Nishikawa, Yamagata

Snow compresses the roads through Nishikawa-machi for months at a stretch, and the town has organized its whole life around that fact. The brewing of *Gassan* beer and the pressing of *Tsukiyama Traya* wine happen here not despite the deep cold but in some ways because of it — the water is clean and abundant, fed by snowmelt through the peaks of Gassan and the Asahi range. That same meltwater is bottled as *Gassan Shizensui* and flows into the noodle vats of the local *seimen* workshops, where *hippari udon* — the pulled noodle dish particular to this part of Yamagata — gets made in a tradition tied to the land rather than to any urban food trend.

Shizu Onsen, the small cluster of inns at the base of Gassan, traces its role as a waystation back to the Edo period, when pilgrims on the Rokujuriri-koe road passed through on their way to the sacred precincts of Yudonosan Shrine and Gassan Shrine — both sites of *Shugendo* mountain practice. In winter, the inns light up for *Yukitabako no Akari*, a festival in which snow is shaped into lantern-like lodgings and lit from within. The shrine at Yudonosan has no main hall in the conventional sense; the worship is directed at the rock itself. Matsuo Basho visited. The mountain still receives practitioners.

The Yamagata Prefectural Nature Museum sits inside the Bandai-Asahi National Park, in a beech forest where interpreters walk visitors through the understory rather than simply labeling it. Near Oizawa, a chestnut tree of extraordinary girth — a prefectural natural monument — stands without much ceremony beside the road. These are not curated attractions so much as objects the town happens to contain, persisting in the cold and the snow alongside everything else.