Sekikawa, Niigata

The straw cat baskets called *neko-chigura* take months to weave, and the hands that make them are mostly those of older women in the villages along the Arakawa. Sekikawa-mura sits in a fold of the Iide mountains in northern Niigata, where the old Yonezawa highway once carried merchants and rice through the snow country. The weight of that commerce is still visible: the Watanabe residence, a national important cultural property, stands in the old post town of Shimonoseki with its formal garden designated as a place of scenic beauty, its gate proportioned for a household that once measured wealth in rice paddies.

A few streets away, Tōkeien — built in 1905 and now open as a café — lets you sit inside the timber and plaster of that era with something warm in your hands. The *etchigo-sekikawa* hot spring cluster runs along the Arakawa gorge in five distinct springs, with inns still operating in the old therapeutic tradition. In late summer, the *Ōshitamon-ja Matsuri* brings out a giant snake effigy through the streets — a festival rooted in flood memory, recalling the Uetsu heavy rains that reshaped the river's banks. Koshihikari rice and mountain vegetable dishes move through the roadside station at Sekikawa, ordinary commerce that keeps the village's provisioning logic intact.

Eburi-sashi-dake rises above the treeline to the south, and the Arakawa gorge road flushes red each autumn along the Momiji Line. The rabbit-stamped御朱印 at Kōto Shrine draws visitors from well outside the prefecture, a small current of pilgrimage threading through a village that otherwise runs on its own quiet seasonal rhythm.