Ito, Shizuoka

The lava shelf at Jogasaki stretches into the sea in dark, fractured plates — the remnant of a volcanic flow that once reached the coast from Omuroyama. That cinder-cone hill still gets burned each year in the Omuroyama Yamayaki, a controlled fire that strips the slope bare before the grass returns. Ito sits at the eastern edge of the Izu Peninsula, where the Sagami Sea is close enough that the smell of it drifts into the shopping streets near the station.

Those streets have their own histories. Yunohana-dori grew out of a postwar black market; Kinema-dori takes its name from a prewar cinema, and on Sundays a market still runs under its arcade. Dried fish — himono — is sold along these stretches, and gruri tea from the hills behind the city. At Kuzumi Shrine, a camphor tree of more than a thousand years stands inside the grounds, its trunk wider than a person can reach around, listed as a national natural monument. The shrine itself dates to the Heian period, which puts the tree in context without needing to say much more.

The port villages of Yawatano and Futo still work as fishing harbors, and the catch moves quickly into local kitchens. Izu Shaboten Animal Park keeps its cactus greenhouses on the volcanic plateau above the coast, where capybaras soak in an outdoor bath — an odd, quietly comic detail that fits the city's general willingness to hold contradictions: hot springs beside the sea, Picasso prints at the Ikeda 20th Century Museum, lava cliffs and a roadside spa at Ito Marine Town.