Moroyama, Saitama

The yuzu orchards sit in the western hills before the land flattens toward the rice paddies — a gradient that tells you something about how Moroyama is organized. The JR Hachikō Line and the Tōbu Ogose Line cut through the middle of town, and the trains are unhurried, the kind that stop at small platforms where nobody is waiting to be photographed. From the window, the Outer Chichibu range holds the horizon to the west.

At Izumo Iwai Shrine, the ground is worn smooth near the track where mounted archery — yabusame — has been performed in autumn for generations. The shrine's main hall is a nationally designated Important Cultural Property, though it sits without ceremony in the landscape, surrounded by ordinary trees. Further along the old road, the Kamakura Kaidō Kamimichi passes through: a historic highway once connecting Kamakura to Kōzuke, with remnants of post-town structures still legible to those who know what to look for, and designated a national historic site in 2022.

Stranger still is Atarashiki Mura — a communal agricultural settlement that relocated here from Miyazaki Prefecture, founded on ideals of cooperative living associated with the writer Mushanokōji Saneatsu. The museum attached to it is small and unhurried. Nearby, Kamikita Lake serves as the trailhead for the Okumuzasa Nature Trail, and Minowada Lake offers heron-quiet mornings for anglers fishing for crucian carp. The yuzu festival, the lion dances, the smell of citrus pressing through autumn air — these are not performances for outsiders but the town simply continuing its own calendar.