Natori, Miyagi

Flat land opens east from the Takadachi hills, the rivers running quietly toward the Pacific, and somewhere between the rice paddies and the coast the city of Natori accumulates its layers. The airport sits here — the only nationally managed airport in the Tōhoku region — and cargo and passengers move through with a matter-of-factness that colors the whole area. Commuters, freight, fish: things pass through Natori rather than staying, and yet the place itself has a distinct gravity.

That gravity is partly ancient. The Raijinya-ma Kofun, a keyhole-shaped burial mound from the fourth or fifth century, rises from the flat plain as a kind of mute declaration — whoever was buried here commanded territory across a wide reach. The Iinozaka Kofun-gun, a cluster of square and rectangular mounds rare in their configuration even nationally, sits nearby. At the Dōguchi Family Residence, a farmhouse from the Edo period now designated an Important Cultural Property, the building operates as an agricultural restaurant — history and lunch occupying the same room without ceremony.

Down at Yuriage, the fishing port that supplied Sendai's markets since the Edo period, the catch still comes in: hirame, akagai, shako-ebi. The port is rebuilding, steadily, after 2011. Sasaboiled kamaboko and焼き鰈 appear in the local food supply alongside the rice varieties Sasanishiki and Hitomebore, grown on the same plains the ancient mound-builders once surveyed. In summer, the Sapporo Beer Festival draws a crowd to the factory grounds — ordinary and industrial, but that too is Natori.