The young man at the ticket gate thanked us politely as we stepped off the platform and through the wicket. The ride from Ikebukuro in Tokyo had been short, and somewhere between Tokorozawa and Seibu-Chichibu in Saitama Prefecture the concrete-gray city landscape had given way to brilliant shades of green. Outside the station, the police box resembled a log cabin, and there wasn't a convenience store in sight.

We were definitely not in Tokyo anymore.

I'd only recently heard of Chichibu, the sleepy little town in western Saitama, but everyone else seemed to know it well. The people I talked to had not only been there, but had returned on numerous occasions. Still, no one could pinpoint what made the place so enchanting. Determined to uncover the small city's mysterious allure, I convinced a band of my city-slicker friends to join me for an afternoon of hiking.