Shiroi, Chiba

Pear orchards line the roads between housing blocks in Shiroi — a quiet collision of planned suburb and working farmland. The Hokuso Line brought the first residents of Chiba New Town here in the late 1970s, and the city grew steadily outward from its two stations, yet the agricultural calendar never quite yielded. The fruit known as *shiro i no nashi* has been grown here since the Meiji era, and in late summer the orchards are simply part of the landscape, neither attraction nor backdrop.

Older layers surface if you look. The Takita Family Residence stands as a thatched-roof farmhouse from the Edo period, preserved as a nationally designated Important Cultural Property. Enmei-ji temple, founded in the early eleventh century, holds prefecturally designated cultural assets within its grounds. The Kigi Street — the old Kino-shita Kaidō — once threaded through what is now suburban grid, and its trace is still readable in the way certain roads bend unexpectedly.

The Shiroi Abacus Museum is an unusual presence for a city this size — a collection dedicated entirely to the history and culture of the soroban. At the Oridate Iris Garden, the *shōbu matsuri* marks the season with the kind of local attendance that has nothing to do with tourism. The city also hosts the Japan Racing Association's Jockey School, lending the flatlands of the Shimōsa Plateau an institutional quietness that is hard to place at first.