Mihama, Mie

Peel an Iyokan somewhere along the Kisei Main Line and the scent fills the carriage before you've even set down your bag. This is citrus country — Mihama-cho, in the southern reaches of Mie Prefecture, where groves of Unshu mikan and Maiyaa Lemon climb the hillsides and the harvest, spread across varieties, runs through most of the year. The town's economy is quietly organized around this fact: when one variety finishes, another begins.

To the east, the land flattens and meets the sea. Shichiri-Mihama is a long stretch of rounded pebble beach — not sand, but smooth grey stones that shift underfoot and catch the light differently at every hour. It runs along the Kumano-nada coast and falls within the Yoshino-Kumano National Park, protected but not fenced off. The road that follows it passes the roadside station Paaku Shichiri-Mihama, where the pebble shore is close enough to hear. Inland, at the opposite edge of town, the mountains begin — Fudo-no-Taki, a waterfall in the hills, and Kaze-den-toge, a pass with views that belong to a different register than the coast.

What lingers is the ordinariness of the arrangement: citrus on the slopes, pebbles at the shore, a town that has been doing this since before the 1958 merger that joined Atawa, Kanziyama, and Ichiki-Oroshi into what Mihama-cho is today.