Yanaizu, Fukushima

The smell of steamed millet reaches the street before the shops on Akabeko-dōri come into view — small storefronts selling awamanjū, the mochi-wrapped sweets that have been made in this gate town since the early nineteenth century. Enyūji temple sits above it all on a rock face over the Tadami River, and the town of Yanaizu has arranged itself below for centuries in the manner of a place that knows its center of gravity. Pilgrims still come for Nanokadō Hadakamairi, the mid-winter festival in which participants climb the temple steps, and the rhythm of that ritual shapes the calendar here in ways that a casual visit can still sense.

The Tadami River does more than frame the view. Water from it runs through the Yanaizu Power Station, a civil-engineering structure recognized as a heritage site, while deeper in the mountains the heat of the Sunagohara caldera drives one of the country's larger geothermal generation units at the Yanaizu-Nishiyama plant. These are not tourist attractions so much as the working infrastructure of a valley that has always extracted energy from its geology. The seven ryokan along the river at Yanaizu Onsen hold their own independent springs; the more remote Nishiyama Onsen, reached further into the hills, operates as a genuine tōjiba, five family-run inns each drawing from different sources.

The Saitō Kiyoshi Art Museum holds prints by the town's most recognized artist, and the station building — reopened in 2024 as Aibekko — now houses a workshop where the red papier-mâché akabeko cattle, said to originate here, are still made by hand. Renting a bicycle from the roadside station and following the river road puts you alongside both the old gate-town commerce and the geothermal steam vents without having to choose between them.