The Scenery of the Mogami River and the Town of Aterazawa

A Town Built at the River's Turning Point

The Mogami River makes one of its sharpest changes of direction at Aterazawa. After cutting eastward through a gorge in the Asahi Mountains, it receives the waters of the Tsununo River, strikes the foot of Mount Tateyama, and swings from a northbound to a southbound course before opening out into the Murayama Basin. The town of Aterazawa grew at exactly this hinge in the river. Today it forms the eastern part of the town of Oe in Yamagata Prefecture.

On 27 March 2013, this place was selected as an Important Cultural Landscape under Japan's Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties. It was the first such designation in Yamagata Prefecture. The official wording describes it as a townscape whose urban structure is layered and whose urban functions are combined, with origins in both a castle town and a river-port settlement.

That description is worth unpacking, because it explains why a working provincial town, rather than a single temple or monument, was judged worthy of national protection. Aterazawa is not preserved as a museum piece. It is a place where several centuries of decisions about how to use the land remain visible in the streets people walk every day.

Four Eras Stacked on the Same Ground

Local researchers usually divide the growth of Aterazawa into four periods, and each has left a trace that can still be read.

The first belongs to the medieval era. Mount Tateyama, rising directly above the river, was a natural fortress, and a member of the Oe clan named Aterazawa Mototoki is said to have built a mountain castle there during the Shohei era (1346–1370). The clan held the surrounding district for roughly 270 years. The Oe traced their line back to Oe no Hiromoto, an influential administrator of the early Kamakura government. At the foot of the hill, the place name Motoyashiki, meaning "the original residence," still marks where a town once clustered around the castle.

The second period was the heart of Aterazawa's prosperity. During the Edo period the town became a river port. Cargo arriving on small craft was transferred here onto flat-bottomed boats called hirata-bune for the journey downstream, which made the town a transfer point on the great river highway. The main commodity was aoso, a ramie fibre produced in the mountain villages and prized for weaving. Yonezawa Domain established a storehouse and boat estate at the landing. In the early seventeenth century Sakai Naotsugu became lord of Aterazawa, built Kourushikawa Castle, and laid out a castle town. From that point the settlement worked as a political centre as well as a commercial one.

Then came the railway. When rail lines were laid in the modern era, trade that had once reached the whole country by water was redirected overland toward nearby cities such as Yamagata and Sagae. A new commercial quarter grew up around the station.

The fourth period is the present. Roads were widened as motor vehicles spread, and after a major fire in 1936 the town rebuilt its streets while keeping the plot divisions inherited from the Edo period. The result is unusual: a single town centre where the layout of four distinct eras can be traced at once.

Why It Was Recognised

An Important Cultural Landscape is a relatively young category of cultural property, created by a 2005 revision of the protection law. It honours places shaped by the ordinary working life of a region rather than by a famous architect or a single historic event. Aterazawa fits that idea closely.

The selected area is divided into three districts. The Tateyama district covers the wooded ridge crowned by the medieval castle site. The Mogami River district follows the watercourse that carried the boats. The Aterazawa townscape district takes in the former castle town and the streets that grew from the river landing. Within these zones, thirty-five features have been identified as essential components of the landscape, grouped into six kinds: rivers, roads, bridges, archaeological sites, streetscapes and buildings.

What ties the three districts together is the way river commerce, mountain agriculture and the daily life of a castle town became interlocked over time. Each era did not erase the one before it. Instead the layers settled on top of one another, and that visible accumulation is the quality the designation sets out to protect.

What to See When You Visit

The clearest way to grasp the whole landscape is to climb to Tateyama Park, which stands on the site of Aterazawa Tateyama Castle. The castle site itself was designated a National Historic Site in February 2009. From the pavilion at the top, the Mogami River curves below in a wide loop, with the ridges of the Asahi Mountains to the west and the Murayama Basin spreading east. The viewpoint was chosen as a Mogami River scenic point in 1997 and named one of Japan's hundred best walking trails in 2002. The park is also known by the affectionate nickname "Japan's Number One Park." In spring the cherry trees near the summit pavilion draw people up for the blossom.

From that height the river crossings stand out. In the Edo period people reached the far bank by ferry. A wooden bridge was built in 1883, and in 1941 it was replaced by a concrete bridge whose three arches still span the water. Seen from the park, the arches and their reflection together form a shape often compared to a pair of spectacles resting on the river.

Down in the town, Haramachi-dori is the street to walk slowly. It runs through the quarter that began as the castle town of Kourushikawa Castle, and along it stand misegura, the thick-walled merchant storehouses, including buildings that once held sake breweries. They are quiet evidence of the wealth that river shipping once brought.

The town's calendar also belongs to the landscape. The Oe autumn festival in September sends decorated musical floats and a lion dance through the streets, carrying on a festival culture shaped by the Edo-period townspeople. A doll fair fills the streets in March, and in June the town hosts a national contest for the Mogami River boatmen's song, the work chant that once kept time for the rivermen.

Getting There and Nearby Attractions

Aterazawa is the terminus of the JR Aterazawa Line, and Aterazawa Station sits at the centre of the landscape. The castle site at Tateyama Park is about a fifteen-minute walk from the station, so a visit can be made comfortably without a car.

Close at hand are the Michi-no-Eki Oe roadside station and the Oe Town Exchange Station, both useful for local food and information. Further out, the hot-spring lodge of Oku-Oe Yanagawa Onsen offers a quiet base in the hills. The surrounding district is fruit country, known for apples, La France pears, peaches and cherries, and the legacy of the aoso trade survives in ramie-flour noodles. Local sake is brewed here as well. Volunteer guides based in Oe can lead visitors through the town and explain the constituent features along the way.