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Oze NP, Fukushima
Claim this place to tell your story your way.
Each summer, Hinoemata saves winter snow for about 5 months, then turns it into a sledding run at its Midsummer Snow Festival. Visitors park at the roadside station that houses this information center.
At the roadside station’s restaurant, Hinoemata’s tachi-soba is made from 100% buckwheat, with no binder. Its thin dough is layered and sliced like fabric—hence the name, “cloth-cut soba.”
Hattō is a village treat of buckwheat-and-rice-flour dough, boiled into diamonds and topped with sugared egoma. One local tale says a lord loved it so much he forbade it except on feast days—hence its “forbidden” name.
A local food writer documented Hakone salamander, once valued as a protein in Hinoemata, served whole as tempura at a village inn. It’s a vivid record of the resourcefulness behind the area’s mountain cuisine.
Yamōdo cuisine began with Hinoemata’s forestry workers living in mountain huts: they carried buckwheat, miso and salt, then cooked with wild plants, mushrooms, fish and game gathered nearby. Those practical camp meals became local tradition.
Local tradition traces Hinoemata Kabuki to villagers who saw performances on an Ise pilgrimage and brought the art home. Today, local residents fill every role, from actors to backstage crew, alongside their everyday work.
This center is also the Fukushima-side contact for the Aizu-Numata Kaidō. For centuries, the route linked Aizu and Joshu; lakeside traders exchanged Aizu rice and sake for salt and oil brought from Numata.
Rebuilt around 1897, Hinoemata’s kabuki stage has a roof that fools the eye: from the front it looks hip-and-gable, but it is actually gabled with a front eave—a distinctive local style called kabuto-zukuri.
Because Hinoemata lacked clay for plastered walls, even its storehouses were wooden. To protect supplies from fire, villagers built these board storehouses away from homes, often in fields—a distinctive feature of the old settlement.
Six Jizō statues in Hinoemata commemorate infants killed through “mabiki,” a practice during crop failures. Fukushima Prefecture says they were raised to mourn the children and console their mothers.
