Ina, Nagano

The Iida Line train follows the Tenryu River south, and by the time it pulls into Ina-shi Station — open since the early years of the twentieth century — the valley has already made its scale clear: the Southern Alps to the east, the Central Alps to the west, ridgelines holding the basin on both sides. Ina sits in that compression, a town shaped as much by its geography as by its history as a post town on the Sanshu Kaido, the old inland route that once carried goods and travelers between the mountains.

The food here resists easy categorization. Rōmen — thick mutton-and-noodle, served at small shops around the station — is the kind of dish that belongs to no obvious tradition, a local invention that simply persisted. Basashi and sauce katsudon appear on menus alongside Takatō soba, while the more unusual items — inago no tsukudani, grasshoppers simmered in soy and mirin, or zazamushi, the aquatic insects from the Tenryu — sit quietly on shelves in prepared-food shops, unremarkable to those who grew up eating them.

The older layers of the city surface without announcement. At Inabu-juku, the Edo-period post town, the Izawa family's honjin residence still stands along what was the main highway. The Ina Asahiza, a wooden cinema building dating from 1913 that began as a kabuki theater, holds its place in the neighborhood with the particular solidity of a structure no one has gotten around to demolishing — which is to say it has survived by being used. The Takatō Castle ruins, now a park, occupy a promontory above the dam lake, the stones of Takatō Domain absorbed into the hillside over three and a half centuries.