Hokuto, Yamanashi

The small-gauge trains of the Koumi Line climb through plateau farmland, the carriage windows filling gradually with the silhouettes of Yatsugatake and the Southern Alps. At Kiyosato station, one of the highest in the country, the air arrives differently — cooler, thinner, carrying the faint smell of pasture. This is Hokuto, a city assembled from seven former towns and villages, where the highland geography sets the terms for almost everything.

Agriculture here runs on cold and light. Blueberries, Mukawa rice, and the water-grown greens called tōmyō come out of soil that the plateau's long hours of sunlight seem to intensify. At Hakushu, the same snowmelt that feeds the local fields flows through the Suntory whisky distillery and the Takeno-i Sake Brewery, founded in the mid-nineteenth century and still drawing from the Sanbuichi spring. The Masutomi hot spring village, said to contain radon, sits further into the hills where the Takeda clan once kept it close.

The Kiyosato Fieldballett performs outdoors each summer near the Kiyosato plateau, and the Suzuran Festival and the Akeno Daikon Festival mark the agricultural calendar with a plainness that suits the landscape. The Paul Rusch Memorial Museum and the Yamane Museum — the only museum in Japan dedicated to the dormouse — occupy the same forested precinct of the Keep Association. These are not grand institutions; they are specific ones, each rooted in a particular concern for this particular ground.