Yamagata, Gifu

The bus from Gifu city takes about half an hour, climbing gradually out of the Nōbi plain into a landscape that shifts register almost imperceptibly — rice paddies giving way to cedar slopes, the air cooling slightly. There is no train. Yamagata-shi in Gifu Prefecture sits at the southern edge of the Echizen-Mino mountains, and its topography is the first thing you feel: the valley floors where small factories hum, and the ridgelines above where the old industries of matsutake mushroom and Mino washi paper once organized daily life.

What the factories make now is faucet valves — components found in kitchens and bathrooms across Japan — and the density of precision manufacturers here is quietly striking for a place of this scale. Yet the industrial present and the agricultural past coexist without obvious friction. At Yamagata Bus Terminal, which opened in 2021, a shop called Yamagata Basket sells produce from JA Gifu: Rihei kuri chestnuts, the variety developed here, and Mino yome-nasu eggplant alongside pheasant preparations and ayu caught at the Miyama kanko yana weir. The chestnuts in particular carry local pride — the Rihei variety originated in this municipality.

Shikoku-yama Kaori-no-Mori Park hosts the annual chestnut festival, and the grounds of Kannamiji temple hold an Edo-higan cherry of considerable age. Minami-senji temple keeps the graves of the Toki clan, who once controlled this territory, and the ruins of Ōkuwa Castle remain on the hillside above. Jūgosya Shrine, with its Tokugawa-era main hall designated a prefectural cultural property, marks where the Toki worshipped. The layers here are unhurried, easy to miss — which is perhaps why they remain.