Bandai, Fukushima

The wooden station building at Bandai-machi sits quietly on the Banetsu West Line, its structure unchanged in character since the days when it was still called Daiji Station — named, implicitly, for the great temple that once defined this place. Kainichuji, founded in 807 by the monk Tokuichi, grew into a complex of extraordinary scale during the Heian period, with hundreds of monks and warrior-monks occupying the mountain foothills. The ruins are now a designated national historic site, and the adjacent Bandaisan Kainichuji Museum holds the excavated objects that survived the centuries. Nearby, Ryūgasawa spring water — selected as one of Japan's notable pure waters in 1985 — has been drawing people to this slope since ancient times, when it was a site for rain-prayer rituals.

The town's modern character was shaped not only by faith but by industry. The Inawashiro hydroelectric stations, completed in the early twentieth century, brought a different kind of power to the landscape. Zinc and cadmium refining followed, and with it, a cadmium pollution problem that surfaced in 1970 — a history the town carries without erasure. Now, Nekoma-ga-take hosts the ski runs of Alts Bandai, and Bandaisan itself, a volcano of considerable height, draws climbers through the Bandaisan Gold Line road that runs across its flank. At the Michi-no-Eki Bandai roadside station, local produce changes hands in the direct-sale market, and the restaurant Aizumine serves regional food beside a somewhat unexpected Gundam display corner — a detail that resists easy categorization, like the town itself.