Ayabe, Kyoto

The Yura River runs through the center of town, unhurried, past the old textile buildings that still carry the silhouette of Gunze's early manufacturing decades. Ayabe sits where the San'in Main Line and the Maizuru Line cross, a junction city in northern Kyoto Prefecture that moves at a pace set more by the river than by the timetable.

The craft roots here go back to ancient weavers — the *aya* in the name itself points to silk — and that thread of hand-industry has never quite snapped. In the Kurotani district, papermakers continue to pull sheets of washi by hand, the whole settlement organized around the craft as it has been since the medieval period; Kurotani washi is now a designated Kyoto Prefecture intangible cultural property. Ayabe tea and matsutake mushrooms come down from the Tamba highlands to the north, and in summer the Yura fills with floating lanterns during the water festival, the sky above the river lit briefly before the current carries everything downstream.

The Ōmoto religious site, founded in 1892, occupies a quiet corner of the city, a reminder that Ayabe has drawn unconventional energies as well as industrial ones. Burial mounds from the mid-Kofun period survive at Kisaichi Maruyama and at the Hijiri and Shōbu tumuli — earth raised by the same hands, in a sense, that later wove silk and pressed paper. The city's industrial past and its older, quieter crafts sit close together here, without much fanfare between them.