Ihatovo

Ihatovo (イーハトーヴ, Īhatōvu) is a rural village where Kenji came from.

Description
It is a small rural village where there are neither telephones nor electricity. The village is also assumed to practice bartering.

Kenji cites examples of the village police's uncomplex duties, including repairing pumps in wells, saving cats stuck in chimneys, and participating in their annual watermelon tasting. If someone commits a crime, the police merely tie up the culprit and throw him off a cliff.

Sometime in the past, the village tended a certain orchard for ten years, eponymously referred to as the ten-year orchard. Before it can ever be harvested, a storm destroyed the orchard in a single night. Nevertheless, the villagers decided to plant seedlings once again and started over ten years later.

Trivia

 * Ihatovo is a reference to the fictional cluster of landmarks created by the real-life Kenji Miyazawa, basing the name off his native Iwate Prefecture.
 * It bears similarities with Iwate, including a tendency for natural disasters and a resilient population. This mirrors Ihatov's ten-year orchard incident, which portrayed a natural disaster hitting the orchard and the nature of villagers' resilience by starting over again.

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Ihatovo