Uchiko

We nearly skipped Uchiko. It was a name on the map between Matsuyama and the coast, and we only stopped because a woman at our guesthouse had pressed it on us with real insistence. I am glad she did. From the little station it is a fifteen-minute walk that gives no warning, ordinary streets and a convenience store, and then you turn a corner into Yōkaichi, a long gentle street of two-storey merchant houses plastered in warm ochre and cream, their latticed windows and heavy tiled roofs stepping up the slope, and the twentieth century simply falls away behind you. What money there was here came from wax — Uchiko was one of Japan’s great producers of the vegetable wax pressed from sumac berries, used for candles and cosmetics — and the fortunes it made built this street and then, mercifully, left it alone.

The Wax Town of Yōkaichi

We walked the length of Yōkaichi slowly, and for long stretches we were the only people on it. The houses lean in companionably, their plasterwork ranging from pale cream to a deep mustard-gold, and here and there the family crest is still moulded above a doorway. At the Kami-Haga residence, once a wax merchant’s home and workshop, we went in and saw the low sheds where the wax was pressed and bleached, the great beams dark with age, and a family’s whole life arranged around a trade that has almost entirely vanished.

An old man was sweeping the step of a shop selling handmade candles, and he nodded us in and lit one to show the flame — soft, yellow, and quite unlike a modern taper. We bought two.

The Uchikoza Theatre

A few streets away stands the Uchikoza, a wooden kabuki theatre built in 1916, restored and still very much in use. From outside it is a handsome barn of a building; inside it is a marvel. We paid the small entrance fee on a day with no performance, which meant we had the run of the place — the sloping floor of tatami boxes, the revolving stage turned by hand from a pit below, the trapdoors, the narrow hanamichi walkway running out through the audience.

A caretaker took us down into the understage cellar and let Lia help push the great wooden wheel that rotates the stage, grinning at her surprise when the whole floor above us began to turn.

The Green Countryside

Uchiko sits in a fold of low green hills, and beyond the old street the town gives quickly onto country — rice terraces, orchards, and the Oda river running clear through it all. We walked out past the last houses in the late afternoon, along lanes edged with persimmon trees and vegetable plots, past a covered wooden bridge, and met almost no one but a farmer on a bicycle who raised a hand.

It is the kind of place that does nothing to seize your attention and, precisely because of that, holds it. We stayed far longer than we had meant to.

Getting There

Uchiko lies in central Ehime Prefecture on the island of Shikoku, about twenty-five minutes south of Matsuyama by limited express train to Uchiko station on the JR Yosan line. Local trains take a little longer. From the station it is a flat fifteen-minute walk to the head of Yōkaichi, or a short taxi ride. The town is comfortably seen on foot in a half-day, and pairs naturally with nearby Ōzu further down the same line. Come on a weekday if you can — the preserved street is at its best when it is quiet, which most of the time it is.