Uryu, Hokkaido

Rice paddies stretch across the flat plain north of the Ishikari basin, and on a clear day the ridgeline of Shosanbetsu-dake rises behind them — a solid presence that shapes everything grown and walked around here. Uryu-cho sits at the edge of that agricultural plain, its main streets quiet on a weekday, the surrounding fields carrying the logic of the place more plainly than any sign.

The town's particular produce arrives in two registers: the sweetness of Shosanmetsu melon in summer, and the quieter, more medicinal note of Amachaduru tea — a vine cultivated here since the 1980s and still processed into what the town calls its own. A pure-rice ginjo sake, labeled simply *Uryu*, is also made here, rooted in the same rice culture that covers the surrounding lowland. These are not exports designed for tourist shops; they exist because the land produces them.

Above the flat fields, the Uryu-numa wetland climbs into a different terrain entirely — a highland bog registered under the Ramsar Convention, dotted with pools and crossed by alpine plants that change through the season. The ascent to it requires effort and, from the trailhead, a taxi. At the wetland's edge, Shosanbetsu-dake stands at the far boundary of the view. Down in the town, the calligrapher Tsuji Kyoun's gallery, Bokkyo, holds a quieter kind of attention — brushwork in a small museum opened a decade ago, where the ink and the silence feel continuous with the spare landscape outside.