Oku Japan Walks Chichibu’s Wolf Country
Oku Japan's new four-day self-guided walk in Chichibu, about two hours from Tokyo, gives clients a rural shrine-and-forest add-on without a domestic flight.
Clients who want rural Japan but only have a Tokyo-based week now have a ready-made option. Oku Japan, the Kyoto-based tour operator, has launched Beyond Tōkyō: Wolves of Chichibu, a four-day self-guided walk in Saitama Prefecture that the company says starts a couple of hours north-west of the capital.
The route
According to Oku Japan, the walk links forest trails, countryside paths and quiet residential streets, with stretches that range from gentle to “more demanding ascents”. Highlights the company lists:
- The Three Shrines of Chichibu, reached on foot as Edo-period pilgrims did.
- Part of the 34-temple Chichibu Kannon Pilgrimage, dedicated to the bodhisattva of compassion.
- Mount Bukō, a peak long tied to local mountain worship.
- Hodosan Shrine, at the foot of Mount Hodo, which the company dates to the year 110.
- Chichibu’s Taishō-era streets from the early 20th century.
The thread is the Japanese wolf. The animal has been extinct for more than a century, but wolf statues still guard shrines and trails across the region, where the wolf is revered as a protector.
“This is the kind of experience we love to create – a journey that is accessible as an addition to a classic Tōkyō itinerary, but feels a world away from the city,” said Mariko Nishida, tour development specialist at Oku Japan.
The release does not give prices, departure windows or accommodation details.
Sources
- Press release from Oku Japan (via Bannikin), Beyond Tokyo: New Oku Japan Self-Guided Tour Follows the Trail of Chichibu's Legendary Wolves, Kyoto, 20 Oct 2026
- Oku Japan, Beyond Tōkyō: Wolves of Chichibu trip page
Alicia Loveday is Managing Editor at Not An Atlas, writing from Calgary, Alberta, amid a little creative chaos: a laptop, an iced coffee and about a hundred ideas she hasn't had time to bring to life yet. She became a mom young and spent her twenties raising two kids, so she was 30 before she saw the ocean for the first time, in Aruba. Gliding through that clear Caribbean water on a Seabob felt like freedom, and she's been making up for lost time ever since. She always takes the window seat (she waited 30 years for the view), never travels without the feather pillow she's had since childhood (they're a package deal), and sizes up a new place with a local cocktail and some serious people-watching. She covers fashion, culture, creativity and the people who shape the places we visit. Friends say creative, fearless and unapologetic. Her mum says stubborn, and she'd be right. Next stop: Japan.
