Mie

Mie stretches for some 170 kilometres along the western shore of Ise Bay and down the eastern side of the Kii Peninsula. Its spiritual centre is Ise Jingū, the complex of shrines dedicated to the sun goddess Amaterasu that has been the foremost Shintō sanctuary of Japan for well over a millennium. The Ise-Shima coast, with its drowned valleys, pearl rafts and ama divers, is protected as a national park.

The prefecture sits on a boundary. Government statistics place it in the Kinki region, but its northern industrial belt around Yokkaichi and Kuwana forms part of the Nagoya metropolitan area, and it cooperates closely with Aichi and Gifu in the Tōkai grouping. Residents themselves feel attached to both worlds; the local dialect shares features with Kansai speech.

Beyond Ise, Mie offers the upland basin of Iga, birthplace of the poet Matsuo Bashō and of a famous ninja tradition, the castle town of Matsusaka with its prized beef, and the Higashi Kishū coast of Owase and Kumano, through which the Iseji route of the Kumano pilgrimage runs.

The name comes from Mie District (三重郡) in the north of the prefecture. According to the Kojiki, the legendary prince Yamato Takeru, exhausted on his way home, said his legs felt "folded threefold" (mie) like rice cakes, and the place took the name. When the Meiji government merged the domains of the region, the prefectural office first sat in Yokkaichi in Mie District; it was moved to Tsu, but the name stayed. The present borders date from 1876, when Mie absorbed Watarai Prefecture (Ise and Shima) and took in the Kii districts of Kitamuro and Minamimuro.

The Suzuka range forms the western border with Shiga, rising to over 1,200 metres. Below it the Ise Plain runs along Ise Bay from Kuwana to Ise, crossed by rivers such as the Kiso, Nagara and Ibi at their shared mouth in the north and the Kushida and Miya further south. Inland lie the Iga and Nabari basins, drained towards the Yodo system and therefore historically oriented towards Nara and Kyoto.

South of Ise the coast becomes a ria shoreline: Ago Bay and Matoya Bay in Shima, then the steep, rain-soaked coast of Higashi Kishū around Owase and Kumano, where mountains of the Ōdaigahara plateau drop almost straight into the Kumano-nada. The Kumano River forms part of the border with Wakayama.

The Ise Bay coast has a mild Pacific climate with hot, humid summers and dry, sunny winters, though the Suzuka mountains can bring cold winds and occasional snow to the north. The south-east around Owase is one of the wettest places in Japan, receiving torrential rain from typhoons and summer fronts. The Iga basin is cooler in winter and prone to fog.

Ise has been the seat of the imperial ancestral deity since at least the late 7th century, when the custom of rebuilding the shrines every twenty years (Shikinen Sengū) was instituted. In the Edo period mass pilgrimages to Ise, the okage-mairi, drew millions of commoners along the Ise-kaidō. The Tōkaidō crossed the north of the province via Kuwana, Yokkaichi and the Suzuka Pass, with Seki-juku still preserving its post-town streetscape.

Iga was a semi-independent province of local warrior families until Oda Nobunaga crushed it in the Tenshō Iga War of 1581; its fighters later served the Tokugawa, which gave rise to the Iga ninja tradition. Tsu and Iga Ueno were rebuilt by the castle-building daimyo Tōdō Takatora. Matsusaka produced merchant houses such as the Mitsui and the scholar Motoori Norinaga. In the 20th century Yokkaichi became a centre of the petrochemical industry – and, in the 1960s, the site of one of Japan's four major pollution diseases, Yokkaichi asthma.

Religious life in Mie revolves around Ise Jingū; the Shikinen Sengū – the 62nd was held in 2013 – mobilises the whole region, including the Okihiki and Shiraishi-mochi processions in which residents haul timber and white stones to the shrines. Shima preserves the ama tradition of women free-divers harvesting abalone and seaweed. Iga keeps its ninja heritage alive in museums and its Iga-yaki pottery, and Suzuka hosts the Formula One circuit that has made the city known worldwide.

Mie's table combines seafood from Ise Bay and the Kumano-nada with beef from the Matsusaka area. Spiny lobster, abalone and oysters from the ria bays, tekone-zushi from the fishing villages of Shima and the thick, soft noodles of Ise are its signatures, alongside the red-bean confection akafuku sold to pilgrims.

Northern Mie is an industrial region: the Yokkaichi petrochemical complex, semiconductor memory fabrication in Yokkaichi, and automobile and parts manufacturing in Suzuka tie it to the Chūkyō industrial belt around Nagoya. Agriculture and fisheries remain important in the south – tea (Ise-cha is among Japan's larger tea harvests), pearls, oysters, seaweed and citrus. Tourism is anchored by the Ise pilgrimage, Ise-Shima resorts, Nagashima and the Suzuka Circuit.