Nakanoto, Ishikawa

The road along Route 159 runs through rice paddies and low hills before the sign for the Michinoeki appears — a roadside station where the direct-sale hall known as Orihime Ichiba sets out vegetables and local produce from the surrounding farmland. This is the daily rhythm of Nakanoto, a town on the central Noto Peninsula formed when three smaller municipalities merged in the early 2000s. The textile maker Marui Orimono still operates here, weaving fabric in a district where loom work and agriculture have long run alongside each other.

Behind that ordinary surface, the mountain Ishidoyama rises to a height that feels considerable for this peninsula — forested, quiet, and carrying the remains of a once-vast complex of mountain asceticism. At its height, the temple Taiheiji drew thousands of monks and attendant structures into its orbit, with affiliated shrines extending north along the coast toward Tohoku. The Isurugihiko Shrine at the summit holds national historic site designation.神仏分離 — the forced separation of Buddhist and Shinto institutions in the nineteenth century — dismantled much of that world, and what remains now sits within the Noto Rekishi Koen park grounds, protected and quietly interpreted.

The 2024 Noto Peninsula earthquake left its mark on this land, as it did across the region. The Kōishi-ga-mine prefectural natural park, with its wind turbines and views across Toyama Bay, still stands above the Hodatsu hills, and the Harayama Oike pond below remains a starting point for walking trails. The town continues its work — looms, circuit components, farmland — in the way that places shaped by long cycles of faith and labor tend to do.