Chiyoda, Gunma

The ferry at Akaiwa has no ticket window. You wait at the bank of the Tone River, and when the boat comes, you board. It has been this way for a long time — long enough that the crossing appears in documents connected to Uesugi Kenshin — and today it is still operated by the prefecture, still free, still carrying people between Gunma and Saitama as if the administrative boundary were a minor inconvenience. Chiyoda-cho sits on the Gunma side of this crossing, a flat, low-lying town in Oura District whose orientation has always been riverward rather than inland.

The Tone River is not background here; it is infrastructure. The Tone Ozeki, completed in the late 1960s, draws water toward the greater metropolitan area downstream, while salmon have returned to swim upriver past it. The fields between the levees grow rice and wheat, and the wheat finds its way into the Suntory Tone River brewery, which uses locally grown grain. Koon-ji temple, affiliated with the Koyasan Shingon school, holds a bronze ritual bell set designated as a national important cultural property. Horin-ji, a Ōbaku Zen temple that once received the patronage of Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, opened a temple lodging in 2023.

No railway runs through town. The nearest stations sit at the edges of the municipality, and a regional bus connects outward to Tatebayashi. This geography gives Chiyoda-cho a quality of deliberate arrival — you come because the ferry, the fields, or the river itself has given you a reason.