Tsubata, Ishikawa

At Kurikara Pass, the road narrows and the tree cover thickens before opening onto the ridge where, in 1183, the armies of the Taira and Minamoto clashed. The place is called Kurikara, and the name recurs across Tsubata-machi — in the temple, the park, the festival — as if the town has never quite finished processing that afternoon. Kurikara Fudoji, a Shingon temple founded in the early eighth century, sits above the pass, its principal image the Kurikara Fudo Myoo, a deity coiled in the form of a dragon around a sword. Pilgrims still come on weekdays, without ceremony.

The lower ground is a different world. The Kahoku Lagoon reclamation project turned marshland into flat agricultural fields, and it is here that sunflower oil — pressed from local crops — and makomo, an aquatic grass cultivated in the shallow remnants of the old wetlands, have become the town's particular produce. In late summer, the reclaimed plain at Himawari Mura fills with sunflowers in a density that registers more as color than as individual plants. The Shiratoori Shrine, known for rain prayers, and the Kaga Shrine, established by the feudal lord Maeda Tsunanori to protect the reclamation works, mark the spiritual geography of this flat, deliberate landscape.

Between these two registers — the pass and the plain — Tsubata functions as a junction town, as it has since the old Hokuriku Road split here toward the Noto Peninsula. The Tsuba-shishi lion dance gatherings, held across the town's neighborhoods, keep that community structure visible in the streets at intervals through the year.