Shinto, Gunma

On the eastern slope of Haruna-san, small streams cut through a plateau landscape that has been settled for a very long time. The village of Shintō sits quietly between the urban pull of Maebashi and Takasaki, its residential streets carrying the ordinary rhythm of a commuter community — bus schedules, school routes, weekday mornings. Yet beneath that surface, the ground holds something older.

At the Mimikakari-kan, a museum devoted entirely to ear ornaments, cases display hundreds of clay ear decorations excavated from the Kayano site — a Late and Final Jōmon settlement whose remains were designated a national historic site. The pieces are small, intricate, fired from local earth. Standing in front of them, you register that this plateau was already dense with domestic life thousands of years before the prefecture's name existed. The Takatsuka Kofun, a keyhole-shaped burial mound from the sixth century, sits not far away, a low earthen form absorbed into the village's ordinary topography.

In summer and autumn, the Shintō Budōkyō draws visitors who come to pick Kyohō and Delaware grapes across several dozen small farms spread over the hillside terraces. The fruit is grown here rather than shipped in, and the scale stays close to the land. After the orchards, the Shintō Onsen Fureai-kan offers a sodium-calcium chloride spring that opened in the mid-1990s — utilitarian, local, unhurried.