Higashimiyoshi, Tokushima

The Yoshino River moves through the middle of it all, wide and unhurried, with the Asan Mountains pressing from the north and the Shikoku Mountains rising to the south. Higashimiyoshi occupies this narrow corridor, a town assembled from two older municipalities as recently as 2006, still finding its own name on the map. Three stations along the JR Tokushima Line mark its length without ceremony — small platforms, quiet mornings.

Near an old shrine site, the camphor tree known as Kamo no Daikusu has been standing for roughly a thousand years. A national special natural monument, it doesn't announce itself loudly; the Okusu House beside it is a modest rest stop with a public toilet, the kind of facility that suggests the tree receives visitors on ordinary weekdays, not just holidays. The Tanda Kofun, a keyhole-shaped burial mound built from stacked stones in the fourth century, sits as further evidence that this river corridor has been inhabited and marked by human intention for a very long time.

South of town, the trail toward Tsurugi-san begins at Fujiikehonjibo Ryukoji, a temple with a lodging house established in the early eighteenth century. The mountain's summit holds Tsurugi Shrine's inner sanctum and a spring designated among Japan's celebrated waters — the headwaters of the Iya River rising quietly from the rock. Below all of this, on the terraced slopes between river and ridge, the inclined-field agriculture of Nishi-Awa continues, crops grown on gradients that flatten nowhere.