Ogata Village Polder Museum

Lake Hachirogata was the second-largest lake in Japan. Between 1957 and 1977 it was drained — a national project using Dutch engineering to create seventeen thousand hectares of farmland and a new village, Ogata, settled by farmers recruited from across the country. It is the largest reclamation project in Japanese history and one of the strangest places in the country: a grid of enormous rice fields below sea level, laid out on the bed of a lake.

The museum covers the engineering, the politics and the settlers, and is unusually frank about what followed — the project was completed just as Japan moved to reduce rice production, and the new farmers spent decades in dispute with the government over what they were allowed to grow. Outside, Prefectural Route 298 runs eleven kilometres between cherry trees and rape flower, which in early May is one of the great drives in northern Japan.