The walk begins about five minutes from the train. Takao is 599 metres high, an hour west of central Tokyo by train, and a cable car and a chairlift carry you from the foot of the mountain to its middle slopes. The paths above are well trodden. This is a mountain you can climb in street shoes, and in November a great many people do exactly that.

Peak colour runs from the middle of November into the first days of December, the busiest weeks of the year here. The crowd is part of the season rather than a fault in it, though a weekday morning gives you the same maples with more room around them. Go early. The light comes up the valley from the east, and the lower slopes hold their colour long after the summit has turned.

The colour does not arrive everywhere at once. It works upward: the square in front of Kiyotaki station, the cable car line, the terrace at Konpiradai, the precincts of Yakuoin temple, the pagoda, the summit, and then Momijidai a little beyond it, where the maples that give the place its name come last of all. Three visits a fortnight apart would show you three different mountains.

At the bottom, eat tororo soba. A dozen teahouses along the approach serve buckwheat noodles under grated yam, each with its own broth, most of them for longer than the cable car has run. Some people come down remembering the name of the noodle shop rather than the name of the mountain. That is not the worst way to spend a day.