Naganuma, Hokkaido

Rows of rice paddies and tomato fields stretch across the flat western plain, and then the land tilts gently upward into the rounded shoulders of the Maoi Hills. This is Naganuma, a farming town in Hokkaido's Sorachi region whose name traces back to an Ainu phrase for a long, narrow marsh — a quiet etymology for a place that has never quite been quiet in its history.

The Maoi Canal, dug through peat bog in the 1890s to drain and cultivate the Umaoi plain, is still there to walk beside. Naganuma Shrine, established in the early twentieth century with a division of the deity from Sapporo's Hokkaido Jingu, anchors the town's sense of continuity with its settler past. The novel *Umaoi-yano* by Tsujimura Motoko, written during the war years, pulled that pioneer history into literature. Then came the Naganuma Nike lawsuit — a legal dispute over a missile base that ran for over a decade — which made the town briefly a national stage for questions about land, security, and constitutional rights.

What remains now is agricultural in its bones: jingisukan marinated in the local style, rice of the Kirara 397 variety, soybeans, wheat, potatoes. The roadside station Maoi no Oka Koen sells these without ceremony. NAGANUMA Blue Base, a café carved out of a converted pig farm, serves dishes made from vegetables grown on-site beside an open fire. Naganuma Onsen, a sodium-chloride spring running as a free-flow bath, draws people from the surrounding plain on weekday afternoons as much as weekends. The Yuyake-ichi market runs on late Saturdays from late spring through early autumn — a modest rhythm that the town keeps without advertising it.