Nachikatsura, Wakayama

The morning market at Katsuura fishing port opens before most visitors are awake. Tuna — some of it from Kinki University's aquaculture program — arrives fresh, and the smell of salt and cold fish drifts up from the unloading docks toward the onsen hotels lining the bay. Nachikatsura-cho holds two registers at once: the rias coastline working hard, and the mountains behind it holding still.

Up on Nachi-san, Kumano Nachi Taisha sits inside the forest, the shrine complex and Seiganto-ji temple occupying the same ridge in the layered way that older Japanese sacred sites tend to do — Buddhism and Shinto sharing stone steps and cedar shade. Below the shrine, Hirou Jinja marks Nachi no Taki as its object of worship, the waterfall dropping an uninterrupted distance into a pool that catches the sound before it reaches you. The Kumano Kodo pilgrimage routes pass through all of this, worn into the hillside by centuries of foot traffic, still walkable, still used.

In July, the Nachi no Hi Matsuri — the fire festival — brings large torches up those same steps. In February, the Maguro Matsuri draws attention back down to the port. Between festivals, the town runs on tuna longline fishing, on Nachi-kuro inkstone craft, on the quiet traffic of pilgrims and the steam of Nanki Katsuura Onsen. Fuda-uchi-ji temple at Fudarakusan-ji carries the strange history of the Fudaraku-tokai, monks who set out to sea in sealed boats toward a believed paradise — a reminder that this coast has always faced outward as much as inward.