Anan, Tokushima

Red pigment pulled from the earth at Wakasugiyama — cinnabar, mined here since the Yayoi period — is perhaps the oldest industry this corner of Tokushima has known. The ore was extracted by fire-setting, a technique that left its mark deep in the hillside, and the site is now designated a national historic landmark. That continuity between ancient extraction and present-day production is something Anan wears without ceremony: the city is also home to Nichia Corporation, whose LED and phosphor manufacturing has made this stretch of the Kii Strait coastline a quiet center of global lighting technology.

The landscape holds its contradictions lightly. To the west, the Shikoku mountain range rises toward Tairyuji-san, where the eighty-eighth temple circuit's twenty-first sacred site sits at 618 meters, reachable by ropeway. Pilgrims walking the Awa Henro trail pass through temple precincts — Tairyuji, Heijoji, Kakurinji — each with its own designated path, some worn smooth by centuries of foot traffic. To the east, the Muroto-Anan Coast National Park meets the Pacific, with the Nakagawa River reaching the sea through flat agricultural land where bamboo shoots are harvested in quantity, a trade that dates to Edo-period shipments of bamboo goods to the Kyoto-Osaka markets.

Marble quarried here once supplied the National Diet Building in Tokyo, though you would not know it walking through the city's two commercial districts, Tomioka and Tachibana — ordinary port-town streets, functional and unhurried, with the strait visible between buildings on a clear day.