Fukushima Hidden Gems

Fukushima is the third-largest prefecture and divides into three strips that barely share a climate. Hamadori, on the Pacific, is mild and nearly snow-free. Nakadori, the middle corridor holding Koriyama and Fukushima City, is a fruit-growing basin on the shinkansen line. Aizu, west of the mountains, is snow country with a castle town at its centre, and getting between it and the coast means crossing two ranges. Aizu-Wakamatsu is where the Boshin War of 1868 ended badly for the shogunate's northern allies, and the town has kept that story rather than smoothed it over. Ouchi-juku, an hour south, is a street of thatched roofs on the old Aizu highway that survived because the road stopped mattering, and the houses along it are still lived in and worked in rather than preserved as a set. On the coast, the towns evacuated after the 2011 nuclear accident have largely reopened and the Joban line runs through again, though a small area remains restricted.