Hidden Gems Across Japan
1,610 spots
Cape Hedo
The northern tip of Okinawa Island, where the East China Sea and the Pacific meet over a shelf of raised coral limestone…
Daisekirinzan
The limestone at the northern tip of Okinawa was laid down about two hundred and fifty million years ago and has weather…
Bise Fukugi Tree Road
Fukugi is a dense evergreen with thick leathery leaves, and Okinawan villages planted it in rows around every house as a…
Chiran Peace Museum
Chiran was an army airfield, and in the last months of the Pacific war it was the main departure point for special attac…
Myoken Onsen
Myoken is the largest of the hot springs strung along the Amori river gorge north of Kirishima, in a group known as the…
Lake Imuta
Imuta is a crater lake about four kilometres round, sixty hectares in area, and remarkably shallow — the deepest point i…
Ishibashi Memorial Park
Between 1840 and 1849 five arched stone bridges were built across the Kotsuki river in Kagoshima by Iwanaga Sangoro, a m…
Napoleon Rock
The Koshiki islands lie fifty kilometres off the Satsuma coast and their western shore is a wall of sea cliff running fo…
Minatoya
Keihan is Amami's dish and the format is unusual: shredded poached chicken, thin omelette, shiitake, pickled papaya, dri…
Iriki Fumoto Samurai District
Iriki is the fumoto that shows the technique best. The walls here are tamaishi-gaki — built from rounded river cobbles r…
Illustration — not a photographFukuyama Kurozu Tsubobatake
Kurozu is black rice vinegar, and Fukuyama has been making it the same way since around 1800: steamed rice, koji and spr…
Cape Sata
The southernmost point of mainland Japan, at 31 degrees north, on a headland of subtropical forest at the end of the Osu…
Arahira Tenjin
A small shrine to Sugawara no Michizane, the deity of learning, built on top of a rock outcrop just offshore in Kinko Ba…
Karasengorge Somen Nagashi
Flowing somen usually means a split bamboo chute down which noodles are sent past you once, with one chance to catch the…
Tenmonkan Mujaki
Shirokuma is shaved ice under condensed milk with fruit and beans on top, and it is Kagoshima's, invented at this shop i…
Kamo no Ogusu
The largest tree in Japan stands in a shrine compound in a small town in Aira. The numbers do not prepare you. The base…
Izumi Fumoto Samurai District
Satsuma did not concentrate its samurai in one castle town. It scattered them across more than a hundred fortified admin…
Izumi Crane Observation Centre
More than ten thousand cranes fly in from Siberia to winter on the reclaimed farmland at Izumi — mostly hooded and white…
Ogawa Falls
Forty-six metres high and sixty wide, falling into a pool of an improbable emerald green enclosed by columnar basalt wal…
Sogi Falls
The Sendai river spreads to about two hundred metres wide at Sogi and comes over a twelve-metre step in a continuous cur…
Nikumaki Onigiri
A rice ball wrapped in marinated pork belly, roasted until the outside caramelises, and wrapped again in a lettuce leaf.…
Lettuce Maki
In 1966 the owner of a sushi shop in Miyazaki City made a roll of boiled prawn, lettuce and mayonnaise. At the time raw…
Hiyajiru
Hiyajiru is a cold soup poured over rice: grilled and ground dried fish, sesame and miso, thinned with cold dashi and fi…
Saitobaru Burial Mounds
Three hundred and nineteen burial mounds stand on a plateau outside Saito, built between the late third and the seventh…
Estimated from distance to the nearest airport or shinkansen station. Confirm actual journey times before you travel.