Kyowa, Hokkaido

Watermelons ripen here in the short northern summer, their vines spreading across fields that lie between the Shakotan Peninsula and the Niseko mountain range. This is Kyowa-cho, a town shaped by the particular logic of its geography — hills and river valleys that once drew Ainu traders, later copper and silver miners, and eventually the rice farmers who established the rhythms still visible in the landscape today. The Raiden brand — applied to both watermelon and melon — is not marketing invention but a name grown out of decades of cultivation that began in the early 1960s.

The old infrastructure of the place surfaces in quiet corners. At Horonai Tetsudo Kinen Koen, the discontinued Iwanai Line is commemorated in a small park, a reminder that trains once ran routes here that no longer exist. Kozawa Station, on the JR Hakodate Main Line, opened in 1904, and the Tunnel Mochi confection dates to that same moment of arrival — a food born from a railway opening, still made and sold. The Kakashi Furusato-kan, housed in a former elementary school building, holds local historical and cultural materials, the kind of archive that a town keeps not for visitors but for itself.

Up toward Chisenupuri, the high-moor wetland of Shinjin-numa sits on a lava plateau, reached by a barrier-free boardwalk that threads through the bog. The Nishimura Keio Memorial Museum holds the works and personal effects of the painter Nishimura Keio. These two places — one entirely natural, one entirely interior — suggest something about how Kyowa holds its different registers together, without forcing them into a single story.