Okayama Hidden Gems

Okayama is sheltered on both sides — the Chugoku mountains to the north, Shikoku to the south — and the result is the driest, sunniest weather in Japan, which is why it grows fruit that struggles elsewhere and why so many days here are simply usable. Korakuen was laid out in 1700 as a lord's retreat with an unusual amount of open lawn and working rice paddy inside it, and it is set directly across the river from a black-lacquered castle keep. Kurashiki is the more surprising place: a canal quarter of white-walled warehouses that shipped rice under direct shogunate control, later a textile town, and now the site of the Ohara Museum, which opened in 1930 as Japan's first collection of Western art and bought its El Greco before most European museums were interested. West of the city the Kibi Plain is flat farmland threaded with a cycling route past burial mounds and old temples.