Shiga

Shiga is defined by Lake Biwa, which lies at its centre and supplies drinking water to some fourteen million people downstream in Kyoto, Osaka and Hyogo. Mountains ring the basin on all sides – the Hira and Hiei ranges to the west, Ibuki to the north-east, the Suzuka range to the south-east – and the prefecture's towns sit on the flat, rice-growing plains between shore and hills.

As the province of Ōmi, the area was the gateway to the capital. The Tōkaidō and Nakasendō met at Kusatsu, and whoever held Ōmi controlled access to Kyoto; the castles of Azuchi, Hikone, Nagahama and Sakamoto testify to its strategic value. Mount Hiei, on the border with Kyoto, hosts Enryaku-ji, the headquarters of Tendai Buddhism and part of the Kyoto World Heritage site.

Modern Shiga is one of Japan's more industrialised prefectures relative to its size, with factories along the Meishin Expressway, and one of the few whose population grew into the 2010s thanks to commuters to Kyoto and Osaka. It is also noted for early environmental policy: citizens' campaigns in the late 1970s led to a pioneering ban on phosphate detergents to protect the lake.

The prefecture is named after Shiga District (滋賀郡) on the south-western shore of the lake, where Emperor Tenji's Ōmi Ōtsu palace stood in the 7th century. The name was adopted in 1872 when the prefectural office moved to Otsu in Shiga District. Shiga's territory corresponds almost exactly to the old province of Ōmi – literally "the fresh-water sea near the capital", after Lake Biwa – and has scarcely changed since 1881, when a brief attachment of the Tsuruga area (now Fukui) ended.

Lake Biwa covers about 670 km², roughly one sixth of the prefecture. The deep, larger northern basin and the shallow southern basin are separated at their narrowest point, crossed by the Biwako Ōhashi bridge. More than a hundred rivers flow in, but the only natural outlet is the Seta River at Otsu, supplemented by the Meiji-era Lake Biwa Canal to Kyoto. Islands include Chikubu-shima, Oki-shima – one of the few inhabited islands in a Japanese lake – and Take-shima.

The Kōtō plain on the eastern shore is the prefecture's granary. Mount Ibuki (1,377 m), the highest peak, rises on the Gifu border and is famed for its alpine flora and medicinal herbs. In the south, the Kōka and Shigaraki uplands lead towards Iga and the Kyoto basin.

The south around Otsu and Kusatsu has an inland climate like Kyoto's, with hot summers and relatively mild winters. The north, open to winter monsoon winds from the Sea of Japan through the Tsuruga gap, receives heavy snow – Nagahama's northern districts and the Yogo area are among the snowiest inhabited places in the Kansai region, and Mount Ibuki once recorded a world-record snow depth of 11.82 metres in 1927.

In 667 Emperor Tenji moved the capital to Ōmi Ōtsu-no-miya on the lake shore; it lasted only until the Jinshin War of 672. In 788 the monk Saichō founded a hall on Mount Hiei that became Enryaku-ji, for centuries the most powerful monastery in Japan until Oda Nobunaga burnt it in 1571. Nobunaga then built Azuchi Castle (1576–1579), whose tower set the model for Japanese castle keeps, and the decisive Battle of Sekigahara (1600) was fought just over the border in Gifu.

In the Edo period the Ii clan governed from Hikone, and the Ōmi merchants of Ōmi-Hachiman, Gokashō and Hino built trading networks across Japan under their motto of "sanpō yoshi" – good for the seller, good for the buyer, good for society. The Lake Biwa Canal (1890) sent water and hydroelectric power to Kyoto. After the Second World War, the Meishin Expressway and Tōkaidō Shinkansen brought industry to the southern lake shore.

Shiga's religious heritage is dense: besides Enryaku-ji there are Ishiyama-dera, where Murasaki Shikibu is said to have begun The Tale of Genji, Mii-dera (Onjō-ji) with its famous bell, the Tendai temples of the Kotō Sanzan east of the lake, and Taga Taisha. The province gave its name to the "Eight Views of Ōmi", a set of lakeside scenes popularised by Hiroshige's prints. The Ōmi merchant ethic is still cited in Japanese business culture.

Lake fish define Shiga's cooking: honmoroko and ayu, the fermented funazushi, and the tsukudani of small fish and shrimp. Ōmi beef is one of the oldest Wagyu brands, eaten even in Edo times as a medicinal miso-pickled gift to the shogun. Buckwheat noodles with herring, sweet sticky konnyaku coloured red in Ōmi-Hachiman and the rice of the Kotō plain complete the picture.

Manufacturing accounts for an unusually large share of Shiga's economy, with electronics, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, glass and machinery plants along the Meishin corridor between Otsu, Kusatsu and Maibara. Agriculture centres on rice from the Kotō plain and on Ōmi beef; freshwater fisheries continue on a small scale. The lake shore and Kyoto proximity make tourism and commuting important.