Akiota, Hiroshima

The bus from Hiroshima city climbs steadily into the mountains, passing through tunnels and over rivers until the valley narrows and the cedars press close on either side. This is Akiota, a town assembled in 2004 from three older settlements — Kake, Togouchi, and Tsuga — each with its own grain of history. The ridgelines here belong to the Nishi-Chugoku Sanchi, and Osorakan-yama stands at the highest point of both Hiroshima and Shimane prefectures, a fact the landscape makes easy to believe.

The Sandankyo gorge cuts through the rock for a considerable length, its five main views — cascades, dark pools, narrow rock passages — laid out along a path that follows the water. Near the gorge entrance, Sandankyo Onsen offers a weak radioactive cold mineral spring at a pair of small inns, the kind of bath that requires no ceremony. Elsewhere in the town, the Otoshi Shrine shelters a ginkgo tree of extraordinary age, its autumn leaf-fall a local event in itself. At Yoshimizuen, a garden made in 1781 by the sixteenth head of the Kake Sumiya family, the gates open only on spring and autumn weekends — the moriwao frog, a prefectural natural monument, breeds in the pond.

Food here is specific to the terrain: amago river trout, tochi mochi made from horse chestnut, Gionbo persimmons, and Ota turnip greens. The mountains were once worked for iron through tatara smelting, and the Onui Dam, completed in 2001, created Ryuhiko Lake above the older infrastructure of the valley. The Kake Kagura and the Sandankyo Momiji Festival mark the calendar in their own turns, unhurried, shaped by the rhythms of a mountain village that has always had more trees than people.