The Real Stories Behind Japan and Switzerland’s Sister Cities

In December 2024, I wrote a blog post called Cultural Ties Between Japan and Switzerland’s Sister Cities.

I had become curious about how sister-city relationships are formed and which places in Japan had such relationships with places in Switzerland.

I listed four:

Nagasaki and Basel.
Yamanashi and Valais.
Shizuoka and Ticino.
Sapporo and Davos.

Recently, while going through some of my older writing, I decided to check those relationships again.

There was a problem.

None of the four relationships I listed was correct.

I could have simply corrected the old post. But I prefer to leave it as it is. It records what I believed when I wrote it.

Being wrong also gave me a much better question.

If those weren’t the sister relationships between Japan and Switzerland, which places actually were connected?

And why?

The real list looked very different

Japan’s Council of Local Authorities for International Relations, or CLAIR, currently lists 13 formal sister-city relationships between Japanese and Swiss local governments.

Among them are:

Kutchan and St. Moritz.
Matsumoto and Grindelwald.
Ueda and Davos.
Otsu and Interlaken.
Myoko and Zermatt.
Fujikawaguchiko and Zermatt.
Nanto and Arosa.
Shimada and Brienz.
Chiba and Montreux.
Shinagawa and Geneva.

Looking at the correct list, something immediately caught my attention.

St. Moritz. Grindelwald. Davos. Zermatt. Arosa. Interlaken. Brienz.

A surprising number are Swiss places known for mountains, skiing and Alpine tourism.

Japan certainly isn’t short of mountains.

So why were so many Japanese places forming relationships with famous Swiss mountain towns?

The individual stories turned out to be much more interesting than the list.

The St. Moritz of the East

The first sister-city relationship between a Japanese and Swiss municipality was established in 1964 between Kutchan in Hokkaido and St. Moritz.

Kutchan is part of the area now internationally known for Niseko and its skiing.

Even before the formal relationship, the area was being described as the “St. Moritz of the East.”

In 1964, Kutchan’s mayor visited St. Moritz. That visit led to the two places establishing their sister-city relationship later that year.

The connection wasn’t difficult to understand.

Both places had mountains, snow and growing identities as winter-sports destinations.

But what surprised me was how long the relationship survived.

In 2024—the same year I wrote my incorrect post—Kutchan and St. Moritz celebrated 60 years as sister cities. Their relationship has included visits and youth exchanges across generations.

A comparison between two ski destinations had become a relationship lasting more than half a century.

And Kutchan wasn’t the only Japanese place looking toward the Swiss Alps.

Japanese mountaineers had already found Grindelwald

The connection between Matsumoto and Grindelwald goes much further back than their formal sister relationship.

Grindelwald originally became the sister city of Azumi Village in 1972. Azumi later became part of Matsumoto, which continued the relationship.

But Japanese connections with Grindelwald had begun decades earlier.

Japanese mountaineers were visiting the area in the early twentieth century.

In 1921, Japanese mountaineer Yūkō Maki, together with Swiss mountain guides, completed the first ascent of the Mittellegi Ridge of the Eiger.

Grindelwald reportedly celebrated the achievement with fireworks.

Other Japanese mountaineers followed.

By the time Azumi and Grindelwald formally became sister communities in 1972, there was already a history between Japanese climbers and the Swiss village.

The agreement didn’t create the connection from nothing.

It formalized something people had already begun.

Japan had its own Davos before it had a sister city called Davos

My old post paired Sapporo with Davos.

That was wrong.

The Japanese relationship with Davos belongs to Ueda in Nagano Prefecture. Ueda inherited it from the former town of Sanada.

And this story goes back surprisingly far.

Sugadaira Kogen began developing as a ski area in the 1920s. In 1928, its natural environment was compared with Davos and it began to be called “Japan Davos.”

That was almost fifty years before a formal sister-city relationship existed.

Then in 1976, marking the 50th anniversary of the development of the Sugadaira ski area, Sanada and Davos officially became sister cities.

They even exchanged one square metre of land with each other.

Today, Sugadaira still has a place called Davos Hill.

