Izushi

photo by Samchan91 · CC BY-SA 4.0

A portion of soba here is five small plates: anyone who eats fifteen passes for an expert.

In the castle town founded in 1604 by Koide Yoshihide, soba is served on small plates of local pottery, five per person, a tradition brought in the eighteenth century by itinerant masters: anyone who eats fifteen counts as an expert. Above the roofs rises the Shinkorō clock tower, from 1871, with a mechanism donated ten years later by a doctor cured of a serious illness, and now in its fourth generation.

Castle town (jōka-machi) in the north of the prefecture, called ‘the little Kyoto of Tajima’: the lowland castle was built in 1604 at the foot of Mount Aiko by the daimyō Koide Yoshihide, who also brought soba craftsmen there from Shinshū (now Nagano), giving rise to the izushi-soba tradition. Above the castle ruins, 157 steps passing under 37 torii lead to the Inari shrine on the hill; higher up, on the same mountain, are the remains of the medieval castle of the Yamana clan (山名氏城跡), a national historic site since 1996: a separate place from the Edo-period castle town you see today.

ℹ️ You can walk round the historic centre freely, at any time and without a ticket; the roughly 36 soba shops and the castle museums keep their own hours, as a rough guide 9:00–17:00. There is no railway station in the town: you get there by bus from Toyooka.

🚉 出石 · 5 min walk

Sources: daytrip-izushi.jp · daytrip-izushi.jp · toyooka-tourism.com · bunka.go.jp

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