Urugi, Nagano

The road into Urugi runs along the Urugi River through a narrow basin, mountains pressing close on all sides. There is no train. Buses arrive from Iida, infrequently, and the village announces itself through the roadside station — Urugi Furusato-kan — where corn, shiitake, and myoga are laid out in the direct-sales corner, grown on slopes that catch what light the ridgeline allows. The single gas pump next door handles most of what passes through.

At elevation, the air is thin enough to matter. Urugi has drawn ultra-marathon runners who come to train at altitude, and the village has quietly organized itself around this new presence — a mountain community finding another reason to persist. The older reasons are less comfortable: the village's history includes the *ojiroku* and *obasa* system, in which younger siblings in farming households were kept in near-total social subordination for generations, a practice that endured into the modern era. That history sits alongside the Nenbutsu-ko rituals and the Orenri festival without contradiction.

The Iwakura Dam, a gravity-concrete structure built in the late 1930s, still generates power for the region. Beside it, a campsite occupies the lakeshore. At Hiraya Pass, the view opens southward toward the Southern Alps — wide and sudden after the enclosed valley. Hōzōji temple, founded in the late sixteenth century, holds the oldest wooden structure in the village: a gate that has outlasted every political reorganization Urugi has passed through.