Rural Landscape of Lake Iba

The Rural Landscape of Lake Iba: A Village That Runs on Water

In the village of Iba, on the flat eastern shore of Lake Biwa, stone-lined channels still carry spring water past the doorsteps of roughly three hundred households. The Iba River descends from the wooded slope of Mount Kinugasa, enters the village, and splits into a grid of waterways that thread between houses before draining into Iba Naiko, a shallow lagoon of the lake. In October 2018 this stretch of village, river, and paddy, covering 260.1 hectares, was selected as an Important Cultural Landscape under the name "The Rural Landscape of Lake Iba."

For most of its history, water in Iba was not scenery. It was infrastructure. Households drew it, washed in it, kept fish alive in it, and moved goods along it by flat-bottomed boat. A good deal of that daily use has faded, yet the channels, the stone steps leading down to them, and the houses built tight against them are still here, and they still shape how the village looks and works.

From Mountain Spring to Inner Lake

The setting reads almost as a cross-section. Mount Kinugasa rises to 432.9 meters behind the village; below it lies the flat ground where Iba sits; beyond that is Iba Naiko, and beyond that the open water of Lake Biwa. Abundant groundwater filtering down from the surrounding hills surfaces as the Iba River and the Uryū River, runs through the settlement, and finally reaches the lagoon.

A word on geography helps here. The shore of Lake Biwa was once fringed with naiko, shallow inner lakes partly enclosed by sandbars and reed beds. Iba grew on slightly raised ground on the former delta of the Iba River, which fed Lake Dainaka, the largest of these inner lakes. Twentieth-century reclamation drained most of Dainaka into farmland. What remains beside the village is Iba Naiko, its surviving western edge.

An Important Cultural Landscape is a designation under Japan's Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties. Rather than protecting a single monument, it recognizes an ordinary working landscape shaped by people's livelihoods and considered essential for understanding how they lived. Iba was recognized on two grounds among the official criteria: as a landscape of water use, covering ponds, channels, and ports, and as a landscape of dwelling, covering roofs and household groves. The village is also part of the Japan Heritage narrative "Lake Biwa and Its Waterside Landscape."

Centuries at a Crossroads of Water and Road

Little written record survives from before the medieval period, but Iba is thought to have supported the Iba clan, deputy military governors who served the Sasaki, the shugo of Ōmi Province. The oldest building in the village, the Niō-dō hall associated with Ōhama Shrine, dates to the Kamakura period and still serves as a core site of the annual festival.

In the early Edo period the area came under Kobori Enshū, the noted tea master and garden designer, in his role as a regional administrator. For the journey of the third shogun, Tokugawa Iemitsu, a shogunal teahouse villa known as the Iba Goten was built along the lowland highway at the foot of the mountain. The Saegusa, a hatamoto family, later kept an administrative residence in Iba until the Meiji Restoration and developed the waterway network that doubled as a map of district boundaries.

Farming was the village's livelihood. A land survey of 1679 rated about half of Iba as top-grade paddy. Trade mattered too. Boat registers track the village fleet of small farm boats growing from 93 in 1601 to 169 in 1677 and 482 by 1878, by which point there was close to one boat for every household. A flourishing late-Edo trade in hemp cloth brought wealth; the Abe merchant family, enriched by it, funded buildings at the local shrines. A prefectural survey of 1880 counted 1,984 residents in 496 households, placing Iba among the largest settlements in Shiga after established towns such as Ōtsu, Hikone, and Ōmi-Hachiman.

Why Iba Was Recognized

What sets Iba apart is how thoroughly the village was organized around moving and using water. The channels were never only for irrigation. They functioned as streets. Before the automobile, flat-bottomed boats called tabune carried people, rice, and tools to outlying fields and out onto the lake. The early-modern village was divided into self-governing neighborhood units known as machi, and their boundaries often ran along the main channels, so the water grid was at the same time a map of the community.

The selection recognized Iba as essential to understanding how people on the shore of Lake Biwa used water and decided where to settle. Few inner-lake villages have kept the physical fabric, the stone channels, the landings, and the houses standing at the water's edge, together with the layered social organization that produced it.

What to Look For When You Walk

The channels themselves repay a slow walk. They are built of Koto rhyolite, a stone quarried from Iba mountain, and the water runs clear enough that carp are easy to spot. In early summer fireflies appear along the banks.

Watch for the kawato: stepped stone landings that drop from each property down to the water. Some are fitted with ikesu, small holding pens where fish caught in the lake or river were kept alive until they were needed in the kitchen. Residents still use the kawato to rinse vegetables and tools.

Look, too, at how the houses meet the water. Land on the narrow raised ground was scarce, so some houses were built to rise straight from the stone wall of a channel, a style called kishidachi. Others show funaita-bari, walls clad with planking salvaged from old boats. Behind the main houses are small cultivated plots planted with useful trees such as persimmon, sansho pepper, and windmill palm, with a narrow ornamental strip between the house and the lane.

One practical note: Iba is a residential village, not an open-air museum. The lanes are narrow and the gardens are private, so walk quietly and keep to the public paths.

The Sakakudoshi: Shrines Brought Down a Cliff

The largest event in Iba is the festival built around the Sakakudoshi, held every year on May 4. Three mikoshi, portable shrines, are taken up to Sanpōsan Shrine near the summit of Iba mountain and then dragged back down a steep slope of about 500 meters by the young men of the parish. Each shrine weighs more than 500 kilograms. The descent drops roughly 175 meters and passes a series of named obstacles, the most demanding a pitch close to 60 degrees. Counted among the unusual festivals of the Ōmi region, it is said to carry more than 800 years of history.

After the descent, the shrines pass through the village to a resting place in front of the Niō-dō and then continue toward Iba Naiko. Until 1934 this final stage was a procession by boat along the channels. Falling water levels and the growing difficulty of securing boats brought it to an end, and from 1935 the route moved onto land. Even so, the path still follows the course of the water, from the mountain spring through the village channels to the inner lake.

Getting There and Nearby

Iba is reached from JR Notogawa Station on the Biwako Line. The village is roughly a 15- to 20-minute walk from the station, and the city's small on-demand "chokotto" bus and taxi services also cover the area.

There is more to see close by. Notogawa is known for its landmark giant water wheel. A few kilometers south lie the ruins of Azuchi Castle, the short-lived headquarters of Oda Nobunaga, while Kannonshōji temple stands on Mount Kinugasa as one of the temples of the Saigoku pilgrimage route. The reed beds and quiet waterways of the wider Lake Biwa shore are good for birdwatching, and Iba Naiko itself is a calm place for a paddle.