Okayama

The plain around the lower Asahi River was the heart of the ancient province of Kibi, a power to rival Yamato in the fourth and fifth centuries, whose rulers raised some of the largest burial mounds in western Japan and whose myths were absorbed into the story of Momotaro, the Peach Boy. Kibi was later divided into Bizen, Bitchu and Mimasaka, the provinces that made up today's prefecture.

The city itself dates from the late 16th century, when Ukita Hideie moved his seat to a low hill called Okayama, where his father Ukita Naoie had begun a castle that was completed in 1597, diverting the Asahi River to serve as its moat and laying out a town of merchants and craftsmen below. Hideie backed the losing side at Sekigahara in 1600; after a short interval the Ikeda family took the domain and held it until the Meiji Restoration. Ikeda Tsunamasa had the garden of Korakuen laid out across the river, finished in 1700, as a place of retreat and entertainment.

The castle town became the prefectural capital in the 1870s, and the arrival of the Sanyo railway in the 1890s made it a junction for traffic to the west and, by ferry, to Shikoku. American bombing on 29 June 1945 burnt much of the city and destroyed the original keep, which was rebuilt in concrete in 1966; two of the watch towers survived and are Important Cultural Properties. Post-war Okayama rebuilt on a grid of wide avenues, gained the Shinkansen in 1972 and the Great Seto Bridge in 1988, and has grown into a city of about 700,000 people.

Okayama's best-known cultural possession is a folk tale. The city claims Momotaro, the boy born from a peach who sets out with a dog, a monkey and a pheasant to defeat an ogre, as its own, linking him to the Kibi prince enshrined at Kibitsuhiko Shrine and to the demon of local legend. His statue stands outside the station, the main avenue is named after him, the millet dumplings he hands out are the standard souvenir, and the August Uraja festival takes its name and its face paint from the ogre's side of the story.

The prefecture has a long craft tradition. Bizen ware, made at Imbe to the east, is unglazed stoneware fired for days in wood kilns, its colours produced by ash and flame rather than by decoration, and it is counted among Japan's Six Ancient Kilns. The ink painter Sesshu was born in the Kibi area in the 15th century, and the Taisho illustrator Takehisa Yumeji came from a village in the prefecture; both are well represented in the city's museums.

The tone of civic life is unhurried and moderately conservative. Korakuen is used as a public stage for tea gatherings and seasonal lighting. The Saidaiji Eyo in February, in which crowds of men in loincloths struggle for a pair of sacred sticks, is the loudest event of the year and is held in the depth of winter. Residents are attached to the sunshine statistics that give the prefecture its nickname, and local speech carries a distinct Okayama accent that outsiders find blunt.

About 700,000 people live in Okayama, making it the second city of the Chugoku region after Hiroshima, and it is divided into four wards. The population has been broadly stable while much of the surrounding countryside has shrunk, because the city draws students, hospital staff and office workers from across three prefectures.

The economy rests on transport, medicine, education, retail and the manufacturing belt along the coast. The city is a distribution hub for western Japan by virtue of its railway junction and expressway crossroads; Okayama University and a cluster of hospitals and medical research institutes make health care one of the largest employers; and farming in the surrounding plain produces the peaches, grapes and rice for which the prefecture is known.

Everyday life is centred on the flat, bikeable middle of the city: shopping in the Omotecho arcades and the station department stores, commuting on the trams and on crowded local trains, and evenings in the small bars around Nishigawa. Suburban districts of detached houses spread over the plain, and many families keep a car for weekend trips to the coast or the mountains. Current concerns include preparing for flooding after the heavy rain that struck the region in 2018, the ageing of the wider prefecture, and how to keep the central shopping streets busy against out-of-town malls.

Okayama's table is shaped by the Inland Sea and by an unusually sunny growing climate. Barazushi, also called matsuri-zushi, is the dish for celebrations: a lacquered box of vinegared rice spread with sea bream, prawns, conger eel, mamakari, mushrooms, bamboo shoots and shreds of egg. The story attached to it is that a 17th-century lord ordered meals limited to one soup and one dish, so the town hid the extravagance under a lid.

Mamakari, a small sardine-like fish of the Inland Sea, is pickled in vinegar and eaten with rice — its name is a joke about having to borrow more rice from the neighbours. Oysters are farmed along the coast in winter, and sawara, Spanish mackerel, is eaten raw here more readily than elsewhere in Japan. Two modern inventions are found in the city's diners: demikatsudon, a pork cutlet on rice under demi-glace sauce, and ebimeshi, dark fried rice with small prawns.

The prefecture's fruit is its proudest product. White peaches, pale and very soft, and Muscat of Alexandria grapes grown under glass are sold in cushioned boxes as gifts, and fruit parlours serve them on shaved ice or in tarts through the summer. Kibi dango, small soft mochi sweets named for the old province of Kibi, are sold at the station in boxes printed with Momotaro. Sake is brewed from local rice, and the hills of the prefecture supply the wood-fired kilns of Bizen with the ash that glazes its pots.