Nakano-Tei 中野邸 - Maybe the best place to visit in autumn 👹🍣🎎 Wonderful Japan

Spring, summer, autumn and winter - in Japan, all four seasons have their irresistible charm and can boast their very own highlights. The most beguiling season is probably the short and therefore also so intense time of the cherry blossom. Sakura and Hanami are magical words for most Japanese, which perfectly describe this so colorful time. But autumn too is a very bright season and during these days many Japanese people are drawn out to the parks and gardens to admire a spectacle called Kouyou 紅葉. During these days, large parts of the island kingdom show their bright and colorful side. As the many trees and bushes change color, the forests turn into rushing seas of red and yellow, drawing many visitors out of the city and into nature.

You can admire this great spectacle in the forests, but also in many parks and gardens, and it is accompanied by ever shorter days and a slowly weakening sun. We wanted to have a close look at the autumn colors this year as well, so we headed for a garden that we had already passed countless times before. However, this time we wanted to stop and take some time to have a good look around.

Our destination was Nakano-tei 中野邸, a former country estate that is now open to visitors year-round. About 100 years ago, oil deposits were discovered in the area around Nakano-tei, which had made its discoverer and owner, Nakano Kanichi, a very wealthy and influential man. The Nakano family had then built a vast estate in the mountains of the Akiha district, around which were innumerable drilling towers and many buildings for processing the oil production. In the second half of the last century, oil production in this area finally came to a complete halt and the site was subsequently transformed into a public park with a museum.

We had already discovered and visited the museum for ourselves this year, and this time our destination was the former home of the Nakano family and the adjacent extensive garden, which can probably rather be described as a park. For our first visit, we have picked this time of year, in the hope that we will come just right to admire a little of the Kouyou spectacle here.

The weather that day was almost perfect for November. Temperatures of around 20 degrees and a blue and bright sky promised a good time outside in nature. And since we also got a little lesson in local history that day, our trip was additionally quite educational.

But what am I talking so much about, let's just walk and look around. Please come with me and have a look over my shoulder. Let us enjoy a little bit of the beauty, which these days can be found outside of the city. I invite you to come along...

Some parts of the former residential house and also some storage buildings can still be visited today and house a small local museum, which gives an insight into the living conditions of a Japanese country estate in the first half of the 20th century. The Nakano family which was living here built a quite spacious estate, and you can still get an idea of how busy it was there some centuries ago.

Especially the garden is huge and stretches quite up into the hills and forest. We had timed our visit quite well as the autumn foliage, called Kouyou 紅葉 in Japanese, was adding a wonderful touch of colors to this old estate and showing this place from its best side. There was so much red to find between the many still lush green of the garden.

On this day, the sun, which is quite low at this time of year, easily managed to make the trees glow. Everywhere the trees were shining in various shades of red and orange and sometimes you didn't know where to take pictures of.

During a tour of the mansion, we could also catch a few glimpses of the inner gardens, which were often a bit more playful and intimate. Framed by walls and fences, these inner courtyards are a true peaceful retreat from the daily stress, which already in earlier times people could not escape even here in this area. The oil business was truly not a quiet job, and it is hard to imagine today what was happening here a hundred years ago.

Who would not like to hide away here and forget about the time for a little while. Just sit down a little and listen to nature. Maybe besides the birds and insects, you can even hear the leaves falling.

The round through the garden became more and more colorful the longer we walked and looked around. From the street you could already imagine the beauty in here, but you could only really understand it when you were right in the middle of it.

Even though red was the dominating color, there was also some yellow which stood up quite well. The Gingko trees always make a great impression and manage to make themselves the center of all the action. Inside the Nakano mansion too, the tree on the right side was just next to a cosy rest place and became a quite popular photo place.

With a little imagination, you could easily transfer the old mansion into the world of the samurai and picture completely different scenes here. But at the time of the local oil boom, the time of the samurai was over for some decades and Japan had already started on its way to industrialization. But standing here in front of one of the entrances to the main building, you could almost forget how it looks nowadays in other parts of the country. Here, time seems to stand almost still and you don't want to change that at all.

During our tour through the garden, we often did not know where to look. There were picturesque scenes just everywhere, highlighted in particular by the various stylistic elements of Japanese garden architecture. The glowing background is perfectly dominated by this moss-covered toro, which skilfully ignores the signs of time and seems to be enthroned in this place forever.

And the end of our round let us take a break and sit down. Let us pause and take in the scene in front of us while inhaling all the energy which derives from that place and time. This is the perfect place to hold on for a moment and let your thought and mind wander, and to capture some more of the stunning beauty in front of you.

Sometimes it doesn't need much to feel at the right place, your heart will quickly tell you. Of course I didn't want to leave that place at all, but in the end there are always things that draw us further. But being able to walk that round and enjoy such wonderful views helped me to revive myself and recharge my batteries. And now while writing this article and looking at those colorful photos again I really appreciate that I am allowed to enjoy and explore so many wonderful things around me.

I hope all you will find such powerful places which then help you to rest and fill up with fresh and new ideas and thoughts. Our world can be such an incredible planet, and there is some beauty and splendor to discover everywhere. So let's go out to find some more and then let's share it with the people around you.