Takikawa, Hokkaido

Gliders trace slow arcs above the flat expanse of the Sorachi Plain, and on clear days their shadows pass over fields of菜の花 — rapeseed flowering in dense yellow sheets. This is Takikawa, a city that grew at the confluence of the Ishikari and Sorachi rivers, its name drawn from an Ainu phrase meaning a river over which waterfalls cascade in layers. The land was settled by tonden-hei, farmer-soldiers, in the 1890s, and that history of deliberate cultivation still runs through the town's grain — in the wheat variety Haruyu-taka, in the onions and buckwheat that come out of these fields, in the sense that the soil here has been worked with intention for generations.

The flavor most associated with Takikawa is the marinated lamb of Matsuo Jingisukan, a company that originated here and whose seasoned preparation method became a template for the style across Hokkaido. The meat arrives pre-soaked in a sweet-savory sauce, and eating it over a domed iron grill is a weekday act as much as a festival one. At the Takikawa City Aviation Science Center, the town's more recent identity takes physical form — a facility that combines a glider museum with an actual airfield, where the sport of soaring has been folded into local life since the early 1980s. The Takikawa City Museum of Art and Natural History holds something stranger: the fossilized remains of Takikawa-kaigyū, a sea cow unearthed here in 1980, sitting alongside fine art in the same building, as if the deep past and the made object require no apology for sharing space.