Chikuma, Nagano

Apricot trees cover the hillsides of the Mori district in a pale wash of blossom each spring — a landscape shaped not by accident but by deliberate planting during the Edo period, when the Matsushiro domain cultivated what became known as the *anzu no sato*. The fruit still defines Chikuma's market stalls and roadside shops, where jars of apricot jam sit alongside fresh produce in that particular arrangement of the ordinary that signals a place feeding itself, not performing for visitors.

The history here runs deep and layered. Shinonoi and the surrounding basin were the political center of ancient Shinano, and the burial mounds of the Hanishina group — including the large keyhole-shaped tomb studied at the Mori Shogunzuka Kofunkan — make that weight of time visible and walkable. Inariyanshuku, once the largest post-town on the Zenkoji Kaido, retains the proportions of a Meiji-era commercial street. The Sarashina no Sato Historical Museum holds reconstructed pit dwellings and face-shaped earthenware from the Jomon period, objects that close the distance between ancient and present in ways a glass case can only partly interrupt.

Up the slope above the Chikuma River, the terraced paddies of Obasute catch the moon in each flooded field — a phenomenon the poets of the *Kokin Wakashū* already knew. Long-rakuji temple stands nearby with its moon-viewing hall. The Togura Kamiyamada hot spring, opened in the Meiji era, has long served pilgrims finishing the road to Zenkoji; its baths remain the practical, unhurried kind.