The next day, we drove higher still, to the Shinhotaka Ropeway, which climbs in two stages from the valley floor to a station at 2,156 metres—Japan’s only double-decker gondola, an engineering charm of the late twentieth century, still operating exactly as it ought. Through the windows, the Hotaka range opened out: Yari, Kasa, Nishi-Hotaka, peaks of three thousand metres draped in unbroken white, their snow-corniced ridges sharp against an immaculate blue. At the top, the network of walking trails was icy and unnavigable without crampons. That evening, slipping back into a hot spring for the third time in 12 hours, we warmed to the rhythms of Japan’s onsen country. You bathe before dinner. You bathe before bed. You bathe in the morning, before the light is fully up. After three days of this, your skin smells faintly of sulphur. To soak is to remember that you are made of water. To be heated, very slightly, beyond comfort, and then to return to coolness, is to undergo, in miniature, the entire human exercise of being alive. Travel of this kind does not deliver the obvious souvenirs, but one’s sense of a country begins to thicken. The roof and the heart of Japan, the inner provinces, the small towns kept warm by water from the earth, remind you that a country, like a person, is mostly what it does when no one is watching.