Matsuno, Ehime

The train slows at Matsumaru Station and the first thing you notice is the bathhouse — not beside the building but inside it, occupying the second floor of the station itself. Mori-no-Kuni Poppo Onsen sits where a waiting room might otherwise be, steam and timetables sharing the same modest structure. This is Matsuno-cho, a small town in southern Ehime where the Hiromi River cuts through terraced land that leaves almost no flat ground, and where eighty-four percent of the surrounding area is forest.

The older part of town along the highway carries the proportions of an Edo-period post town — low shopfronts, a street that once connected travelers moving through the valley. Along Matsumaru Shotengai, eel restaurants occupy some of those same storefronts, serving wild-caught unagi from the river. The Hiromi River also yields river crab, and the hillsides produce peaches and yuzu. These are not curated specialties but the actual output of the land, sold at the roadside station beside the river, Nijinomoiri Koen Matsuno, which also houses a freshwater aquarium displaying the fish of the Shimanto River system — a quietly serious collection of species rarely seen elsewhere in such variety.

Up the Nameratoko Valley, twelve kilometers of gorge follow the uppermost reach of the Meguro River, passing through water-source forest selected by the Forestry Agency — beech stands, rhododendron, a waterfall with a drop that registers physically before you see it. The castle ruins of Kawagomori-jo, a horseshoe-shaped mountain fortress of the Watanabe clan, occupy a ridge above the confluence of two streams, now designated a national historic site. These two landscapes — the post-town street and the deep forest — were stitched together in 1955, and the seam between them is still faintly visible.