Ojiya, Niigata

At Ojiya Station on the JR Jōetsu Line, a tiled underground passage connects the platforms, its walls patterned with the flowing shapes of nishiki-goi — the ornamental carp that have been bred in this river-basin town for generations. The Shinano River cuts through Ojiya from south to north, and the terraced riverbanks that rise from its edges give the town its layered, slightly vertical feeling, hills to the east and west holding everything in.

The craft here is not decorative. Ojiya-chijimi, a ramie-cloth textile whose origins run back through the Edo period when bolts were carried along the Sanjō Kaidō toward Kyoto and Osaka, is still produced in the region. At Sanpuraza, the city's industrial hall, looms are available for hands-on weaving, and the finished cloth — light, slightly stiff, made for humid summers — sits alongside lacquered Ojiya butsudan and samples of Uonuma Koshihikari rice. The sake breweries Takano-i and Niigata Meijō operate here too, their labels — Takano-i, Chōjamori, Koshi no Kanchūbai — appearing in the refrigerator sections of local shops.

In early September, the grounds of Asahara Shrine, considered the origin point of the Katakai Matsuri, become the site of fireworks on a scale that is difficult to describe without numbers — so it is enough to say the sound arrives before the light, and the light fills the sky beyond any ordinary frame. The shrine also holds a sumo ring, the first officially registered in Niigata Prefecture. Quieter but no less rooted, Uonuma Shrine keeps within its precincts an Important Cultural Property amida-dō hall, a small wooden structure that has stood through the region's long winters without particular announcement.