Manno, Kagawa

Sunflower oil pressed from crops grown across the hillside farms of Hanayama district carries this town's character more plainly than any signboard. Manno-cho sits in the foothills of the Sanuki Mountains, where the Dodogawa flows south to north and the ridgelines of Ryuozan and Okawayama hold the sky at both ends of the valley. The town's most persistent fact is water: a vast irrigation reservoir at its center, reshaped centuries ago by the monk Kukai, now designated a national scenic site and listed among Japan's hundred soundscapes. Around it, hundreds of smaller ponds step across the terraced farmland — a landscape that earned the town a place in the "Sato no Mizu Hyakusen," the national register of water heritage villages.

The produce at Nankoku Sanchoku-ichi and the roadside station Epia Mikado runs to bamboo shoots, persimmons, figs, shiitake, and quince in its season. Karin-tei, a small facility dedicated to that quince, sells preserves and goods made from what is otherwise an awkward, faintly medicinal fruit — the kind of product that only makes sense in the place that grows it. Up at Okawayama, a small shrine and an observatory share the summit. The Ayako Odori, a folk dance tradition attached to the town, and the Okawa Nembutsu Odori are both registered cultural practices that surface at particular times of year. And then, incongruously, the national park grounds at Sanuki Manno-koen host MONSTER baSH, an outdoor rock festival — the flatlands around the reservoir briefly loud, then quiet again.