Hidden Gems Across Japan
1,610 spots
Fujido Cave
Ueno is the least populated municipality in Gunma, deep in the mountains on the Saitama border, and Fujido is the reason…
Kawaba Denen Plaza
Michi-no-eki are roadside stations — a network of highway rest stops with toilets, a farm shop and usually a canteen. Ka…
Aisai no Oka
Tsumagoi grows more summer and autumn cabbage than anywhere else in Japan — roughly 150 million heads a year, on fields…
Lake Nozori
Lake Nozori sits at around 1,500 metres at the literal end of Route 405 — the road stops at the lake and does not contin…
Mt. Iwabitsu
Mt. Iwabitsu is 802 metres of broken rock rising straight out of the Agatsuma valley, with a sheer south face that makes…
Shango Tonyamachi Honten
Takasaki calls itself a pasta town, and the reason is partly that Gunma grows a lot of wheat and partly that Shango got…
Kiryu Shinmachi Historic District
Kiryu made silk cloth for a thousand years and industrialised early, and the town still shows it. Honcho 1-chome and 2-c…
Fujiya Honten
Himokawa udon is Kiryu's noodle and it is unlike any other udon in Japan: rolled out to a width measured in centimetres…
Shitamiya Honten
Kiryu's version of katsudon has no egg and no simmering. A pork cutlet is fried, dipped straight into a dark sweet-savou…
Iwasakiya
Ota yakisoba is not the pale, cabbage-heavy noodle dish sold at festival stalls. At Iwasakiya it comes out almost black…
Torihei Honten
Ask anyone from Gunma what they eat at a school sports day, a funeral, a company outing or a hanami, and the answer is a…
Usui Third Bridge
The Usui Third Bridge is a four-arch brick viaduct finished in 1892, 91 metres long and 31 metres high, and it is the la…
Rakusan-en
Rakusan-en is an early Edo daimyo garden in the small castle town of Obata, laid out by the Oda family — descendants of…
Ichinomiya Nukisaki Shrine
Nukisaki is the first-ranked shrine of the old province of Kozuke and appears in the tenth-century Engishiki register, b…
Takatsudo Gorge
The Watarase River narrows abruptly at Omama and cuts a rock channel through the town, and the result is a gorge you rea…
Shiriyaki Onsen
At Shiriyaki the hot spring does not come out of a pipe into a tub — it comes up through the bed of the Nagasasa River,…
Chatsubomigoke Park
At the far western edge of Nakanojo, in a basin formed by eruptions of Kusatsu-Shirane, warm acidic springs seep out of…
Nagai Shokudo
Nagai Shokudo sits on Route 17 north of Shibukawa, in a stretch of road where there is essentially nothing else, and it…
Harashimaya Sohonke
Yakimanju is the food Gunma people miss when they move away, and almost no guidebook aimed at foreign visitors mentions…
Ebiya Chozo
Nikko and Kyoto both make the skin that forms on heated soy milk, and they write it differently on purpose. Kyoto writes…
Nasu Kokuzohi
In the year 700, the sons of Nasu no Atai Idé raised an inscribed stone to their late father, who had governed the provi…
Kirifuri Falls
Kirifuri means falling mist, and the name is descriptive: the water drops in two stages, 25 metres and then 26, breaking…
Iwashita New Ginger Museum
Iwashita Shokuhin makes shin-shoga, a pale pink pickled young ginger sold in a distinctive jar across Japan, and in 2015…
SL Moka
The Moka Railway is a 42-kilometre single-track line running east from Shimodate through rice country to Motegi, and at…
Estimated from distance to the nearest airport or shinkansen station. Confirm actual journey times before you travel.