Chiba Hidden Gems
Chiba is a peninsula, and being surrounded by warm water on three sides changes what grows and what the winter feels like. The Kuroshio current keeps the southern Boso coast frost-free, which is why flowers are cut there in January and why the surf beaches at Kujukuri work most of the year. The prefecture also happens to hold Narita, so a great many visitors touch down in Chiba and leave without seeing any of it, when the temple complex at Naritasan is fifteen minutes from the terminal and has been a pilgrimage site since the tenth century. On the west coast, Nokogiriyama is a quarried mountain: two centuries of stone-cutting left vertical faces, and a Buddha carved into one of them along with more than 1,500 stone arhats. The interior is farmland, and the Tone and Edo rivers made Sawara and Choshi wealthy shipping produce and soy sauce to Edo.
37 spots
Climate & Best Season
The mildest winters in Kanto thanks to the Kuroshio current; humid summers cooled by sea breezes. Good year-round.
Famous For (Food)
- Peanuts
- Namerō (minced fish)
- Futomaki sushi
- Soy sauce (Noda & Choshi)
Signature Sights
- Naritasan Shinshoji
- Nokogiriyama cliff Buddha
- Kujukuri beaches
- Choshi coast
When to Go
Chiba has the mildest winter in the Kanto region, with January highs around 11°C on the southern coast and almost no snow — the Boso flower fields are cut from January through March, when the rest of Honshu has nothing. Summers are hot and humid but sea breezes take the edge off; the swimming season at Kujukuri runs July and August. Typhoons are a genuine consideration from August into September on this coast. Choshi's cliffs get the earliest sunrise on mainland Japan at New Year. Spring and autumn are comfortable throughout, and Sawara's float festivals fall in July and October.
Getting Around
Narita and Haneda both feed the prefecture, and the Keisei Skyliner reaches Narita in about 40 minutes from Ueno. JR's Sobu and Sotobo and Uchibo lines circle the peninsula, but they slow down considerably south of Kisarazu, and the far end of Boso takes over two hours from Tokyo. The Tokyo Bay Aqua-Line cuts across the bay by bridge and tunnel and turns a long detour into a short bus ride to Kisarazu. Nokogiriyama has a ropeway from Hama-Kanaya, reachable by ferry from Kurihama. For the inland farms and the smaller beaches, take a car.
Local Food
Choshi and Noda have brewed soy sauce for centuries — Noda for the Tokyo market, Choshi with sea air — and both run brewery tours. Namero is a fisherman's dish from the Boso coast: horse mackerel chopped on the board with miso and ginger until it holds together. Chiba grows more peanuts than any other prefecture, mostly around Yachimata, harvested in autumn and sold boiled as well as roasted. Futomaki-matsuri-zushi, thick rolls cut to reveal a picture in the rice, is a farming-village craft from the interior.
Boso Peninsula Railway Crossing
Two small railways meet end to end at a station in the middle of nowhere and, between them, cross the Boso peninsula. Th…
Namero and Sanga-yaki
Namero is a fisherman's dish and the method explains the name. Horse mackerel or sardine, filleted on a moving boat, cho…
Oyama Senmaida
Three hundred and seventy-five rice paddies stacked up a steep slope over 3.2 hectares, the closest terraced rice landsc…
Byobugaura
Ten kilometres of sea cliff, forty to fifty metres high, running south-west from Choshi along the Pacific with nothing i…
Awamata Falls
Awamata is a broad shallow fall about thirty metres high on the upper Yoro river, and it is unlike most Japanese waterfa…
Katsuura Morning Market
The lord of Katsuura castle started this market in 1591 to get farmers and fishermen trading with each other, and it has…
Choshi Electric Railway
The Choshi Electric Railway runs 6.4 kilometres from Choshi to the easternmost point of the Kanto region, on rolling sto…
Ichihara Lakeside Museum
A 1990s municipal sculpture museum on the shore of a reservoir in inland Chiba was, by the early 2010s, the kind of plac…
National Museum of Japanese History
