Higashikawa, Hokkaido

Snowmelt from Daisetsuzan feeds the taps directly — no municipal waterworks, just groundwater drawn from the mountain's base. That fact alone tells you something about Higashikawa's relationship with its landscape. The town sits at the western foot of Daisetsuzan National Park, forests covering most of its area, with Asahidake ropeway and the hot spring village of Asahidake Onsen at roughly eleven hundred meters marking the upper edge of ordinary life.

The town declared itself "a town of photography" in 1985, and that identity has accumulated weight over the decades. The Higashikawa International Photography Festival runs through summer, drawing submissions and visitors into a conversation about images that feels less like a promotional event and more like a working proposition the town has made to itself. Alongside it, the Shasin Koshien — a national high school photography competition — brings young photographers here each year, giving the streets a particular kind of attentive energy. Mitsuzakura Sake Brewery, relocated from Gifu, uses Daisetsuzan spring water for its brewing; Higashikawa rice, grown in the same watershed, has its own reputation among local producers.

Furniture-making and woodcraft have run through the local economy for generations, connected to the forests that surround the town. The roadside station Michikusa-kan carries the products — rice, sake, local vegetables — in one place, adjacent to the Kyodokan, where a relocated former town hall holds records of the settlement era. Tenjinkyo Onsen sits deeper in the gorge, near Hagoromo no Taki, a waterfall of considerable drop. The texture here is not rustic nostalgia but something more purposeful: a small town that has chosen specific things — water, images, wood, fermentation — and built a coherent, if quiet, argument around them.