Kawauchi, Fukushima

The road into Kawauchi rises through cedar and oak, the plateau opening gradually above the valleys cut by the Kidogawa and its tributaries. Most of the land here is forest and mountain field — shiitake logs stacked beside farmhouses, patches of highland vegetables on the terraced slopes, the occasional curl of smoke from a ridge. The village sits at the center of the Abukuma Highlands, enclosed by peaks in the seven-hundred-to-nine-hundred-meter range, and the air carries the particular coolness of elevation even in the growing season.

Tenzanbunko stands near the edge of the village, a thatched-roof building housing the collected volumes of the poet Kusano Shimpei — roughly three thousand books held in a structure that looks grown rather than built. Each July, the Tenzan Matsuri is held here, drawing the literary and the curious alike. Not far away, Heifushinuma is known as a breeding ground for the Moriaogaeru, the tree frog whose presence Kusano Shimpei also wrote about, the pond and the poet bound together in local memory. Chofukuji, a Soto Zen temple founded in the late sixteenth century, stands quietly in the Kamikawachi district, its age unremarked upon by most who pass.

After 2011, the entire village was placed under evacuation orders following the Fukushima Daiichi accident. The lifting of those orders in 2016 marked the beginning of a slow return — rice paddies replanted, leaf tobacco tended again, the rhythms of agriculture resuming on a plateau that had gone silent. What you encounter here is a place in the middle of that process: not restored to a prior condition, but moving forward through its own particular effort.