Matsue

The land between the two lakes has been settled since antiquity: the eighth-century Izumo Fudoki describes villages, hot springs and shrines around the shores, and Kamosu and other shrines nearby preserve some of the oldest forms of Shinto architecture. The regional centre in the medieval period lay inland, and Matsue as a town did not exist until the beginning of the 17th century.

Horio Yoshiharu, granted the Izumo domain after the battle of Sekigahara, found his hilltop castle at Gassantoda inconvenient and moved to a low hill beside the Ohashi River, where he built Matsue Castle between 1607 and 1611 and laid out a grid of samurai and merchant quarters below it. The Horio line died out, and from the 1630s the Matsudaira family, relatives of the shogun, held the domain for more than two centuries. The seventh lord, Matsudaira Harusato, known as Fumai, was a celebrated tea master whose enthusiasm shaped the town's tea houses, gardens and confectionery.

The keep survived the demolition of the castle's other buildings in the early Meiji period, leaving it, an attached turret and the stone walls as the original structures. In 1890 the Greek-Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn arrived to teach English, lived here for little more than a year, married Koizumi Setsu of a samurai family and wrote about the town's ghost stories and customs, drawing outside attention that the city still trades on. Matsue became the prefectural capital, absorbed neighbouring towns, notably in a large merger in 2005, and now has about 200,000 residents. The castle keep was designated a National Treasure in 2015.

Matsue is a tea town. Fumai's patronage left it with a dense culture of tea houses, garden rooms and sweet makers, and it is often grouped with Kyoto and Kanazawa as one of the three great wagashi cities. Ordering matcha with a seasonal sweet is routine here rather than a tourist ritual, and tea is served in the castle grounds, in museum rooms and at Meimei-an.

The city also stands at the centre of Japan's oldest layer of myth. The Izumo region is where the chronicles place Susanoo, the serpent and the transfer of the land to the heavenly gods, and where the gods are believed to gather in the tenth lunar month — called elsewhere the month without gods and here the month with gods. Shrines around the city are visited for matchmaking, and marriage prayers at Yaegaki Shrine are part of the local economy as well as of belief.

Lafcadio Hearn's presence is a third strand. His essays on Matsue's temples, dances and ghost stories remain the best-known foreign account of the town, and the museum, his old house and a strong local line in supernatural tales all follow from them. Otherwise the tone is quiet and provincial: the Izumo dialect is distinctive and slow to outsiders' ears, shops close early, and the day ends with people gathered along the lake to watch the sun go down behind the small pine-covered island of Yomegashima.

About 200,000 people live in Matsue, which is the largest city in Shimane, one of the two least populous prefectures in Japan. The wider city takes in farming villages, fishing ports on the peninsula and the hot-spring valleys, and much of that area is ageing and losing residents while the centre holds steady.

The economy rests on government and services: the prefectural administration, schools and hospitals are the biggest employers, alongside retail, tourism and a small software sector that the city has promoted for years. Fishing on the lakes and the coast, rice farming, and the making of sweets, soba and crafts fill in the rest.

Daily life runs early and unhurried. Commuters drive or take short bus and train journeys, the central shopping streets are quiet on weekdays, and the evening crowd concentrates in a few blocks near the station. Depopulation is the overriding local issue, together with the future of rural rail and bus services, and the balance between tourism and the town's steady, ordinary character. Water quality in Lake Shinji, on which the clam fishery depends, is a continuing public concern.

The lakes set the menu. Lake Shinji's seven traditional foods — shijimi clams, sea bass, whitebait, smelt, a small shrimp, carp and eel — are still served in the city, and shijimi soup is the everyday emblem, clouded, salty and eaten at breakfast as often as at dinner. Sea bass is baked in paper in a style said to have been favoured by the lords, and winter brings snow crab landed at the coastal ports along with firm, cold-water fish.

Izumo soba is the other staple: buckwheat ground with the husk, giving dark, strongly flavoured noodles, served cold in three stacked lacquer bowls with broth poured over each in turn, or hot as kamaage in the water they were boiled in. Simple soba shops are scattered through the castle district and the merchant streets.

Sweets are taken seriously. Matsue's confectioners make seasonal wagashi of bean paste, rice flour and sugar in forms tied to the tea calendar, several of them associated with Fumai's own preferences, and the city consumes green tea and sweets at a rate few places match. Botebote-cha, a frothy whisked tea mixed with rice and pickles in the bowl, is a local survival from the working past. Sake is brewed in the city and around Izumo, where brewing has deep ritual associations, and the region's rice and lake fish are its usual accompaniments.