Kammaki, Nara

The footwear trade arrived here quietly, sometime in the late Edo period — zori sandals and their fabric straps, hanao, produced in the villages of what is now Kanmaki-cho. That craft, modest and tactile, sits oddly against the wide residential streets of Nishi-Yamato New Town, which spread across the Umamioka hills from the 1960s onward. Kanmaki is the kind of commuter town that grew fast along the Nishi-Meihan Expressway corridor, its population drawn toward Osaka and Nara, its shopping anchored by Raspa Nishi-Yamato on ordinary weekday afternoons.

And yet the ground beneath the housing blocks holds older matter. The Kanmaki Kudo Kofun cluster — burial mounds built from the earliest Kofun period through the Asuka era — sits as a nationally designated historic site, largely without ceremony. Higher on the ridge, Kataoka Castle once occupied a hilltop at roughly ninety meters, and Izanagi Shrine still occupies its southern edge, a shikinaisha with roots in antiquity. These are not preserved as spectacle; they simply remain, embedded in the slope.

After the expressway and the kofun and the shrine, there is still the Yamato Kami no Maki Onsen, Nijinoyu, where the town's residents wash off the week. The hills that once made this land suitable for horse pasture — the old place name carries that memory — now carry cell towers and cul-de-sacs. Both facts are equally true, and neither cancels the other.