Kusu, Oita

Flat-topped mountains ring the basin on every side — mesa after mesa, their silhouettes cutting the sky above the valley floor where Kusu sits. These are not the soft, forested ridgelines common elsewhere in Kyushu. They are abrupt, table-like, and the locals have names for each one: Fukumanyama, Mannenyama, Kabukiyama. The town below them feels quietly enclosed, the Kusu River threading through farmland at around 675 metres above sea level, the air noticeably cooler than the coast.

The town's cultural memory runs in two directions at once. At the Toyogorimori Engine Shed Museum, a preserved steam locomotive roundhouse — registered as a tangible cultural property — sits beside the wooden station building of Bungomori, which has been receiving trains since 1929. A short distance away, the Kurushima Takehiko Memorial Hall holds an extensive collection of materials related to the folklorist and storyteller Kurushima, whose connection to the former Mori domain lordship gives the town its annual Nihon Dōwa-sai, a festival built around the tradition of oral storytelling. Yoshiroku-zuke, a local pickled vegetable product, appears in shops near the station — the kind of thing you buy wrapped in paper, not in a gift box.

Up at Kakumure Castle ruins, the dry-stone walls built in the Anō style still hold their shape on the hillside, the stonework precise enough to have earned the site a place on the continued list of Japan's notable castles. The Kyūsuikei hot spring sits further into the hills, away from the main road. Between these points, the basin opens and closes around you, the mesas always present at the edges, giving the whole place a particular sense of containment that has nothing to do with confinement.