Kamiyama, Tokushima

The road into Kamiyama follows the Akui River through a narrowing valley, the cedar and cypress closing in on both sides until the mountains seem to press the sky into a thin ribbon overhead. Most of the land here is steep slope — fruit trees terraced where the gradient allows, the rest given over to forest. This is suitably remote country, and the town has carried that quality for a long time.

At the center of the valley's older life stands Kamiichimiya Ōawa Shrine, dedicated to Ōgetsuhime-no-Mikoto, a deity of food and agriculture whose presence here suggests how long people have been coaxing harvests from this difficult terrain. Sudachi — the small, tart citrus that appears on grilled fish and in dipping sauces across Shikoku — grows in quantity on these slopes, along with ume plums from orchards like Agawa Ume-no-Sato. The Awaji ningyo joruri tradition left its mark here too, in the form of fusuma paintings, a quieter residue of a performing art that once moved through rural communities.

Kamiyama Onsen, a sodium-chloride bicarbonate spring tucked alongside the Hotel Shiki-no-Sato, sits near the river rather than on a hilltop — modest in the way that working onsen in agricultural towns tend to be. The Awaikuigawa valley and its tributaries run cold and clear, and the Kamiyama Shinrin Koen follows the river's course through the gorge. The Awaikuigawa family residence, the Aiiharabara residence, remains as a document of how domestic architecture once answered this landscape.