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.