Towada, Aomori

The grid-pattern streets of this inland Aomori city carry an unusual confidence — wide, deliberate, planted with rows of Somei Yoshino along Kanchogai-dori, one of the designated hundred great roads of Japan. Towada grew from reclaimed upland, a planned settlement rather than an organic village, and that origin shows in the geometry of the place, in the way the streets meet at right angles and the civic buildings hold their ground without apology.

At the center of that civic confidence sits the Towada City Contemporary Art Museum, whose compound reads less like a gallery than a dispersed neighborhood of white pavilions, works by dozens of artists from Japan and abroad installed as permanent residents rather than temporary guests. A short walk from there, the Towada City Public Library — designed by Tadao Ando and opened relatively recently — offers five sunlit rooms where people sit without particular purpose, which in a mid-sized agricultural city feels like its own quiet statement.

The food here is specific: garlic, grown in the surrounding fields, turns up in everything, and Towada Bara-yaki — thin-sliced beef and onion cooked on an iron plate — has its own festival, the Bara-yaki Hakurankai. Stamina-dare, the sauce associated with the region, is bottled and sold at the roadside station near Denpojicho. Further west, the land rises toward Hakkoda-san, and the hot springs at Tsuta Onsen and Oirase Keiryu Onsen settle into the forested slopes. The Oirase river runs south to north through the city, and at its source, Towada-ko, the Towada Shrine stands where Edo-period Shugendo practice once organized the whole landscape into something sacred.