Seiyo, Ehime

Along the old post road through Uwamachi, the wooden shopfronts stand in careful alignment — their plaster walls and latticed windows unchanged in their proportions since the Edo period. Seiyo, shaped from five towns that merged in the early 2000s, holds within this single preserved streetscape an unusual density of local history: the Kaimei School, a brick-and-timber structure from the Meiji era, still functions as an educational archive, its corridors carrying the faint institutional smell of old timber and display cases.

The city's geography does much of the explaining. From the Uwa Basin at its center, the land drops westward toward Uwa Sea fishing grounds — ちりめんじゃこ and hamachi raised in the bays — and climbs eastward to the limestone plateau of Shikoku Karst, where the Ōnogahara dairy pastures produce milk ice cream sold at roadside stops. In between, citrus groves yield Iyokan and New Summer Orange, and the papermakers of Izumo continue pressing 泉貨紙, a handmade washi whose production stretches back four centuries. This east-west span, from sea to karst, is not metaphor but physical fact: a single municipal boundary containing an elevation difference that would span entirely different climatic zones.

The 乙亥大相撲 held at Otoigaikan keeps a ritual tradition rooted in a Sengoku-era votive offering. The かまぼこ板の絵展覧会 — a national exhibition of miniature paintings submitted on fish-cake boards — speaks to a different register entirely: civic, playful, quietly eccentric. Both persist without apparent contradiction, in a city still largely oriented toward its own agricultural and fishing rhythms.