Morioka

The plain where three rivers meet was settled long before the castle town: Jomon sites and the eighth-century frontier fort of Shiwa lie nearby, built when the imperial court was pushing north against the Emishi. In the medieval period the district passed to the Nanbu, a warrior family from central Japan, and Nanbu Nobunao began a castle on a granite outcrop above the Kitakami in the 1590s. Work went on under his son and grandson until 1633, and the fortress became the seat of the Morioka domain, with a town of samurai, merchants and craft quarters laid out around it.

Iron made the town's name. The Nanbu lords brought in casters from western Japan, and by the eighteenth century Morioka kettles and pans were sold across the country. The domain remained poor, though, on cold ground prone to crop failure, and famine struck repeatedly. In 1868 the Nanbu joined the northern alliance against the new imperial government, were defeated, and lost land and status; the castle buildings were pulled down after the Meiji Restoration, leaving the walls.

The railway arrived in 1890 and the city became the administrative centre of the new Iwate prefecture, with a bank in red brick, a courthouse, schools and newspapers. Morioka produced an unusual number of national figures — the poet Takuboku Ishikawa grew up nearby, the writer Kenji Miyazawa studied here, and the statesman Takashi Hara was born in the city. Post-war growth was steady rather than dramatic; the Shinkansen reached Morioka in 1982, and the Akita branch still divides from the main line here.

Craft is the city's pride. Nanbu tekki, the heavy cast ironware of the former domain, is still made in workshops in and around Morioka: kettles with pebbled surfaces, teapots, pans and wind chimes, some of the workshops several centuries old. Morioka also keeps dyers, woodworkers and makers of Nanbu senbei, and shops selling all of them line the old streets near the rivers.

Its festivals are loud in a region known for reserve. Sansa Odori fills the main avenue for four nights in August with ranks of drummers, dancers and flute players; in June the Chagu Chagu Umakko leads working horses in bell-hung harness across the fields and into the city, a custom that grew out of prayers for farm animals. The autumn festival of Morioka Hachimangu brings out floats and horseback archery.

Literature runs through local identity. Takuboku Ishikawa's tanka about the Kitakami and Mount Iwate are learned at school; Kenji Miyazawa, the poet and children's writer from nearby Hanamaki, studied agriculture in the city and drew his imaginary country of Ihatov from this landscape. The mountain itself is part of daily life, watched for its snow line and its weather. Residents are polite, slow to boast and understated about their own city.

About 280,000 people live in Morioka, roughly a quarter of the population of Iwate, which is one of Japan's largest and emptiest prefectures. The city grew through the post-war decades and has begun to shrink, while the towns and villages around it are losing people faster and rely on it for hospitals, shopping and schools.

Work is mostly in prefectural and city government, hospitals, banks, education and retail, with food processing, brewing, ironware and electronics in the industrial belts along the river. Farming in the surrounding plain produces rice, apples, dairy and Japanese Shorthorn beef, and the Sanriku coast two hours east supplies the fish markets. Tourism is a growing part of the economy, though most visitors stay only a night or two.

Life is unhurried by the standards of Japanese cities: short commutes by car, bicycle or bus, riverbanks used for running and school sport, and shopping that has drifted from the arcades to roadside stores. Snow clearing is routine from December, and the city is used to deep cold. The issues residents discuss are depopulation and vacant shops in the old centre, hospital staffing across a vast rural prefecture, and how to keep young people from leaving for Sendai and Tokyo.

Morioka is known across Japan for three noodle dishes. Wanko soba is a ritual as much as a meal: buckwheat noodles arrive in a stack of tiny lacquered bowls, and a server refills each one the moment it is emptied, counting the total until the diner claps the lid shut. Morioka reimen was created in the 1950s by a cook from the Korean peninsula: firm, translucent noodles of wheat and starch in a cold beef broth, with kimchi and a slice of fruit. Jajamen, adapted from the Chinese zhajiangmian, is a flat white noodle dressed with a dark miso and minced meat sauce, after which an egg is beaten into the hot bowl and broth added to make a soup.

Beyond the noodles, the food is that of a cold inland domain. Hittsumi is a soup of hand-torn flour dumplings with vegetables; Nanbu senbei are thin wheat crackers baked in iron moulds, plain, with sesame or peanut, and sometimes broken into a soup. Iwate beef and Japanese Shorthorn cattle, mountain vegetables, mushrooms and freshwater fish fill out the year.

Dairy from the farms at the foot of Mount Iwate turns up as milk, cheese and ice cream, and the prefecture's rice and cold winters support a number of sake breweries; a well-known local brewer of both sake and beer operates in the city. Oysters, scallops and sea urchin come in from the Sanriku coast, and apples and blueberries from the orchards on the plain.