Tsu, Mie

Unagi smoke drifts through the older quarters of the city on weekday afternoons — not a special occasion, just lunch. This is the eel culture that took root here during the Edo period, when Tsu served as a castle town under the Tōdō clan, and it persists in the ordinary rhythms of the place. The Ise Sangū Kaidō once brought pilgrims through, and something of that transit energy still runs beneath the surface of a city that is now, quietly, a prefectural capital.

Kōtaiji Senjuji — Takada Honzan — stands in the Ichinomiya district, its vast timber halls designated as the first national treasure structures in Mie Prefecture. On the days of the Oshichiya, a week-long gathering tied to the True Pure Land school, people arrive not as tourists but as practitioners, filling the precincts with a different kind of attention. Sakakibara Onsen, recorded in the Makura no Sōshi among Japan's celebrated hot springs, sits further inland, a small valley bath with a long memory.

The Mie Prefectural Art Museum holds works by Soga Shōhaku alongside a substantial Western collection. The Sekisui Museum keeps the ceramics of Handeishi and the documents of an Ise merchant family, the Kawakita. Tsu gyōza — large, pan-fried, served at school lunch counters and local canteens — is the kind of food that tells you more about a city than any monument. Keirōmine rises to the east; the fishing harbors of Kawage and Shiratuka face the bay to the west. The city holds its different geographies without making a point of it.