Niyodogawa Town

Niyodogawa Town isthis kind of town.

1. 01Hyotan-zakura (ひょうたん桜) is an old Edo-higan cherry standing in the Sakura district, designated a prefectural natural monument as the “Oyabu no Higan-zakura” (大藪のヒガンザクラ). The town website gives its age as about 500 years and its height as 21 m. It says the base of the calyx swells into a ball, so from the side it looks like a gourd, and that it came to be called hyotan (gourd) cherry. It says the district's old name Oyabu (大藪) was changed to “Sakura” (桜) in 1958 after this tree. Another hyotan-zakura stands in Ikuimo, in the same town.
2. 02The Akiba Festival is a prefecturally designated festival of Akiba Shrine in Bessho, and Kuki Bridge is a registered Tangible Cultural Property, a submersible bridge over the Niyodo River. Yasui Gorge and Nakatsu Gorge are both prefectural natural parks. In the Choja district, local volunteers of the Dandan Club have worked since 2003 to restore terraced rice fields. In Shimonanogawa, the Shimonano-no-Sato facility has a reference room for Kaneko Naokichi, said to have contributed much to the prosperity of Suzuki Shoten.
3. 03A town in Agawa District, formed in 2005 by the merger of Agawa Village, Ikegawa Town and Niyodo Village; the town office is in Osaki. The town website says villages are scattered across the mountain valleys at an altitude of about 100–600 m, over 150 large and small, and that its main industries are timber and lumber and the production of Japanese tea. The population is 4,206 (1 September 2026).