In the hills of northern Iwate, a short ride from the town of Ichinohe, a group of round houses with grass-covered roofs sits in a quiet clearing among cedar and broadleaf woods. They look like something out of a fairy tale, low mounds with doorways and smoke holes, and they are reconstructions of pit dwellings from the Jomon period, the long prehistoric era of hunter-gatherers who lived in Japan from around fifteen thousand years ago until the arrival of rice farming. The Goshono site was a large settlement in the middle Jomon period, and excavations found that some houses here were roofed with earth rather than thatch, which is why the reconstructions look the way they do. Since 2021 it has been one of the components of the World Heritage site of the Jomon Prehistoric Sites in Northern Japan.
The Jomon people are famous for their pottery, decorated with cord-marked patterns from which the period takes its name, and for their strange, goggle-eyed clay figurines. They lived in a rich forest and coastal environment, gathering chestnuts and walnuts, fishing and hunting, and they built permanent villages, stone circles and burial grounds without agriculture as we know it. The museum at Goshono explains this well, and the site itself, with its woods and open meadow, gives a sense of the landscape they knew.
The riding in this part of northern Tohoku is gentle and green. The Mabechi river valley runs north through Ichinohe toward Hachinohe and the Pacific, and the roads follow it through rice paddies, small villages and wooded hills, with easy bends and light traffic. Head west into the mountains toward Lake Towada and Hachimantai and the roads become more serious, climbing through beech forests with tight hairpins and splendid views. Autumn colours here are spectacular in October, but winter brings deep snow, and mountain roads close.
Ichinohe is a small town with fuel, convenience stores and a few restaurants, so you are well covered. Northern Iwate is known for its buckwheat noodles and for hearty local dishes; try a bowl of soba or a plate of local beef if you see it on a menu. Leave the bike in the site car park, walk among the reconstructed houses, and step inside one if you can. It is dark, cool and smells of earth and smoke, and it is easy to imagine a family sitting around the fire five thousand years ago.