Our Visit to Echizen Town, Fukui

Last weekend was a three-day holiday, so we decided to get away in our Will Cypha and put its new tires to the test. Tristy's parents-in-law run a minshuku B&B on the west coast of Japan's rugged Fukui province, less than 200 km away from us, so we decided to make a trip out there. Unfortunately, it turned out that the crab (and therefore tourist) season had just ended (the season for fishing crab off the local coast runs Nov-Feb) and the minshuku was closed for business, but by coincidence Tristy was planning to go up the same weekend and twisted her mother-in-law's arm to let us come, too.
YK was very excited. He'd never been to Fukui and was salivating at the thought of all the fresh seafood which would undoubtedly come his way.
He wasn't disappointed. Our hosts were incredibly generous, preparing a huge feast the night we arrived of sashimi (crab, buri, squid, sweet shrimp), mounds of large and small cooked crab (male and female), as well as grilled sole, pickled fish and fish roe. One of the chief families in Echizen Town, they all (from great-grandmother, to cousins, nephews and uncles) play some kind of role in the seafood industry. Some are fishermen, others are fish packers and processors, supplying sashimi and cooked seafood to their regulars, supermarkets and restaurants in the prefecture and even setting up shop across in Shandong, China, with a fish-processing unit that sends seafood back to consumers in Japan. The family business has been running thirty years or more and is clearly a way of life. As with so many successful family-run enterprises, however, the question of succession has arisen.
Tristy's parents-in-law have three children, the eldest of whom is Tristy's husband, but none seem interested in taking on the business. This question seems to weigh on the minds of the family elders in a fishing town where tradition is not taken lightly. There's even a rule which says that properties built on reclaimed land can only be owned by second sons (because first sons inherit).
Echizen Town is a working crab town, a narrow strip of densely-packed wood and brick houses, restaurants and ryokan sandwiched between the billowing ocean and the cedar-covered mountains, with the occasional concrete onsen and the Crab Museum, built for the tourists.
Echizen City, not too far away, is a conglomerate of small towns which came together to reinforce the Echizen brand, famous for yaki (pottery), washi (paper) and knives, as well as crab. The Washi no Sato-dori ('a promenade symbolizing Imadate-cho's traditional washi-making industry'), built relatively recently, features a typical-looking washi-maker's house where professionals still produce hand-made paper for sale and a 'Papyrus Kan' where children can have a go at making their own paper. In the fading light of a stormy day, it encapsulated all that is lovely about the Japanese aesthetic. Rain dripped from wooden eaves, gravel glistened, and the last washi-maker respectfully pulled the heavy, sliding wooden doors closed and hurried up the path with a nod, her apron flapping. Tristy is a tad cynical and would no doubt laugh and call me sentimental. She dismisses such stuff as tourist nonsense. But I liked it.