Morioka and Its Towns: Learning About Winter, Tourism, and Experience in Northern Iwate

It has been about nine months since I moved to northern Iwate.
Although I had lived in the prefecture before in Morioka (the city that ranked second on The New York Times’ list of the best places to visit in 2023), this is the first time I am experiencing winter from a rural perspective, living day to day in a town like Ichinohe, just one hour away from Morioka.

Here, winter not only changes the weather, but it also changes everything. The mountains change, and even the buildings seem different under the snow. The sounds change as well: tractors clearing snow appear, the constant crunch beneath one’s feet becomes familiar, and the birds mark the season. The song of the swans (白鳥), for example, becomes part of the soundscape, while other animals retreat into the mountains or fall into silence.

Within this context, I had the opportunity to attend the Yuki Akari event in Okunakayama. The event was simple and brief: small lights resting on the snow, short dances, a warm soup shared at night, and fireworks that lit up the sky for only a few moments. It was not an event designed to gather crowds or attract attention from afar. Rather, it was an intimate scene, deeply rooted in winter life in this region. And inevitably, I found myself thinking that in cities, light competes, while in villages, it accompanies.

Seeing Yuki Akari at this scale led me to reflect on how I have been looking at this region and how I want to continue telling its story. For a long time, I thought about my writing and my work in terms of reaching a broad audience, assuming that places like this needed to be explained or presented in a more obvious way.

Living here has taught me the opposite. What exists in northern Iwate, in Kenpoku, in Ichinohe, in Okunakayama, does not align with what most people seek when they think about traveling. And perhaps that is precisely its greatest value.

Morioka is undoubtedly the center of the region and a beautiful city, worthy of the recognition it has received, and I will always defend that. However, Morioka would not be what it is without the surrounding towns, without the landscapes, seasons, and communities that sustain this balance. Living in one of those towns has allowed me to see this relationship from the inside, not as a visitor, but as someone who is still learning and who hopes, one day, to fully become part of everything that happens here (even if, little by little, I already am).

After recently obtaining my driver’s license, being able to “unlock” Okunakayama more freely has been a small personal achievement. At the same time, it has allowed me to understand the territory better and realize that the value here is not in accumulating places, but in moving through them slowly, expanding the map little by little.

I am still far from being an expert (and even farther from having perfect Japanese), but if I am going to speak about this place and help promote it, I want to do so from a different perspective: focusing on small-scale experiences, on a way of traveling that is more intimate, slower, and, paradoxically, more valuable. A kind of luxury that is not advertised, but quietly felt.