Kakunodate

Kakunodate was founded in one act. In 1620 Ashina Yoshikatsu, a lord serving the Satake of the Akita domain, abandoned the old castle on the hill to the north and laid out a new town on the flat ground below, dividing it by a firebreak of open land into a northern quarter for samurai and a southern one for merchants and artisans. That plan, and much of the street pattern with it, has survived for four centuries. The Ashina line died out in 1653 and in 1656 the town passed to the Satake North family, a branch of the domain's ruling house, who governed it until the Meiji Restoration.

The weeping cherries came with a marriage. A bride from the Kyoto nobility is said to have brought saplings north in the seventeenth century, and the trees were planted along the samurai street, where several hundred of their descendants now grow; many are designated natural monuments. Cherry bark craft began in the late eighteenth century, taught to low-ranking retainers as a source of income, and grew into the town's characteristic industry.

Fires, which destroyed so many Japanese towns, largely spared the samurai quarter, and the Second World War left it untouched. In 1976 the district became one of the first in Japan to be designated an Important Preservation District for Groups of Traditional Buildings, which fixed its appearance and brought tourism. The cherry avenue along the Hinokinai River, now a national place of scenic beauty, was planted in the twentieth century. In 2005 the town merged with Tazawako and Nishiki to form the city of Semboku, and Kakunodate is now its best-known quarter rather than a town in its own right.

The town's craft is kabazaiku, made from the bark of wild cherry trees: strips are heated, glued in layers over a wooden form and polished until the grain shines like dark lacquer. Tea caddies, boxes and trays are the classic products, and workshops along the samurai street let visitors watch the work. It remains a protected traditional craft, taught by apprenticeship, and is unique to this district.

Its autumn festival is the other great local tradition. Wheeled floats carrying drummers, flute players and dancers are pushed through the streets by teams from each neighbourhood, and where two floats meet the question of which gives way is settled by pushing them into each other, sometimes for hours. The festival is held over three days in September and is a designated Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property. In February, the Hiburi Kamakura sees participants swinging burning straw bundles on ropes in the snow, a purification rite for the new year.

Kakunodate also has a place in the history of Japanese art: Odano Naotake, a retainer of the Akita domain born in 1750 and long claimed by the town, learned Western perspective and shading from Hiraga Gennai and became a leading figure in the short-lived Akita ranga school of painting. The town today lives with a tension familiar to preserved places — residents keeping ordinary lives behind fences that thousands of visitors photograph each spring — and manners are correspondingly reserved and polite.

The Kakunodate district is part of the city of Semboku, which has about 24,000 people in all and is losing them steadily; Akita's population is ageing and shrinking fast, and the school rolls here have shrunk for decades. Many houses in the old quarters are occupied by elderly owners, and some stand empty.

The economy rests on rice and tourism. The paddies of the Senboku plain grow Akita Komachi rice, one of Japan's best-known varieties, and farming still sets the calendar: transplanting in May, harvest in September, snow clearing from December. Tourism concentrates into the blossom fortnight and the autumn weeks, when coaches fill the car parks, and falls away almost entirely in midwinter. Craft workshops, inns, restaurants and shops depend on that rhythm, while many residents commute to Akita city or Daisen for work.

Winter dominates ordinary life. Snow is cleared from roofs to stop them collapsing, streets are ploughed before dawn, and sprinkler pipes melt ice on the main roads. The bullet train connection keeps the town less isolated than most places of its size in the north, and it is a reason young families occasionally return. The concerns discussed locally are depopulation, the maintenance of old houses that are expensive to keep, and how to spread visitors across more of the year.

Akita cooking is built for cold and for rice. Kiritanpo is the prefecture's signature: freshly cooked rice pounded, moulded around cedar skewers and toasted over a fire, then cut into a hotpot of Hinai chicken, burdock, mushrooms and spring onion. Inaniwa udon, made in southern Akita, is a thin, flat, hand-pulled wheat noodle with a silky texture, eaten cold with dipping sauce in summer and hot in winter.

Preserved foods fill the snow months. Iburigakko is daikon radish hung over a fire to smoke before pickling, sliced thin and eaten with sake or tea; mountain vegetables gathered in spring are salted for later; and shottsuru, a fermented fish sauce from the coast, flavours a hotpot made with sandfish. Tonburi, the small seeds of a summer cypress bush prepared until they pop like caviar, is a delicacy of Akita and is sometimes called land caviar.

Kakunodate's own tables show all of this alongside plain soba, rice grown on the plain and sweets made with local chestnuts and walnuts. Akita is one of Japan's major sake regions, and merchants in the old town sell bottles from breweries across the prefecture; the same shops carry cherry-bark tea caddies to keep the leaves in. In blossom season stalls along the riverbank sell grilled skewers, sweet rice-flour dumplings and sakura-flavoured ice cream.