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Ashizuri-Uwakai NP, Ehime
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In the 1950s, Mizugaura hit on a profitable trick: plant potatoes in winter and harvest in spring. The early crop sold so well that cargo boats came from Osaka to collect it.
More than 50 field terraces climb a slope averaging about 40° to a top roughly 60 m above sea level. Their stone retaining walls average over 1 m high—a hand-built farm on a startlingly steep hillside.
By 1877, the slope held 8,900 plots, most still edged with bare earth. As sericulture boomed in the Meiji era, mulberry income gradually paid for stone walls—turning a soil patchwork into today’s stacked terraces.
The hillside’s spring potatoes even became a local spirit: “Dan-shaku” is authentic shochu made from potatoes harvested here, developed with a brewery as a new specialty for the community.
Sardine fishing, pearl farming and later yellowtail aquaculture helped sustain farming here. This intertwined land-and-sea livelihood earned the terraces national Important Cultural Landscape status in 2007.
The side channels are ingenious multitaskers: stone-lined grooves along both edges serve as paths for farmers and carry away heavy-rain runoff. Stone steps built into the walls provide extra ways up and down.
While nearby fields switched to citrus after the war, Mizugaura’s conditions were poor for citrus, so potatoes persisted. That local exception helps explain why potato farming still shapes the terraces today.
The terraces nearly vanished: cultivated area shrank from more than 30 hectares to about 2 as aquaculture expanded. Local residents formed the Danbata o Mamorōkai group in 2000 to bring fields back and pass them on.
Since FY2009, a potato-owner program has let people adopt a terrace plot: about 240 seed potatoes are planted there, and the harvest—around 100 kg—is provided to its owner.
Each April, the Furu-sato Dandan Festival centers on selling the season’s first-dug potatoes, turning the hillside’s early harvest into a community celebration.
Once a year, local elementary pupils help make bamboo-and-candle lanterns to light the stone terraces for an evening gathering, accompanied by shamisen and other Japanese instruments.
