Kakunodate

I was born in a town people call "the little Kyoto of Michinoku," and I never left. Visitors come for the cherry trees and the samurai district in spring, and for the three days of the omatsuri in September. For the other three hundred-odd days, it is an ordinary town that never appears in the tourist photographs.

What I write here is not a guide but a record from the inside — the years I pulled a hikiyama float, why I stopped, the streets where fewer lights come on each year, and what may become of all this. The good and the worrying alike, in the words of someone who actually lives here.