Matsuzaki, Shizuoka

Namamoko-kabe walls — their black tile inlays pressed into white plaster in a grid pattern — run along the lanes near Matsuzaki Onsen, interrupted now and then by a shop front or a low stone fence. The town sits on the western coast of the Izu Peninsula, where the Nagakagawa and Iwashina rivers open onto a stretch of flatland that is, by the peninsula's standards, unusually wide. Behind it, forested ridges rise toward Nagakurou-san, and the sea opens to the west.

The craft that defines the town's interior life is *kote-e* — decorative plasterwork applied with a trowel, elevated here by the nineteenth-century artisan Irie Chōhachi into something closer to relief sculpture. The Izu no Chōhachi Museum holds his work, and it is the kind of place where you look at a wall and reconsider what walls are for. Sakura-ba-zuke — salt-pickled cherry leaves — is made here and pressed into the familiar shape of sakura-mochi; both appear in small shops without ceremony. The port, once a node in Edo-period coastal shipping routes, still functions as a working harbor on Suruga Bay, with bonito and dried katsuobushi among the catches that move through it.

The Ishibu terraced rice fields are registered with the "Most Beautiful Villages of Japan" association, to which Matsuzaki belongs. Much of the town's land is mountain forest; the cultivated river plain is the exception, not the rule. Matsuzaki Onsen, a sulfate spring with a strong flow, sits within the namamoko-kabe streetscape — so that soaking and architecture occupy the same unhurried block.