Azumi Basin

[4][failed verification – see discussion] Yoshimi Usui from this area wrote a long novel entitled Azumino, which won the prestigious Tanizaki Prize in 1974.

[5] The Azumi Basin was created by numerous streams and rivers that take their water from melting snow on the Northern Alps.

[6]: 4  Some streams suddenly disappear into the ground and some of these reappear as springs in the middle of green groves known in the local dialect as kemi.

[8] Because of the low water-holding capacity of its soil, the Azumi Basin had been a parched wasteland for many centuries, except for limited small areas close to rivers and springs.

In the early Edo period, after many failures, the mayor of Yabara village succeeded in building Yabara-segi along the 545-meter contour line.

Today, farm land in the Azumi Basin has twice the density of irrigation as the national average, giving rise to its high agricultural productivity.

-1687) was a former Nakagaya village head who led a failed appeal to the magistrate’s office of the Matsumoto Domain, asking for lower taxes.

It was in 1686, the third year of the Jōkyō era (1686) of the Edo period, when Azumidaira was part of the Matsumoto Domain under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate.

[11] He married a girl named Ryō from Sendai, but she could not get used to rural life, and he moved his family to Tokyo where he founded a successful bakery called Shinjuku Nakamuraya with his wife.

Kigenji Iguchi (1870–1938) was a Christian educator who founded Kensei Gijuku, a small private school in Hotaka, Nagano.