Kameyama, Mie

At Kameyama Station, two railway companies meet on the same platform — JR Tokai hands off to JR West, and the line south toward the Kii Peninsula diverges from the one running west to Osaka. That boundary is not incidental; Kameyama has always been a place where routes converge and separate. The Tokaido once passed through here, threading the Suzuka Pass, and the town grew around the movement of people and goods between the capital and Ise.

The old post-town fabric survives most visibly at Sekijuku, a short distance from the city center, where the street holds its Edo-period proportions in stone and plaster. Closer in, Kameyama Castle's stone walls and the sole remaining tamon-yagura watchtower — the only one of its kind in Mie Prefecture — stand in a park without much ceremony. Nearby, the autumn procession of the kasa-boko floats at Oshiyama Shrine moves through the streets as a designated intangible folk cultural property, unhurried and local in scale. For something more quotidian, the miso-braised yaki-udon that originated at Kame-hachi Shokudo carries the smell of a sweet-savory tare that has been in use since the shop opened in the early postwar decades.

The Suzuka mountains press in from the northwest, and the valley at Sekisui-kei, below the southern face of Sengadake, runs clear enough to support kajika frogs and shakunage in the undergrowth. Sharp's large-scale manufacturing plant, which arrived in the early 2000s, shifted the city's economic gravity again, layering industrial modernity over the railroad town that had already layered itself over the castle town. Kameyama Triennale, a contemporary art festival held every three years, suggests the city is not finished accumulating identities.