Hirono, Fukushima

At Hirono Station on the JR Jōban Line, the departure melody is a children's song — not a jingle, but an actual *dōyō*, the kind sung in school halls. It is a small, deliberate choice, and it tells you something about how Hirono thinks of itself. The town sits along the Pacific coast of Fukushima's Hamadōri, where winters arrive without much snow, and the old post-town of Hamakaido Hirono-juku once marked a stop along the coastal road north.

The layers here are not easy to separate. Narahahachimangu Shrine traces its founding to the eleventh century, and Jōtokuji temple, opened in the fourteenth century, holds a wooden Amida Nyorai statue designated as a prefectural cultural property. Against these, the Hirono Thermal Power Station has operated since the late twentieth century, its stacks visible from the coast. J-Village — the national football training center — opened in the late 1990s and later became a staging base during the 2011 disaster before returning to its original purpose. JFA Academy Fukushima and Futaba Mirai Gakuen, a recovery-oriented middle-high school, now sit in the same landscape as all of this.

The Michinoeki Hirono on Route 6 sells local produce and serves as a designated disaster-preparedness hub — a roadside station that carries two functions without apology. The Hamakudari Shinto ritual, the summer festival, the *dōyō* festival, the harvest celebration: the town's calendar moves through its seasons steadily. Hirono is not performing recovery; it is simply continuing to accumulate the ordinary — students, athletes, fishermen, engineers — in a place shaped equally by deep history and recent rupture.