Sankyoson Viewpoint

Getting the most out of Sankyoson Viewpoint is less about the destination than about timing the light right.

The Tonami plain is farmed in a pattern found in very few places: instead of villages, each farmhouse stands alone in the middle of its own paddy, and each is surrounded on the north and west by a dense square of planted trees. The trees are called kainyo and they are a windbreak against the winter gales off the Sea of Japan, as well as a source of timber and firewood. There are several thousand of these islands scattered across the plain, and the arrangement is one of the largest surviving dispersed-settlement landscapes in Japan.

From the ground it is invisible — you just see fields and trees. From the viewpoint on the hills at the southern edge, the whole logic appears at once: a flat green plain to the horizon, punctuated evenly by dark clumps of woodland each with a roof in the middle. Flooded paddies in late April and early May reflect the sky and the effect is at its strongest; evening in the same season, with lights coming on one by one across the plain, is the other time to be up there.