Nature

The thing to understand about nature in Japan is that almost none of it is wilderness in the sense of being unmanaged. A gorge has a boardwalk and a boat operator; a waterfall has a designated viewing platform and a bus that stops there; a marsh has a raised wooden path with passing places. This is the legacy of centuries of pilgrims and a century of domestic tourism, and it has two consequences worth planning around: access is far better than the terrain suggests, and the good spots are known, signposted and busy on the right weekend.

Most of it is free. Where there is a fee it is usually parking, a few hundred yen at a national or prefectural park, or a ropeway and a boat, which are the two things in this category that reliably cost real money — a couple of thousand yen return is normal for a cable car. Bring cash; rural car parks and small boat operators are not card operations.

Time it deliberately, because this is the category where "open" and "worth going" diverge most. Alpine routes and mountain park roads close for snow from around November until April or May, and a surprising number of the best-known gorges and forests are built around a single foliage or fresh-green window a few weeks long. A place that is spectacular in the third week of October is a car park in August.

Two safety notes that are boring and true: mobile signal drops away from the trailhead, and mountain weather changes faster than the forecast in the valley. Neither matters until it does.

The useful first question is not which landscape you like but how much of the day you are prepared to give it. Nature spots fail visitors mostly through mismatch — three hours of travel for a viewpoint you look at for ten minutes, or a gorge walk started at four in the afternoon.

So choose by the shape of the visit first. If you have a spare half-day inside a city trip, take something with a fixed, contained mechanism — a boat through a gorge, a ropeway to a plateau, a marked circuit around a crater lake. These have a defined length, run to a timetable and cannot go wrong. If you have a whole day and a car, that is when the forest, the coastal road and the long valley become the better option, because they need slack in the schedule to be any good.

Second criterion: pick something in its season rather than something famous out of it. A second-tier waterfall in full autumn colour beats a first-tier one in bare November, and this category is unusually honest about that if you read the season on each entry.

Third, and specific to Japan: check what the last leg actually is. A great many of these sit at the end of a bus route with four services a day, and the difference between a good day and a stranded one is whether you read the return timetable before or after lunch. If the answer is "a car", accept that rather than trying to make trains work — this is the category where car access genuinely changes what is possible.

Assuming a road or trail is open because the weather is fine. Mountain park roads and alpine traverses run to a calendar, not to conditions. Several of the best routes in the country are shut for half the year, reopen in April or May, and publish that date each spring.

Planning around the last bus in. The one that matters is the last bus out. Four services a day is common, the final one is often mid-afternoon, and taxis do not cruise past a trailhead.

Underestimating the walk from the car park. "Ten minutes" on a sign is ten minutes for someone who does it daily, and it is frequently down a slope you then have to come back up. Waterfall approaches in particular tend to be a staircase.

Going for foliage on the calendar rather than the report. Peak colour moves by altitude and by year, and a fortnight either side is the difference between the photograph and brown twigs. The same is true of blossom in reverse.

Turning up cashless. Parking, the ropeway kiosk, the boat and the mountain hut are cash. This catches people who have spent a week in Tokyo paying for everything by phone.

Treating a volcanic area as scenery. Sulphur valleys and crater rims have posted restrictions, gas warnings and closures that are about the gas rather than the view, and they change. Read the boards at the entrance rather than the one on the internet from last year.

Bringing city shoes. Boardwalks are wet, gorge paths are wet, moss is wet, and the stones by a waterfall are wet all the time regardless of the weather.