Miyoshi, Saitama

The fields here are older than the suburb around them. On the Musashino plateau, where the Kanto loam layer once resisted cultivation, farmers in the Edo period devised a method of composting fallen leaves to coax fertility from the soil — and that practice, recognized now as a Japanese Agricultural Heritage, continues to shape the land in Miyoshi-machi. Sweet potatoes, the Kawagoe-imo, still grow in plots that interrupt the residential blocks, their vines low and unhurried against the flat terrain.

The town has no station of its own. Commuters fan out toward Tsuruse or Fujimino to the northeast, or toward Niiza or Tokorozawa in other directions, which means the interior of Miyoshi stays quieter than its position inside the greater Tokyo orbit might suggest. Route 254 and the Kan-Etsu Expressway cut through north to south, carrying freight and traffic, but the Kamitomi district — laid out during the Santomi Shinden land development ordered by Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu — holds its older proportions, long narrow lots running perpendicular to the road in a pattern unchanged since the Edo period.

Printing and publishing industries have settled here alongside the agriculture, drawn by the same access roads that bring the commuters. The result is a landscape that refuses a single register: a warehouse beside a sweet potato field, a residential street ending at a windbreak of trees. Miyoshi itself coined the word "Tokai-naka" — neither city nor countryside — and the compound is less a marketing slogan than an accurate description of what you see from any ordinary intersection in the town.