Meiwa, Mie

Flat rice fields stretch in every direction from the small station at Saiku, and the land barely rises. The Sasafue River moves north through low, wet ground — the kind of terrain that holds water and history in equal measure. This is Meiwa, a town in Mie Prefecture where the ancient administrative compound of Saiku-ato once housed the imperial princesses who served as Saio, intermediaries between the court and Ise Jingu.

The site itself is vast and largely open, its buried post-holes and building foundations invisible underfoot but documented in careful detail at the Saiku Rekishi Hakubutsukan, the prefectural museum set within the grounds. Aerial reconstructions and excavated artifacts trace the compound's operation from the Asuka and Nara periods through to the Northern and Southern Courts era — a span of centuries compressed into quiet display cases. Nearby, Saiku Heian no Mori, the history park completed in 2015, offers reconstructed structures that let the scale of the original settlement register physically rather than abstractly.

What persists most visibly above ground is botanical. The colony of Nohana Shobu — wild iris — at Saiku no Hanashobu Gunraku holds status as a natural monument, its dense purple flowers opening across the wetland in late spring. The moisture that makes this plain difficult to build on has, for centuries, sustained something else entirely.