Hidden Gems Across Japan
1,610 spots
Minamoto Masuzushi Museum
Masuzushi is Toyama's contribution to the national bento canon: vinegared rice pressed into a round wooden tub under a l…
Sankyoson Viewpoint
The Tonami plain is farmed in a pattern found in very few places: instead of villages, each farmhouse stands alone in th…
Uchikawa
Uchikawa is a canal running through the middle of the old port town of Shinminato, and the fishing fleet ties up along b…
Hisui Coast
Jade forms in the Kotaki river valley over the prefectural border in Niigata, washes down to the sea, and the current ca…
Asahi Funakawa Riverbank
For about ten days in early April, a stretch of riverbank in the small town of Asahi produces one of the most improbable…
Sugisawa no Sawasugi
This is a cedar forest growing on flat ground at sea level, fed by springs rising through the Kurobe alluvial fan — whic…
Uozu Buried Forest Museum
Two thousand years ago a cedar forest stood on the shore at Uozu. The Katakai River buried it in gravel, the sea rose ov…
Etchu-Yatsuo
Yatsuo is a small town of stone-paved slopes and fine-latticed houses built on a river terrace south of Toyama, and for…
Yamachosuji
In June 1900 a fire destroyed six-tenths of Takaoka. The merchants of Yamachosuji, the wealthy stretch of the old Hokuri…
Kanayamachi
When Maeda Toshinaga founded Takaoka in 1609 he brought in seven metal casters from a village in Tonami and gave them la…
Inami Woodcarving Town
Inami carves wood, and it has done since the eighteenth century, when carpenters rebuilding the temple at the top of the…
Shomyo Falls
Shomyo is the tallest waterfall in Japan: 350 metres in four stages down a wall of columnar rock at the western edge of…
Tsugawa Fox Wedding Procession
Mount Kirin above the town of Tsugawa is where foxfire was seen. Sightings of the drifting lights were recorded here mor…
Izumozaki Townscape
Izumozaki has the longest continuous run of gable-entrance houses in Japan, about four kilometres of them along the old…
Naena Falls
Naena Falls drops 55 metres off a wall of columnar basalt on the Sekikawa river, right on the border between Niigata and…
Kasugayama Castle Ruins
Kasugayama was Uesugi Kenshin's castle, and it is a mountain rather than a building. Nothing above ground survives excep…
Nuttari Terrace
Nuttari Terrace is a single short street of tiny shops in a former market row east of central Niigata. The row was built…
Sasagawa Nagare
Sasagawa Nagare is an eleven-kilometre stretch of the northern Niigata coast where the Japan Sea has cut the rock into a…
Bishamondo Honpo
Tochio abura-age is not the thin fried tofu pouch sold everywhere in Japan. It is a slab roughly 20 centimetres long and…
Matsudai Nohbutai
Matsudai Nohbutai is the working centre of the Echigo-Tsumari Art Field, the permanent art landscape that grew out of a…
Tonkatsu Taro
Niigata's katsudon has no egg in it. Thin pork cutlets are fried, dipped straight into a soy-based tare while still hot,…
Shukunegi
Shukunegi is a shipowners' village packed into a ravine on Sado's southern coast, and it is built the way it is because…
Yagigahana
Yagigahana is a wall of rhyolite more than 200 metres high standing directly over the Ikarashi river in the Shitada vall…
Fossa Magna Museum
The Itoigawa-Shizuoka Tectonic Line runs through this city — the western edge of the Fossa Magna, the enormous rift that…
Estimated from distance to the nearest airport or shinkansen station. Confirm actual journey times before you travel.