Shiroyone Senmaida
Interesting facts
- Some historians think the slope was first cleared as kakushida, hidden paddies kept off the domain's tax registers, as well as openly declared new fields.
- One theory holds that the name Senmaida comes not only from the count of plots but from an old word for narrow fields that drifted into 'thousand'.
- The Taniyama irrigation channel, built in the 1630s by Itaya Heishirō, a Kaga domain official posted to Noto, still waters the terraces today.
- Salt pans once lay on the shore below the paddies, but coastal erosion swallowed them and salt-making there came to an end.
- The soil on the slope is naturally fertile, so the paddies need less fertiliser than usual while yielding around 2.6 koku of rice per tan.
- Wajima city protected the terraces as a local scenic site in 1958, more than forty years before they received national status.
- The autumn illumination uses roughly 25,000 solar-charged LEDs set out by volunteers, shifting colour every 15 minutes for four hours after dusk.
- Because of its constantly changing colours, the light display has been jokingly nicknamed the 'gaming rice paddies' online.
- After Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi praised the view in 2006, rice harvested that autumn was sold under the name Zekkei Senmaida, 'superb-view thousand fields'.
Why it is worth it
Shiroyone Senmaida drops toward the Sea of Japan in more than a thousand tiny paddies, stacked down a slope of about 4 hectares with a fall of some 50 metres between the coastal highway and the shore. The name means "a thousand rice fields of Shiroyone", and before the 2024 earthquake the plots numbered 1,004. Some are minuscule: the smallest measure about a fifth of a square metre, and a local folk song jokes that after planting 999 paddies the farmer found the last one hiding under his straw raincoat. Seen from above, the curving terraces follow the contours of the cliff like a topographic map made of water and green rice.
The fields are a product of the Kaga domain. After Maeda Toshiie received Noto Province in 1581, land clearance was encouraged, and around 1632 the Taniyama and Sasora irrigation channels were dug to bring river water to this slope. A great landslide in 1684 and an earthquake in 1729 destroyed much of the work, and part of the ground lay abandoned until the Meiji era, when the local salt-making trade declined and farmers rebuilt the terraces into roughly their present form. Volunteers and an owner programme now help the community keep the paddies under rice, since only active cultivation preserves the landscape.
Shiroyone Senmaida was designated a national Place of Scenic Beauty in 2001 and forms part of "Noto's Satoyama and Satoumi", recognised as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System in 2011. Each autumn and winter since 2011 the terraces have been lined with solar-powered LED lights along the paddy edges, an installation recognised in 2012 by Guinness World Records as the largest solar-powered LED display. The nearby city of Wajima, on the north coast of the Noto Peninsula, is best known for Wajima-nuri, its tradition of lacquerware.
Getting there
The terraces sit on National Route 249, roughly 8 km east of central Wajima, with a roadside station overlooking the fields. The nearest airport is Noto Satoyama Airport (NTQ), about 15 km away; Komatsu (KMQ) is the larger regional airport.
On these lists
37.42544, 136.99978per Wikidata