Aizuwakamatsu, Fukushima

A town of the defeated never forgets its pride. In Aizuwakamatsu, Fukushima, the Aizu Festival sends a grand procession through the streets against the backdrop of Tsuruga Castle. In the Boshin War at the end of the shogunate, Aizu fought to the last on the shogun's side, and lost. The Byakkotai, a unit of teenage boys, believing the castle had fallen, took their own lives on Mount Iimori at sixteen and seventeen. It was a mistake; the castle had not yet fallen. The festival offers a sword dance in their memory. The history of the victors stays in textbooks; the history of the defeated is kept by the land. The people of Aizu feel no shame in having lost. Their pride is in having held to principle to the end. The armor in the procession gleams in the autumn light.

They are painted with flowers — peonies, chrysanthemums, the blossoms of seasons not yet arrived. Each February these Aizu lacquerware candles are placed throughout the castle town: at the base of Tsurugajo's stone walls, along the paths of the Oyakuen medicinal garden, at Iimori hill where the White Tiger Unit made its final stand in 1868.

The flames are steadier than you expect in the winter air. Each candle burns in a glass holder, and the effect along the garden paths is of a second snowfall — slow, colored, rising rather than falling. The painted flowers are not decoration. They are a counterargument.

Aizu carries particular weight in Japanese history. The city was on the losing side of the Meiji Restoration, and the gravity of those stories has not softened in a hundred and fifty years. The candle festival does not resolve this history. It simply says: beauty is also a form of persistence, and a city can hold both tragedy and loveliness at once.

The Nanukamaichi morning market has been running every Sunday for more than two hundred years, which means it has continued through the Boshin War that devastated this city in 1868, through the Showa-era conflicts, through the 2011 earthquake. Markets that persist this long do so because communities need them, and the need persists through whatever disrupts everything else.

The Nanukamaichi district itself is unusual: a commercial street where Taisho and early Showa-era architecture has survived in sufficient quantity to give the neighborhood a coherent period character. The wooden shopfronts and advertising signage from the early twentieth century are not a reconstruction; they are what was not demolished. Walking the street before the market begins is a way of seeing a Japanese commercial district in something like its original form.

The market itself is what morning markets are when they are not designed for visitors: produce, pickles, and local food from people who grow or make them, sold to people who live nearby and come every Sunday. Visitors are welcome. The experience of shopping for breakfast ingredients in this context — the continuity of the building, the continuity of the market — is not easily replicated.