Tashibu-no-Sho

Tashibu-no-Sho is a valley of rice paddies that has been farmed in essentially the same shape since the Heian period. It was an estate belonging to Usa Shrine, and because the valley is closed on three sides by hills the field boundaries never had room to be consolidated into the large rectangular plots that mechanisation imposed almost everywhere else in Japan. What survives is a medieval field pattern still under cultivation, with the farmhouses on the same sites as the estate stewards' residences.

It is a nationally designated Important Cultural Landscape and forms part of the Kunisaki Peninsula and Usa region's Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System listing. The valley is worked by people who live there, not maintained as an exhibit, and the difference is visible: the water is managed for rice rather than for photographs, which is why the flooded weeks in early summer are the window everyone waits for.