ (near Ubasute Station) was selected as one of 100 Night Views of Japan in 2004, it began gaining attention as a tourist attraction. The volunteers from the neighboring “Togura Kamiyamada Onsen” created tour products to offer the view to the guests staying overnight in the Onsen area.
During the day, the view from the train windows on the JR Shinonoi Line is famous as one of “Japan’s Three Best Views from a Train Window”. There is also a landscape that has been selected as one of the Top 100 Terraced Rice Fields of Japan, called the “Terraced Rice Fields of Ubasute”, so it’s a great place to enjoy the splendid scenery by day or by night.
This landscape is also said to be a landscape with a history: in old times, it was a land that people longed to visit to admire the moon, and has been known as “Sarashina no Chi” since the Heian period. It is also the first landscape that travelers making a pilgrimage to Zenkoji Temple would see when they got through the pass.