Inazawa, Aichi

Nursery trees line the roads out of the city center, their roots balled in burlap, waiting for transport. This is Inazawa, planted in the middle of the Nōbi Plain, where the soil and the flat horizon have shaped an economy of growing things — ornamental trees, saplings, and the ginkgo groves of Sobue whose leaves, come autumn, turn the district a particular shade of amber. The Sobue Ichō Kōyō Festival marks that season, when the trees that supply much of Japan's ginkgo are briefly, visibly the point of everything.

The older layer of the city runs through Kōnomiya, where the Owari Ōkunitama Shrine stands as the general shrine of ancient Owari Province. The Hadaka Matsuri held there is one of the more physically intense festivals in the region — crowds of men pressing through winter cold in a ritual that has no easy modern explanation. Nearby, Seikōji temple is known for its hydrangeas, and the Ogisu Memorial Museum of Art preserves the Paris studio of Takanori Ogisu, a painter who spent his working life in France; a reconstructed atelier sits inside, oddly quiet in the middle of a commuter city.

Inazawa also carries the traces of the old Mino Road post town, and the former national railway marshaling yard that once made it a node in Japan's freight network. Today the city runs on factory shifts — Sony, Mitsubishi Electric, Toyoda Gosei — and on the ryūhaku-mochi and Inazawa curry sold at local shops, ordinary goods that don't announce themselves but accumulate into the texture of a place that has always been several things at once.