Nakagawa, Tochigi

Along the Naka River in Tochigi's northeastern corner, the land holds an unusual density of the past — burial mounds on the hillsides, ancient administrative ruins at Nasu Kanga, and横穴 chamber tombs cut into the slopes above the river. Nakagawa-machi grew from the 2005 merger of Ogawa and Bato, two towns whose separate histories still run in parallel: one carrying the weight of Nara- and Heian-period governance, the other shaped by hot springs and the river trade.

The Bato Hiroshige Museum of Art, designed by Kengo Kuma, holds a substantial collection of Utagawa Hiroshige's work, including original brush paintings. The building itself — quiet, low, fitted to its site — gives the museum a different weight from the white-cube institutions of larger cities. Nearby, Bato Onsen offers a soak without ceremony, while the Kosago district, recognized by the "Most Beautiful Villages of Japan" association, is where Kosago-yaki pottery has been produced since the discovery of local clay in the late Edo period. The Fujita Pottery workshop still uses that same clay, and the ware it produces has a particular quality tied directly to the ground beneath it.

The Naka River running through town is not incidental — it shapes the local economy as much as the landscape. Ayu, Honmoroko, and the more unlikely温泉トラフグ, tiger puffer fish raised in the town's hot spring water, appear at the roadside station Michi-no-Eki Bato alongside other local produce. The river, the clay, the hot springs, the burial mounds: Nakagawa-machi is a place where the geological and the historical keep surfacing, quietly, in the same ground.