Aizuwakamatsu

The Aizu basin was fortified in 1384, when the Ashina clan built Kurokawa Castle on the site of the present keep and grew into one of the strongest houses of the northern interior. Date Masamune defeated them in 1589 but held the basin only briefly: Toyotomi Hideyoshi took it from him the following year and gave it to Gamo Ujisato, who rebuilt it in stone in 1592 and renamed it Tsuruga, developed the castle town whose grid still orders the streets, and brought in lacquer workers and brewers whose trades the town lives by to this day.

From 1643 the domain belonged to the Hoshina family, later the Matsudaira, a branch of the Tokugawa house that owed the shogunate a debt of loyalty and made it a matter of principle. Its schooling was famously strict, centred on the Nisshinkan academy, and by the 1860s the lord Matsudaira Katamori was serving as military commissioner in Kyoto for the shogun.

That loyalty destroyed the town. In the Boshin War of 1868, Aizu led the northern alliance against the new imperial government; after defeat in the passes, the castle endured a month-long siege before surrendering. Among the dead were the Byakkotai, a reserve unit of teenage sons of samurai, nineteen of whom took their own lives on Mount Iimori when they saw smoke over the town and believed the castle had fallen. The domain was abolished, many families were exiled to the far north, and the castle was pulled down in 1874. The keep was rebuilt in concrete in 1965, and in 2011 its roof was retiled in the red tiles it had carried in the Edo period.

Aizu keeps its defeat as a living identity. The Aizu Festival each September parades hundreds of townspeople dressed as the lords, retainers and boy soldiers of the domain, and schoolchildren still learn the domain's code of conduct, whose closing line — "what must not be done must not be done" — is repeated as a local motto. The Byakkotai graves draw visitors and mourners all year.

The town is also a craft centre. Aizu lacquerware, worked here since the 16th century, is decorated with pine, bamboo and plum and with a gold-flecked technique associated with the region; the akabeko, a nodding papier-mache red cow, is a charm against illness made in the Aizu villages and now a mascot found across Fukushima; and painted candles, decorated with flowers because fresh ones were scarce in the snow, are the subject of the February festival. Martial arts, archery and shrine rituals carried on by old families remain part of local life.

Sake matters as much. The basin's rice, soft snowmelt water and cold winters have made Aizu one of Japan's leading brewing districts, and several breweries in the town open their halls to visitors. Higashiyama Onsen, with its riverside inns and geisha tradition, is where much of the town's hospitality is concentrated, and its dances appear at civic occasions.

About 118,000 people live in Aizuwakamatsu, the main city of western Fukushima and the service centre for a basin of farming villages. The population has been falling for decades as young people leave for Koriyama, Sendai and Tokyo, and the city has responded by courting technology work: the University of Aizu, founded in 1993, specialises in computer science and has spun off software firms that give the town an unusual profile for its size.

The older economy continues alongside it — rice farming in the basin, lacquer workshops, sake breweries, textiles and the tourism built on the castle and the hot springs. Most residents live in low houses and flats spread across the grid north and west of the castle, drive to out-of-town supermarkets, and shop in the centre mainly for crafts and meals out.

Winter shapes the year. Snow falls from December to March, roofs and roads are cleared as a matter of routine, and pavement heating or sprinklers keep the main streets passable. The 2011 earthquake and nuclear accident happened on the far side of the prefecture, but the damage to Fukushima's name cut visitor numbers here for years, and rebuilding that trade has been a long civic project.

Kozuyu is the dish Aizu is known for: a clear soup of dried scallop broth with taro, carrot, mushroom, shirataki and small beads of dried wheat gluten, served in shallow lacquer bowls at New Year, weddings and funerals, and now on restaurant menus all year. Wappa-meshi, rice steamed in a round bentwood cedar box beneath salmon, mushrooms or mountain vegetables, is the other formal local plate.

Everyday eating is led by sauce katsudon, a breaded pork cutlet dipped in a sweet-savoury sauce and set on rice with shredded cabbage, a version of the dish particular to the town. Nishin no sansho-zuke, dried herring pickled with the leaves of the sansho pepper tree in lidded stone boxes, is an old preserve from the days when the basin was far from the sea. Mountain vegetables, buckwheat and freshwater fish fill out the rest of the local repertoire, and at Ouchi-juku to the south soba is eaten with a spring onion used in place of chopsticks.

Aizu is one of Japan's leading sake districts, and the town's breweries sell directly from their halls. Locally the drink goes with grilled Aizu-jidori chicken and pickles; the sweet counterpart is awa-manju, steamed millet buns from nearby Yanaizu, and lacquer-wrapped sweets sold along Nanokamachi. Kitakata's ramen, twenty kilometres north, is close enough to be part of the local diet.