Aibetsu, Hokkaido

Mushrooms arrive at Aibetsu before almost anything else registers — the town is known across Hokkaido for cultivating maitake, enoki, shiitake, and nameko, and the smell of damp cultivation sheds drifts faintly into the surrounding air. The town sits at the northeastern edge of the Kamikawa basin, where the Ishikari and Aibetsu rivers meet, with the greater part of its land covered in forest. That ratio of mountain to settlement gives the place its particular density: quiet, working, oriented inward toward its own harvests.

The name itself comes from Ainu — *aipet*, meaning something like "arrow river" or "thorned river" — and settlers from Wakayama, Gifu, and Aichi arrived here in the 1890s to clear and farm this basin edge. One thread of that settlement survives in the Aibetsu Gifu Shishi Kagura, a traditional lion dance designated as a town cultural property. At Aibetsu Jinja, a rope of extraordinary scale and weight is hung each year-end, lit during the new year period. These are not performances staged for outsiders; they are the town's own calendar.

At Kyowa Onsen, a simple carbonic spring bathhouse offers day visits and overnight stays, with a full-course mushroom meal as the centerpiece. Stone formations on Ishigakiyama, shaped by columnar jointing, attract rock climbers. Outdoors, the sculpture park displaying works by Aibetsu-born artist Nakai Nobuya sits quietly among the trees. The Kinoko no Sato Festival punctuates the year, but the town's rhythm runs on cultivation, timber, and the slow accumulation of forest seasons.