Mima, Tokushima

The white-walled merchant facades of Wakimachi Minamicho rise in a line along the old road, their distinctive *udatsu* fire walls jutting upward between each house like raised shoulders. This is the preserved core of Mima, a town that once prospered as a staging post on the Yoshino River, where indigo merchants built with enough confidence to show it in their rooflines. The 旧長岡家住宅 and its neighbors still stand as working evidence of that era — not reconstructed, not museumified, simply remaining.

Beneath the surface, the layers go deeper. The 郡里廃寺跡 marks the site of one of Tokushima's earliest temples, its foundations laid in the Hakuhō period in a style traced to Hōkiji. Across the same plateau, the 段の塚穴古墳群 preserves stone burial chambers from the late Kofun period — horizontal passage tombs of a scale rarely seen in Shikoku. These sites sit quietly in the landscape, without crowds or interpretive fanfare, requiring a certain willingness to read the ground.

To the south, the Yoshino River gives way to the Anabuki River, whose water runs clear enough that ayu — sweetfish — are taken from it each season. Beyond that, the ridgeline climbs toward 剣山, a mountain long associated with Shugendo ascetic practice and still approached through the ancient 劔山本宮劔神社. The mountain and the merchant street occupy the same municipality, which tells you something about the range of this place.