Nosegawa, Nara

Mist pools in the valleys before dawn, and by mid-morning it has risen into something the village markets as "the sky country" — a sea of cloud visible from the ridgelines that draws visitors up roads narrow enough to require pulling aside for oncoming traffic. Nosegawa sits deep in the Kii Mountains of southern Nara, connected to Kōyasan by the Kōya-Ryūjin Skyline, a road that traces the spine of the range before descending into this scarcely inhabited fold of forest and river. The village name itself was assembled from three older administrative districts — Noka, Sako, Kawanami — compressed into two characters, a small grammatical record of the fourteen Edo-period settlements that once occupied these slopes.

The cold here is productive. At altitude, winter temperatures firm enough to freeze tofu solid, and the technique behind kōya-dōfu — the dried, freeze-processed block — has its own exhibition space at the Kōya-Dōfu Denshokan, where the history and method of production are laid out. The single inn, Nosegawa Onsen Hotel Nosegawa, sits at seven hundred metres and serves kamo-nabe and sansai ryōri alongside its alkaline sulfur spring water. These are not decorative touches; they are what the kitchen has to work with in a place where cultivable land is almost entirely absent.

The Kumano Sankeidō Kohechi, a pilgrimage route now listed as a World Heritage site, passes through the village, as does the legend of Taira no Koremori, the wandering Heike general said to have ended his days near the northern foot of Ubakodake. At the summit of Kōjindake, Tatari Kōjinja sits in the wind, one of three shrines in Japan dedicated to Kōjin. The village holds these layers without ceremony — pilgrimage trail, feudal ghost, freeze-dried tofu — all present in the same cold air.