Annaka, Gunma

The lacquered box arrives on the platform at Yokogawa station still warm, its lid sealed with a paper band. Inside, rice has been cooked in an earthenware pot — the *kamameshi* from Ogino-ya, a lunch that belongs specifically to this junction, this altitude, this pause before the climb. Annaka sits at the eastern foot of the Usui Pass, where the old Nakasendo road once funneled travelers between the Kanto plain and the mountain provinces, and the sense of threshold has never entirely left.

The pass itself still carries that weight. Kumano Kōtai Jinja straddles the prefectural border at the summit, its main hall split between Gunma and Nagano — a shrine that belongs, administratively, to two places at once. Lower down, the former Usui Pass railway facilities stand as evidence of the engineering effort once required to haul trains up this gradient, and the Tetsudo Bunka-mura preserves the locomotives that did it. Along the Abt no Michi trail, walkers follow the old rail bed between Yokokawa and the day-bath facility at Toge no Yu, where the torokko train turns around.

At Isobe, the onsen quarter claims a particular distinction: the hot spring symbol — that looping mark printed on every Japanese map — is said to have originated here. Isobe senbei, wafers made with the mineral water, are sold in small packets near the baths. Elsewhere in the city, the Usui Silk Cooperative continues thread production at one of the few remaining filature mills in the country, a quiet industrial fact that sits alongside the cedar avenue at Annaka-Haraichi — a row of trees noted in the old Jomo karuta card — and the Annaka Church founded through the work of Niijima Jo, Gunma's first Protestant mission point. History here is not arranged for display; it simply persists, in the food, the mills, the roadside shrines.