Yabitsu: a village built on smoke signals
The smoke that rose from this hill was a warning about the sea. The story starts
four hundred years ago.
A village that started with four people
In the Genna era, in the early 1600s, Tokugawa Yorinobu founded this settlement. He was the tenth son of Tokugawa Ieyasu, and the grandfather of Yoshimune, the eighth shogun.
Yorinobu moved two fishing couples here from Koza and gave them one job: watch the sea. Four people. That is where Yabitsu begins.
No road reaches the village. The houses stand on a slope that drops straight to the
water.
On the hill above, the domain built a signal station to watch for foreign ships.
When something was sighted, smoke went up, and the next hill passed it on until it
reached Wakayama Castle.
For this village, smoke was how you sent word a long way. It was the first signal.
Ohimachi: 350 years of saying thank you
After Yorinobu died, the villagers carved a seated figure of him and built a shrine,Nanryu Jinja. That was in 1672.
For more than 350 years since, they have gathered every January for Ohimachi, a
festival that thanks the beginning. Arida City listed it as intangible cultural
property in 2002.
Hadaka-mairi, the winter procession, had died out. In 2017 a younger group brought
it back after more than thirty years.
From watching to welcoming
The village that watched the sea became a place people come to fish, and then a
place that takes in visitors.
Four hundred years ago, one line of smoke went up here. It was always the signal that something was starting.
NOROSHI carries that smoke on.
