Numazu

Where it sits. Numazu is a city of roughly 185,000 people in eastern Shizuoka, occupying the hinge where the Izu Peninsula joins the main body of Honshu. It faces Suruga Bay, which at about 2,500 metres is the deepest bay in Japan, and it looks across that water at Mount Fuji from a distance of around thirty kilometres — close enough that the mountain fills the northern sky and far enough that the whole cone is visible from sea level, which is not true from most of the towns nearer to it. The city runs from the flat delta of the Kano River in the east to the steep, indented shore of Uchiura Bay in the west, and that western half is a different world from the town centre: mandarin terraces dropping to the water, fish farms moored in the coves, and villages with one road in.

The working port. Numazu Port handles the local fleet and, more importantly, the processing that made the city's name. This is Japan's leading producer of aji no himono — horse mackerel split, brined and dried in the wind off the bay — and the fish market and its surrounding restaurants trade on it alongside sakura shrimp and the deep-water species that Suruga Bay produces because of its depth. Over the harbour mouth stands the Byūo, a colossal steel flood gate completed in 2004 to shut the inner harbour against tsunami, with a public observation deck about thirty metres up that gives the best free panorama in the city: the port below, the bay, the Izu ridges and Fuji behind the town. The Numazu Deep Sea Aquarium beside the market is small but genuinely unusual, built around the bay's abyssal fauna and holding preserved coelacanth specimens.

Pines, villas and viewpoints. Along the eastern shore runs Senbon Matsubara, a belt of black pines planted from the sixteenth century onward as a windbreak and now stretching some ten kilometres behind the beach; the classic composition frames Fuji through the trunks, and the grove has been a subject for painters and photographers for centuries. Set within it is the Numazu Imperial Villa Memorial Park, the grounds and buildings of an 1893 retreat built for the crown prince, whose mild winters made the coast an imperial convalescent resort. Behind the city, Kanuki-yama rises to under 200 metres with a park and observation deck at the top, reachable on foot in twenty minutes for a view down the coast. At the far western end of the city, Ōsezaki hooks out into the bay as a narrow spit crowned with ancient pines and containing an improbable freshwater pond metres from the sea; the water off its point is one of the best-known shore-diving sites in mainland Japan.

On screen. Since 2016 Numazu has been the physical home of Love Live! Sunshine!!, whose school and nine principal characters are set in the Uchiura district on the city's western shore. The correspondence is exact enough that fans navigate by bus stop: the harbour at Uchiura, the ferry to the small island off the coast with its shrine, the mandarin slopes, the shopping arcades near Numazu Station and the seafront at Mito all appear with their real geometry. Numazu's response has been among the most thorough in Japan — character manhole covers set into pavements across the city, wrapped buses and trains, novelty residence certificates issued at the city office, shop-front panels in the arcades and long-running tie-ins with the aquarium and the ferry operator. It has demonstrably moved money into a provincial city that was otherwise losing retail to the highway malls, and it has done so with the municipality's active participation rather than in spite of it.

Under the water. Uchiura Bay deserves its own paragraph. Sheltered from the prevailing swell and dropping steeply, it holds a string of dive sites — Ōsezaki, Mito, Heda — used year-round, including in winter when visibility improves. Aquaculture rafts in the bay farm horse mackerel and other species, and the pens themselves attract fish life. Numazu is where a great many Tokyo divers were certified, and the area has the infrastructure to match: shops, air fills, and guides who work the same sites daily.

Getting there and timing. Numazu Station is on the JR Tōkaidō Main Line, about ten to fifteen minutes from Mishima, which is a Shinkansen stop roughly fifty minutes from Tokyo. Buses run west from Numazu Station along the Uchiura shore toward Mito and Ōsezaki and take considerably longer than the map suggests, since the road is narrow and winding. Winter is the season for the mountain: dry northwesterlies clear the air and Fuji stands out most days from November to February. Summer is hazy and humid, and the coastal road jams. The city centre is flat and easy; the western shore involves hills, steps and a scarcity of pavements.