Hinoemata, Fukushima

The bus from Aizutajima follows the Tadami River upstream for well over an hour before the valley narrows and the road surface changes. By the time it reaches Hinoemata, the mountains are pressing in from three sides — Aizukomagatake, Hiuchigadake, Taisakusan — and the air carries the particular stillness of a basin sitting close to a thousand meters above sea level.

This is a village where almost everything that isn't a roof is forest. The residents have, over generations, turned the slope-farming tradition of slash-and-burn cultivation into something else: minshuku that serve *sansai* and mushrooms foraged from the surrounding ridges, and *tachi-soba* cut straight from the rolled dough with a knife rather than folded. The hot spring at Hinoemata Onsen — sulfurous in one source, plain alkaline in another — runs through several of these guesthouses, where *sanjin ryori*, the mountain people's kitchen, arrives at the table in small dishes heavy with the season's pickings.

What persists alongside the food is the stage. The *Hinoemata Kabuki* has been performed on a rural stage built in the Edo period, now a nationally designated folk cultural property, by villagers rather than professionals. The *Midsummer Snow Festival* and the *New Soba Festival* mark the annual rhythm alongside the mountain-opening ceremonies for Hiuchigadake and Aizukomagatake. At the edge of the village, the wetlands of Ozenu — a Ramsar-listed marsh dammed into existence by Hiuchigadake — begin. The distance between the kabuki stage and the marsh is not large. That proximity is perhaps the most telling thing about Hinoemata.