Kamisato, Saitama

The dry northwest wind that sweeps across the Kantō plain in winter arrives here with particular force, funneled between the Kanna and Karasu rivers that mark the border with Gunma. Shinbohara Station on the JR Takasaki Line sits at the practical center of Kamisato-machi, a town whose flatness is total — no hills interrupt the view, only the dark mass of keyaki and zelkova that form the traditional *yashikibayashi*, windbreak groves planted generations ago around farmhouses to hold the cold at bay.

The land between those two rivers produces *kanna seiryu-mai*, rice grown along clear-running water, and *tane komugi*, a seed wheat variety — crops that speak to soil kept deliberately productive rather than abandoned to subdivision. The Jōetsu Shinkansen and the Kan-etsu Expressway cut through the town east to west, and the Kamisato Service Area on that highway offers a view toward the three peaks of Jōmō and the profile of Mount Asama on clear days — a moment of vertical drama in an otherwise horizontal landscape.

The town emerged from the 1954 merger of several villages — Jinbohara, Kami, Nanahongi, Nagahata — and carries the layered identity of a place that was once a node on the Mikuni Kaidō highway. That older transit function has been replaced by commuter rhythms along the Takasaki Line, yet the *yashikibayashi* groves persist, pressing up against newer residential streets, a quiet negotiation between what the land requires and what the town has become.