Mitane, Akita

The hot spring at Moridake surfaced unexpectedly in 1952, when workers were drilling for oil. What they found instead was water — dense with salt, sharp on the tongue, the kind locals now simply call *shoppai*, the salty one. That accidental discovery sits at the center of Mitane's quiet daily life, a town in Akita's northwest corner shaped by three formerly separate municipalities that merged along the Mitane River.

Junsa — the gelatinous aquatic plant harvested from still ponds — grows here in the agricultural lowlands between the river and Lake Hachirōgata. It is a crop that requires patience: hand-harvested from small boats, slippery and cool in the fingers. At the roadside station Kotaoka, local produce lines the shelves alongside rice-flour bread, and the fermented crunch of local pickles carries the particular sharpness of Akita winters. Further toward the coast, Kamagahama beach stretches in a wide arc of natural sand, where the Sunado Craft festival shapes the shoreline into something temporary and deliberate.

Inland, Fūjūzan rises quietly. The mountain was opened as a site of mountain Buddhism in the Heian period, and the legends attached to it — including those connected to the warrior Sakanoue no Tamuramaro — still circulate in the place names around its slopes. The three former towns — Kotaoka, Yamamoto, Hachiryu — each brought their own character to the merger, and that layering is still faintly legible: in the獅子舞 of Hachiryu, in the festivals along the Koikawa, in the different registers of landscape as the road moves from paddy to dune to forested hill.