Tottori

The plain where the Sendai River reaches the sea was the heart of Inaba province, and the name Tottori, written with characters meaning bird-taking, appears in the eighth-century chronicles as the home of people who caught waterfowl in its marshes. A castle was built on Mount Kyusho in the mid-sixteenth century, and in 1581 Toyotomi Hideyoshi took it not by assault but by buying up the region's rice and cutting the garrison off until it starved — a siege remembered in Japan as one of the harshest of the period.

From 1616 the Ikeda family held Tottori as the castle town of a large domain covering Inaba and Hoki provinces, and the grid of merchant streets below the castle dates from that time. The castle's buildings were pulled down after the Meiji Restoration, leaving the walls and moat, and the prefecture that took the city's name was merged into Shimane in 1876 before being re-established a few years later.

Two disasters shaped the modern city. An earthquake in 1943 killed well over a thousand people and flattened much of the centre, and in 1952 a fire that began in a single house spread through the rebuilt wooden streets and destroyed thousands of buildings. The city that rose afterwards is low, wide and modern, with broad firebreak avenues. Mergers in 2004 brought in surrounding towns and villages, pushing the boundaries to the pear orchards and the coast, while the prefecture as a whole has continued to lose people to Osaka and Tokyo.

Tottori's best-known story is the White Hare of Inaba, in which a hare tricked sharks into forming a bridge across the sea, was skinned for the deception and was healed by a passing deity. The shrine at Hakuto, west of the city, marks the spot, and the tale has made it a place to pray for love and marriage. The myth also ties the area to the older mythology of Izumo, along the coast in Shimane.

The Inaba region has its own lion dance, kirin-jishi, performed at shrine festivals by two dancers under a long cloth with a single-horned head, to drums and flutes. The city's summer festival, Shan-Shan, takes its name from the sound of bells on the large decorated umbrellas that dancers spin through the streets in August — a dance traced to a legend of an old man who danced with an umbrella to pray for rain during a drought.

Craft matters here. Yoshida Shoya made Tottori a centre of the mingei folk craft movement in the twentieth century, founding a museum of everyday objects in 1949 and encouraging local potters, and kilns in the prefecture still work in that tradition. Tottori is also proud of its comic-book connections: the prefecture is the home ground of two celebrated manga artists, and the airport carries the name of a detective series whose creator grew up nearby. Manners are those of small-town Japan — quiet, formal with strangers and warm once introduced.

About 180,000 people live in Tottori, which has the lowest population of any prefectural capital in Japan, in the least populous prefecture of all. The city is spread thinly: a compact commercial core around the station, then suburbs, rice fields, orchards and fishing villages inside the same boundaries.

Government, education and health care employ a large share of the working population, since the prefectural offices, Tottori University and the main hospitals are all here. Farming and fishing remain central to the wider economy — pears, watermelons, scallions and rice on the plain, crab, squid and sweet shrimp landed at Karo — alongside electronics and food-processing plants and a tourist trade built on the dunes.

The rhythm is unhurried. Shops and offices empty by early evening, cars outnumber buses outside the centre, and life turns with the seasons: pear picking in late summer, crab from November, snow shovelling in January and February. Depopulation and ageing dominate local politics, along with the cost of keeping rural bus and rail lines running and the effort to draw visitors beyond the dunes.

Winter belongs to crab. Matsuba-gani, the male snow crab landed on the San'in coast, is boiled, grilled or served as sashimi, and the smaller, cheaper beni-zuwai red snow crab appears on everyday menus. Karo port also lands pale squid, eaten raw in summer, and a sweet shrimp too delicate to travel far, which is one reason to eat it here.

The everyday dish is ramen made with a beef-bone broth, gyukotsu ramen, clear and lighter than the pork-bone soups of western Japan and a local speciality rather than a national one. Tofu chikuwa, a steamed roll of fish paste mixed with tofu, is made in the east of the prefecture, whose households eat more chikuwa than those of any other; it is served grilled with soy and ginger. Curry is popular here too, and curry houses are easy to find.

The land supplies the rest. Nijisseiki pears, crisp, pale green and juicy, are the prefecture's emblem, sold fresh in autumn and turned into juice, jelly and ice cream sold along the road to the dunes. Tottori beef is raised in the hills, the prefecture grows large quantities of scallions, yams and watermelons, and local sake breweries work with rice from the plain. Rakkyo, a shallot-like bulb grown in the sandy soil at the edge of the dunes, is pickled and eaten with curry — the dunes on a plate.