The name wasn’t invented after the sister-city agreement.

The imagined connection came first.

The official relationship followed decades later.

Sometimes it begins with tea

Not every relationship started with mountaineering or skiing.

The story of Otsu and Interlaken is much quieter.

In August 1976, a tea gathering was held in Interlaken.

That gathering led to exchanges between residents of the two places.

As those contacts developed, people also noticed similarities between the two cities. Both were associated with lakes, mountains and tourism.

Two years later, in 1978, Otsu and Interlaken formally became sister cities.

I like this example because it changes the neat explanation I gave in my original post.

I had described sister-city formation almost like a procedure: identify similarities, establish contact, study the possibilities and eventually sign an agreement.

Sometimes that may happen.

But Otsu and Interlaken suggest something much more natural.

People met first.

The reasons for connecting the places became clearer afterward.

And then there is the missing bell

My favorite story has almost nothing to do with mountains.

Shinagawa in Tokyo has a friendship relationship with Geneva because of a missing temple bell.

A large Buddhist bell from Honsenji Temple in Shinagawa was taken to Europe for international exhibitions in the nineteenth century.

Somewhere along the way, it disappeared.

Decades passed.

Then, in 1919, the bell was discovered in Geneva, where it had ended up at the Ariana Museum.

Efforts were eventually made to return it.

Geneva’s city council agreed, and in 1930 the bell finally came home to Honsenji Temple.

But the story didn’t end there.

Connections between Shinagawa and Geneva continued. Swiss athletes visited the temple during the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Decades later, a new bell was made in Japan and presented to Geneva.

In 1991, Shinagawa and Geneva signed a friendship charter.

A relationship between two places on opposite sides of the world had grown from the strange journey of a Buddhist bell.

I certainly wouldn’t have predicted that by comparing the characteristics of the two cities.

What is a sister city anyway?

This investigation also made me realize that I had been treating all international relationships between local governments as though they were the same.

They aren’t.

Japan doesn’t have a single legal definition of a sister city.

CLAIR uses several criteria to decide which relationships it counts as sister or friendship relationships. There should be a written agreement between the local governments, and their exchanges shouldn’t be limited to only one particular field.

That distinction brought me back to Basel.

Basel was the reason one of the incorrect relationships in my old post had particularly interested me. I was born and raised there, so discovering that Basel supposedly had a sister relationship with Nagasaki immediately caught my attention.

It doesn’t.

But Basel does have a Japanese partnership.

Just not with Nagasaki.

Basel led me to Toyama

Since 2009, the Canton of Basel-Stadt has had a partnership with Toyama Prefecture.

But Basel’s relationship with Toyama is different.

It focuses mainly on pharmaceutical sciences.

That makes sense for Basel, with its long history in the pharmaceutical industry.

The partnership also supports cooperation between the University of Basel and universities in Toyama.

So there really was a Japan–Basel connection hiding behind my old mistake.

I had simply connected Basel to the wrong Japanese place.

And something similar happened with Nagasaki.

My instinct about Nagasaki wasn’t completely wrong

In my original post, I wrote that I was surprised to find Nagasaki supposedly connected with Basel because I had expected Nagasaki to have a relationship with a Dutch city.

That part of my thinking turned out to be much closer to reality.

Nagasaki has been a sister city of Leiden in the Netherlands since 2017.

The connection has deep historical roots.

During Japan’s period of restricted foreign contact, the Dutch trading post at Dejima in Nagasaki became one of Japan’s most important windows to European knowledge.

In the nineteenth century, the German physician Philipp Franz von Siebold worked at Dejima in Dutch service. After leaving Japan, he continued studying Japan in Leiden, where collections associated with him remain today.

Those historical connections eventually grew into modern exchanges between Nagasaki and Leiden.

Museums and universities became involved. The two cities also worked together around the restoration of Dejima.

Nagasaki and Leiden first established a citizen-friendship relationship in 2013. As those exchanges developed, Leiden proposed a formal sister-city relationship.

They signed it in 2017.

So the connection I had expected really did exist.

I just hadn’t found it.