Kawakami, Nagano

The single station on the JR Koumi Line sits at high altitude, surrounded by mountains that belong to the Oku-Chichibu massif. The air here is thinner and cooler than the lowlands, and the village of Kawakami presses close against ridgelines that include Kokushi-ga-take and Sanpo-zan. This is not a transit point. The road ends, more or less, at the Daibira Pass.

Beneath that landscape lies something older. During the Middle Jomon period, people settled here and left behind the Ofukayama site — a cluster of remains designated a national historic site. Among the objects recovered was a human-faced incense burner vessel, a piece of fired clay so particular in its expression that it later became the basis for the design of Ultraman. That lineage — from Jomon potter to television icon — is documented without fanfare at the Kawakami Village Cultural Center, where the original ceramics and stone tools are kept alongside the connection to that character.

Chichibu-Tama-Kai National Park presses against the village boundaries, and the mountains are not decorative. They are the condition of life here — shaping what grows, what travels, what remains. Walking toward the pass, or simply standing at the edge of the village, the massif reads as presence rather than backdrop. The Ofukayama site is out there in that same landscape, its Jomon layers compressed into the same high ground where the trails begin.