or many of us, Japan has come to mean crowded trains, high-tech gadgets, efficient systems, cool reserve; a neon blur, in the imagination, of pencil-thin high-rises in which traders in dark suits mutter into cell phones. Or, if not the hard realism of Tokyo's office blocks, then the gossamer romance of Kyoto's teahouses, all exquisite restraint and antique silence. In either case, the coming Olympic Winter Games are going to explode many a stereotype, if only because Nagano, their center, and the village venues all around offer a down-home, uncrowded, friendly Japan where some of the hard hats along Kencho-dori (or Prefectural Office Street) are women wearing lipstick. The "Games from the Heart" the organizers promise will be Games from the Heartland of a slow-paced, half-forgotten countryside that could be called Japan's New England.

To many Americans who have never set foot in Japan before, Nagano may look at first like Atlanta with jet lag-an "industrial and technology-intensive city," as its brochures boast, larger than Newark, N.J., and lined, along its broad boulevards, with a cacophony of gas stations (called Apple), coffee shops (called Apple Grimm) and supermarkets (called Apple Land). There are seven Kentucky Fried Chicken parlors in Nagano, its literature attests, two Mister Donuts and a Denny's.

But to Japanese city dwellers, used to even snazzier Vuitton-and-Panasonic pleasures, Nagano has the charm of the big city's drawling country cousin, an apple-cheeked, wood-burning relative still known to eat raw horsemeat and pond snails and crickets. In a chestnut-filled village just 30 minutes from central Nagano, a ruddy-faced high school boy gets off his bike to walk a visitor to his destination. An old woman at a country bus station counts out change with an abacus. The driver of a Highland Express cab (working 24-hour shifts) is a robust woman with a basket of huge apples by her side. Nagano is a world of deep, ancestral sounds: the traditional melody of a potato seller, audible downtown; the mournful strains of an enka ballad (often known as Japanese country-and-western) in a tiny noodle shop; the martial tunes that reverberate around the old battlefield at Kawanakajima.

Though only 200 km northwest of Tokyo, Nagano has long been the provincial capital farthest in time from the center of Japan, since, unlike the cities on the outlying islands of Hokkaido and Okinawa, it has never had an airport. Even during the Games, the nearest airport to the Olympic Village will be a modest, two-story box appointed with exactly four check-in counters and one baggage carousel, 75 minutes away by (very occasional) bus. As your plane takes off from Matsumoto, the technicians all line up on the tarmac to wave you goodbye.

Throughout its history, Nagano's renown has been as a temple town, home to one of the country's most ecumenical Buddhist centers, Zenkoji, a 40-structure complex set against the mountains. To this day, the cypress-roofed temple is the city's center of gravity, marked on all the highway signs. Zenkoji announces itself with the shock of pounding drums, the smell of burning incense, the flutter of white-paper prayers. Somewhere inside its main hall is what is said to be the first Buddha ever to arrive in Japan (in A.D. 552), so precious that only a replica of it is displayed once every seven years. At dawn the grave walls shake with the sound of gongs and bells and clappers, and priests in green robes, or huddled all in black, gather around a brazier, drinking tea. A high priest in orange robes, followed by an attendant carrying a red umbrella, delivers blessings on the heads of rows of crouching petitioners. Underneath the main hall is the temple's most charged metaphorical space, an underground passageway, black as the womb, in which the visitor, sightless, is invited to fumble through the cold and dark in search of a "Key to Paradise."