Nishiokoppe, Hokkaido

The buildings here are orange — not accidentally, but by policy. Against the white of deep snow and the dark wall of conifers, the warm color registers as a deliberate statement, a village deciding what it wants to look like. This is Nishiokoppe, an inland settlement in Hokkaido's Okhotsk region where forest covers nearly all the land and the Okoppe River cuts through the valley below Uenshiri-dake.

The village has made guitars here. It produces matsutake shochu. These two facts sit side by side without obvious explanation, and that strangeness is part of the texture. The Mori no Bijutsukan "Kimyu," opened in 1997, frames the surrounding forest as its subject matter. A deer farm, established a few years earlier, occupies another edge of this small economy. In winter, an ice tunnel event draws people to the Uenshiri campground, which otherwise serves as a base for climbing the mountain above.

What keeps the place functioning in the face of depopulation is partly technological — a cable television and information network centered on the multimedia hall "IT Mu," completed in the early 2000s, made Nishiokoppe an early experiment in rural connectivity. The Murakoshi Matsuri and the Gyoja no Taki festival mark the calendar. The orange facades glow against the cold. It is a village that has thought carefully about its own persistence, and the thinking shows in the details.