Hamanaka, Hokkaido

The walls of concrete that ring the town are the first thing you notice — not walls in any decorative sense, but a seawall of serious intention, built after repeated tsunami damage along this stretch of Pacific coast. Hamanaka sits on a tombolo, a narrow sand spit connecting the mainland to what was once an island, and the sea has always had opinions about that arrangement.

Behind the seawall, fishing boats work out of ports like Honboro and Sanpu, hauling natural kelp and surf clams from cold water. Dairy farms spread across the northern hills, their milk going into products — Haagen-Dazs and Calpis among them — that most people consume without any thought of where the raw material originated. The gap between production and recognition is part of what gives this coast its particular anonymity.

To the south, the Kiritappu wetland stretches across a wide plain, mist-prone in summer, home to red-crowned cranes. The Kiritappu Wetland Center sits at its edge, with a small café corner where you can sit after walking the marsh. The 湯沸岬 lighthouse stands above the headland, its beam reaching far out to sea. Once a year, the town hosts the Lupin III Festival — an unlikely pairing of a manga character and a fishing town that somehow holds, perhaps because both involve a kind of audacious persistence in difficult terrain.