Hidden Gems Across Japan
1,610 spots
Karikomi Pond
A pond four hundred metres around and four and a half metres deep, at the foot of Mt. Gankyoji in the Hakusan national p…
Echizen Daffodils
One of the three great wild daffodil grounds in Japan is on the cliffs of the Echizen coast, and it flowers in December…
Ryusogataki Falls
Sixty metres of water down a rock face in a narrow valley in Ikeda, one of the least populated municipalities in Fukui,…
Uriwari Falls
The name means the melon splitter, from a story that the water was so cold that a melon left in it cracked. It comes out…
Urushi no Sato Kaikan
Echizen lacquerware has been made in the Kawada valley for around fifteen hundred years — the origin story involves a fi…
Megane Museum
Around ninety-five per cent of the spectacle frames made in Japan come from Sabae, a city of sixty thousand people in in…
Kehi Jingu
The great torii at Kehi Jingu is 10.9 metres high, built of wood, and is counted with Kasuga Taisha in Nara and Itsukush…
Port of Humanity Tsuruga Museum
Tsuruga was the Japanese end of a shipping route from Vladivostok, and twice in the twentieth century that made it a pla…
Taniguchiya
Fukui eats more fried tofu per household than any other prefecture in Japan, by a wide margin, and the reason is partly…
Rainbow Line Summit Park
Mikata Goko is five lakes lying side by side behind the Wakasa coast, and the reason they are famous is that they are fi…
Jinguji Omizuokuri
Every 12 March, water is drawn from a well at Todaiji in Nara in the ceremony called Omizutori. The belief is that the w…
Sanchomachi
Obama was the port where the mackerel and everything else from the Sea of Japan came ashore for Kyoto, and the money tha…
Myotsuji
Fukui has exactly two National Treasure buildings and both are here, in a wooded valley outside Obama. The main hall dat…
Nanamachi Morning Market
Four hundred years of the same arrangement: farmers bring what they have grown into Ono, sit down on the street, and lay…
Echizen Ono Castle
Ono sits in a mountain basin, and on cold still mornings from autumn into spring the basin fills with cloud while the ca…
Kumagawa-juku
Before refrigeration, the mackerel landed at Obama on the Sea of Japan was salted and carried on foot over the mountains…
Hakusan Heisenji
In the medieval period Heisenji was one of the largest religious complexes in Japan — six thousand monks, forty-eight ha…
Toga
Toga is a mountain village at the top of a valley in Nanto, seventy minutes by road from Toyama city and considerably fu…
Okado Somen
Okado somen does not come in the straight bundles that somen comes in everywhere else. It is hand-stretched, then coiled…
Shiroebi-tei
Shiroebi are tiny translucent shrimp, three or four centimetres long, that live in the deep trench running through Toyam…
Takaoka Daibutsu
Takaoka has made bronze since 1609 and this is the industry's demonstration piece: a seated Amida sixteen metres high, c…
Fugan Canal Kansui Park
The Fugan canal was dug in the 1930s to link central Toyama to its port, fell out of use, and the basin at the city end…
Johana Betsuin Zentokuji
Zentokuji was founded around 530 years ago by Rennyo, the eighth head of the Honganji and the man who turned Jodo Shinsh…
Hotaruika Museum
Firefly squid spend their lives in deep water and come into Toyama Bay in spring to spawn. They are a few centimetres lo…
Estimated from distance to the nearest airport or shinkansen station. Confirm actual journey times before you travel.