Shunan, Yamaguchi

The petrochemical towers of the Tokuyama Kombinat line the southern waterfront, their flare stacks visible from the ferry that crosses toward Ōtsushima. At night, the industrial glow over Shunan has earned recognition as a nightscape heritage site — an unusual distinction, and one that tells you something about how this city holds its contradictions. Refineries and shrines, wartime memory and working harbor, mountain village and coastal plain: the city formed from the 2003 merger of Tokuyama, Shinnanyō, Kumage, and Kano draws these into a single, uneven whole.

Inland, the temple Kanyōji holds a garden designed by Shigemori Mirei, and the kitchen there produces shōjin ryōri. Further into the hills, Mioku Onsen and Ōkōchi Onsen sit quietly, the kind of baths that appear on no ranked list. The northern basin around Kano receives deep winter snow, a different register entirely from the mild coast. At Kōgenji, a ginkgo tree of roughly nine centuries stands on the grounds — the temple itself founded in the Tenshō era, the tree predating it.

At Tokuyama Station, the library faces the concourse directly, with a Tsutaya bookshop and café built into its floor plan — a municipal library designed around the fact that people pass through. The local table runs to fugu, jizake, shizen-jo, and a preserved Edo-period dish called tsushima. On Ōtsushima, the Kaiten Memorial Hall holds the personal effects of the young men who piloted the human torpedoes launched from that island during the Pacific War. The objects are specific and close.