Taki, Mie

At Taki Station, two rail lines part ways — one curving toward Ise, the other pushing south along the Kii coast. That junction, almost unremarkable in its ordinariness, is itself a clue to what Taki-cho has always been: a place where routes converge and then scatter outward. The old Ise Honkaido, the Wakayama Betsukaidō, the Kumano Kaidō — all three once crossed here, and the merchant temperament that grew from that convergence still shows in the local economy.

The agriculture runs deep and specific. Ise-imo, a yam variety tied closely to this district, goes into the filling of yōkan-style sweets and into the dough of jōyo manjū sold at roadside stalls. Free-range fertilized eggs from the farms around Kokekokkō Kyōwakoku end up at the Yama-no-Eki Yottetei shop, where the retail counter and a small restaurant share the same roof. Students at Aiko High School run Mago-no-Mise, a restaurant that uses local ingredients as its syllabus — the kitchen doubles as classroom, and lunch service is the exam. Across the valley, Niuōji, the temple known as Nyonin Kōyasan, receives pilgrims who could not enter the mountain sanctuary in Wakayama; the practice of faith here moved quietly around the exclusions imposed elsewhere.

The Tachiumesui irrigation channel, a designated cultural property, still carries water through fields that have been farmed since the area was recorded as the ancient village of Taki-no-Sato. The Sōga Ayu-gari Tōrō Nagashi festival sends lanterns down the river each year. Shōjo Manga-kan TAKI 1735, a private library of girls' manga built by a resident newcomer, sits somewhere in this same landscape — an archive of popular culture planted among rice paddies and temple precincts, which is perhaps the most honest summary of what Taki-cho actually is.