Morioka, Iwate

On Saturday afternoons from May through November, the Zaimokucho district of Morioka becomes something between a market and a gathering place. Farmers from the surrounding Iwate countryside, young chefs with portable kitchens, craftspeople who set up workshops in the city, people who moved here from Tokyo and Sendai — all of them, on Saturday evenings, in the same place.

Morioka has become, in recent years, a reference point for a particular kind of Japanese aspiration: the small city with excellent infrastructure, a functioning cultural life, a relationship to the land that Tokyo cannot offer. The market is where the transplants meet the long-term residents, where the person making lacquerware for forty years sells adjacent to the person who started last year.

The market runs until eight in the evening — late enough for the summer light to change while you are there. Morioka's summers are cool and extended, with the Kitakami River a few blocks away. The evening market in this light is one of the better arguments for living somewhere that is not the center of anything.

The largest number of drums in the world.

The Morioka Sansa Odori holds a Guinness record for the most Japanese drums played at once, and in early August the city's main avenue fills with dancers and drummers until the pavement itself seems to beat.

Behind it lies a legend of a demon's handprint. A demon had been troubling the people, the story goes, until a god caught it and made it promise never to return, pressing its hand to a rock as proof—the rock that gave Iwate, and Morioka, their names. The relieved villagers danced for joy, and that dancing became the Sansa.

The drums are carried, struck while walking, while leaping, hundreds of them shaking the ground. The sound reaches your organs; stand and watch and you feel your own pulse drifting into time with the drums. For three days of summer, Morioka is filled to its edges with the sound.