How this started

Maple Grove Line came out of a conversation in a van somewhere between Matsumoto and Hakuba in the autumn of 2024. Kenji Mori had been booking small club shows in Nagano city for about three years, mostly post-punk and noise acts that didn't have many places to play outside Tokyo. The idea was simple: take that same bill, move it outside, move it up. The Hakuba Mountain Grounds had been sitting mostly unused outside ski season, and the owner was open to the idea of a summer event.

The first real planning meeting happened in January 2025 in a rented room above a ramen shop in Hakuba village. There were four people at that table. By March, the lineup was mostly locked. By May, the Early Bird lottery had filled up faster than expected, which was either a good sign or a sign that the capacity was too small. Probably both. The decision to keep the site capped at its current size was deliberate. A bigger crowd would mean a bigger production, which would mean a different kind of festival. That's not what this is.

Maple Grove Line is one stage, one valley, twelve acts who agreed to come up the mountain. The bill runs from noon to around 10 p.m. Each day, with a long gap in the middle for food and the view. Kenji books every act personally. There's no booking agency involved. Most of the artists on the 2026 bill are people he's worked with before, or people he's been watching for a while and finally had the right context to ask. The festival doesn't have a genre. It has a feeling.

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One stage, no schedule conflicts, ever. Capacity capped at the site's natural limit, not a round number. Every act booked directly by Kenji, no agency middlemen. Campsite sits inside the grounds, not in a field down the road. Hakuba valley in August runs about 10 degrees cooler than Tokyo. No corporate sponsorship banners on the main stage. The gap between afternoon and evening sets is intentional. Go look at the mountains.