Akita
— — the prefecture that the snow keeps to itself.
Not only on a wall.
“A prefecture in the Tōhoku region of northern Honshu, facing the Sea of Japan, with the Ōu mountains at its back. The winters here are among the heaviest in Japan: roofs steep, eaves long, paper lanterns of the Kantō festival lit against an August sky that already knows how cold the coming February will be. The land grows the rice that becomes some of the country's most carefully made sake. The Akita dog comes from these mountains. The voice you hear in town is slower than in Tokyo, the consonants softened by the snow country. from the studio
Akita, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Akita is a prefecture on the Sea of Japan coast of northern Honshu, in the Tōhoku region. It covers roughly 11,600 square kilometres and is bordered to the east by the Ōu Mountains, which separate it from Iwate and Miyagi. Its capital is the city of Akita, with about 300,000 residents. The prefecture includes Lake Tazawa, at 423 metres the deepest lake in Japan, and a long stretch of the Shirakami-Sanchi beech forest, a UNESCO World Heritage Site inscribed in 1993. Population has been declining for decades; Akita has one of the oldest median ages of any Japanese prefecture.
Akita sits inside Japan's snow country (yukiguni). Sea-effect snow from cold Siberian air crossing the Sea of Japan dumps several metres of snowfall on the inland plains each winter; mountain towns like Yokote and Kakunodate can pass two metres on the ground for weeks. The Kantō Matsuri in early August is the great summer festival: 280-odd performers balance 12-metre bamboo poles strung with up to 46 paper lanterns each, on their hands, foreheads, hips, and shoulders. The Yokote Kamakura festival in February carves snow shelters with altars to the water deity inside.
The Akita-ken dog, one of Japan's six native breeds, was designated a national natural monument in 1931 and is the breed of Hachikō. Akita rice — particularly the Akitakomachi cultivar developed at the prefectural agricultural station and released in 1984 — feeds a long-standing sake industry; the prefecture is home to roughly 35 active sake breweries. Kakunodate, a former castle town in the interior, preserves a quarter of samurai residences lined with weeping cherry trees brought from Kyoto in the 17th century. The cherry bloom there usually opens in the last week of April.