Ayase, Kanagawa

No train line runs through Ayase. You arrive by bus or car, crossing the gently terraced land that the Sagami River shaped over centuries — a plateau of mild slopes and small watercourses, where the fields have given way to residential streets without entirely losing the feel of the countryside. The Atsugi base occupies a substantial portion of the city, and its presence creates an unusual quality of open space, a certain quietness in the urban fabric that production crews have noticed and used.

At the Kanzaki Site, the ground itself holds a history that predates any of this. A moated settlement from the late Yayoi period, now laid out as a history park, it sits quietly within the city's ordinary rhythms — joggers pass, children visit on school trips, and the ditches that once enclosed a community remain visible in the earth. Nearby, Joryuji and Renkooji carry the accumulated grave markers of local clans, the Tooyama and Oohashi families, in the way that small temples do — without ceremony, as a matter of course.

The Ayase Sasara Odori and the Ayase Dai-Noryosai mark the calendar, and the rock band festival gives the city a different register entirely. On the table, Kozabuta — the pork raised here — connects the place to its agricultural past, when pig farming defined the local economy. That lineage persists in the food even as the landscape around it continues to change.