This is the national museum for the history of Japan, and it is not in Tokyo — it is on the grounds of the old Sakura ca…
Sakura Samurai Houses
Sakura was a castle town of the Hotta clan, close enough to Edo that its domain school and its samurai mattered, and thr…
Tainoura
Sea bream are deep-water fish that do not normally school at the surface. In the bay at Kominato they do, in numbers, an…
Hoki Museum
Hoki is the first museum in Japan devoted entirely to realist painting — work so precisely rendered that at a distance i…
Shiramazu Flower Fields
The southern tip of the Boso peninsula is warm enough that flowers grow outdoors through the winter, and the coast road…
Kameiwa Cave
A small waterfall drops through a hole cut in rock in a wooded valley in Kimitsu, and for a couple of weeks twice a year…
Okamoto Pier
A wooden pier about 160 metres long, built in 1921 to land fish and out of that use since 1961, running straight out fro…
Futtsu Cape Observation Tower
Futtsu is a sand spit that runs five kilometres out into Tokyo Bay, narrowing to almost nothing, and at the very end of…
Kasamori Kannon
The hall at Kasamori stands on top of a rock outcrop and is held up on all four sides by a lattice of timber posts of di…
Ezawa
Katsuura tantanmen is not Sichuan tantanmen and does not pretend to be. There is no sesame paste and no peanut. It is a…
Tokyo DisneySea
Tokyo DisneySea is the only Disney park built specifically for adults and families, without a Cinderella Castle or Main…
Tokyo Disneyland
Tokyo Disneyland, opened in 1983, was the first Disney park built outside the United States and remains one of the most…
Kamogawa Sea World
Kamogawa Sea World, opened in 1970, is one of Japan's most advanced marine parks, known for its orca (killer whale) bree…
Sawara Historic District
Sawara was a river port that got rich during the Edo period shipping rice and sake to Tokyo, and the merchant houses fro…
Choshi Fish Market
Choshi Port has been Japan's number one fish landing port by volume for multiple years running, processing over 250,000…
Okinoshima Island
Okinoshima is a small island connected to the Tateyama coast by a 500-meter sandbar, creating a tide-dependent land brid…
Maebara Beach
Maebara Beach, along Kamogawa City's Pacific coastline, is one of Chiba's premier surf breaks — a 1.5km crescent of sand…
Tateyama Flower Fields
Tateyama's temperate coastal climate — moderated by the Kuroshio Current — creates the 'Flower Highway,' a 50km stretch…
Taibusa Cape
Taibusa Cape (太房岬) forms the southernmost tip of the Boso Peninsula, where the Pacific Ocean meets Uraga Channel. The su…
Naritasan Shinshoji Temple
Naritasan Shinshoji Temple, founded in 940 AD, is one of Japan's most important Shingon Buddhist temples and a major pil…
Yamasa Soy Sauce Factory
Yamasa Corporation, founded in 1645, is one of Japan's oldest soy sauce breweries and the largest in Choshi — a city tha…
Katori Shrine
Katori Shrine, founded over 2,600 years ago according to shrine records, is one of Japan's three great martial shrines (…
Inubosaki Lighthouse
Inubosaki Lighthouse, built in 1874 by British engineer Richard Henry Brunton, stands 31 meters tall on Cape Inubo — the…
Narita Dream Farm
Narita Dream Farm is a 30-hectare agricultural park offering year-round fruit and vegetable picking — strawberries in wi…
Niemon Daiko
Niemon Daiko, hidden in the mountains of Kamogawa, is a taiko drum workshop and performance space founded by taiko maste…
Nokogiriyama
Nokogiriyama (鋸山, 'Saw Mountain,' 329m) earned its name from the jagged cliff face created by 300 years of stone quarryi…
Illustration — not a photographChiba Peanuts
Chiba Prefecture produces 80% of Japan's domestic peanuts, a dominance that began in the Meiji era when sandy coastal so…
Urayasu Edo-Style Bathhouse
Before Urayasu became synonymous with Disney, it was a fishing village on the edge of Edo (Tokyo) Bay, and the town's ba…
Narita Eel Restaurants
Narita's association with eel (unagi) dates to the Edo period when pilgrims visiting Naritasan Temple required high-prot…