Yusu Mizugaura Terraced Fields

Yusu Mizugaura Terraced Fields is one of the reasons Ehime keeps coming up whenever the conversation turns to Japan's landscapes.

The Uwajima coast is a drowned ria shoreline — steep hills dropping straight into deep water, with almost no flat land. The people at Mizugaura made some. They cut terraces into a slope above the sea and faced them with dry stone, each step about a metre wide, stacked up the hillside for a hundred metres above the water. The local phrase is that they cultivated until they reached the sky.

The crop is potatoes, planted in autumn and lifted in spring, and the households here have always run half-farming and half-fishing on a peninsula with no other option. The terraces were designated an Important Cultural Landscape — one of the first — and are on the national hundred best rural landscapes list. They are still worked, which is not true of most terraces at this gradient, and they are forty minutes down a peninsula road from Uwajima.