Shirako, Chiba

Sand gets into everything here — shoes, bags, the cuffs of a jacket left on a beach chair. The nine-mile stretch of shoreline along the Pacific that defines Shirako-machi is not a dramatic coast; it is wide and gradual, the kind of flat, open beach where the horizon appears to lean slightly away from you. Five swimming areas are marked along it, and in the off-season they sit nearly empty, the surf audible from the road.

The town's older identity belongs to the sardine fishermen of Kujukuri, whose haul-net technique arrived here in the sixteenth century and shaped the economy for generations. That history surfaces in the local kitchen:青魚つみれ, fish paste formed from the same blue-backed fish, and 青海苔 dried from the coastal waters, appear in shops and restaurants without ceremony. A different kind of catch lies underground — iodine-rich brine, drawn up as natural gas, feeds the springs of Shirakohama Onsen. The water there is a sodium-chloride type with measurable iodine content, and the sand baths that hotels have built around it are the most tactile expression of what the place offers.

Shirako Jinja, founded in the Heian period and home to a white-snake legend, stands quietly above this. Its main hall is a prefectural cultural property. Nearby, on weekdays, the sound most likely to reach you from across a hedge is the pop of tennis balls — the town holds more courts than almost anywhere else in the country, and groups of players arrive by bus from Tokyo, sixty-odd kilometers west, to train on them. It is an odd pairing: onsen town and tennis town, sardine coast and sports facility. Yet Shirako wears the combination without apparent strain.