Hiragi — Hiragi Map Poster & Print

ແຜນທີ່

Hiragi Map Poster & Print

Hiragi sits on the Sanuki Plain in Kagawa, the smallest of Japan's prefectures, a short way inland from Takamatsu. From above it has a quiet pattern: long farm roads, clusters of houses along older lanes, and the thin line of a local railway running across open ground. Nothing here follows a grand plan. The streets trace field boundaries that were drawn long before cars arrived.

The feature that defines this part of Kagawa on any map is water. The rainfall is low and the rivers are short, so over the centuries farmers built thousands of irrigation ponds, and they appear as rounded or angular shapes between the paddies. On a Hiragi map poster these ponds read almost like punctuation: small solid forms that break up the fine mesh of lanes and field edges around them.

Kagawa is known across Japan for sanuki udon, and the modest towns of the plain belong to that everyday landscape of noodle shops, shrines and farmhouses. At a wider zoom the low hills that rise out of the plain come into the frame. A street map has no contour lines, so their outlines show up in the places where the roads stop or bend around them.