Fukuchiyama, Kyoto

Three rail lines converge at Fukuchiyama Station, and from the platform you can already sense the city's double nature — a working junction town that also happens to sit at the center of old Tamba province, where the Yura River once flooded seasonally and where Akechi Mitsuhide built his castle in the sixteenth century. The castle still stands above the city, its stone walls visible from the shopping streets below. Mitsuhide's reputation here is not the treachery that history textbooks emphasize but the flood-control works he carried out along the Yura River, which locals have not forgotten.

The food grown in the surrounding hills carries that same unhurried quality. Black soybeans from the Tamba brand, taro from Hōonji, chestnuts — these are produce that take a full season to develop, and they appear in local shops without much ceremony. Doburoku, the unrefined sake brewed at the Shuten Dōji complex on the grounds of a former mine, is the kind of drink that belongs to a particular valley and resists easy export. Nearby, the terraced rice paddies at Kehara — hundreds of narrow steps climbing the lower slopes of Ōeyama — are still cultivated, the ridge lines shifting with the light.

The city flower is the kikyo, the bellflower, which Mitsuhide is said to have used as his crest, and the name appears everywhere: on the public library plaza at the station, at the autumn festival held at御霊神社, in the quiet shorthand of a place that has decided to carry its own history without making too much noise about it.