Ainan, Ehime

The road into Ainan follows the contours of a coastline that keeps folding back on itself — inlets cutting into hillsides, fishing nets drying on concrete walls, the sea appearing and disappearing as the bus from Uwajima winds south along National Route 56. The rias here are not gentle; the mountains drop almost directly into the water, and the towns that sit between them feel compressed, purposeful, built around what the sea gives.

What the sea gives is considerable. Oysters from the bays around Mishō — known locally as Ainan kaki — are raised in water shaped by those same folded inlets. Pearl cultivation runs alongside them, the rafts visible from the road. Further out, fishermen work for katsuo at the deep-water port of Fukaura. Inland, on the terraced slopes that catch the southern light, growers tend Biseiikan — the pale, thick-skinned citrus sold under the name Ainan Gold — alongside amanatsu and Kawachi Bankan. At the roadside station Mishō MIC on Route 56, these things sit together on shelves without ceremony: the oysters, the fruit, a bag of dried seafood, a jar of something local.

Kannonji, the fortieth temple of the Shikoku pilgrimage, stands in the town and draws walking henro through on a route that Kūkai is said to have established. The Shiden-kai Exhibition Hall holds a recovered naval fighter aircraft from the Pacific War — the only one of its kind on public display in Japan. These two facts coexist without contradiction in a town that has simply accumulated its own history, layer by layer, between the mountains of Sasayama and the open water of Sukumo Bay.