Hidden Gems Across Japan
1,610 spots
Fujita Memorial Garden
Fujita Kenichi was born in Hirosaki, went to Tokyo, became the first chairman of the Japan Chamber of Commerce and Indus…
Oma Tuna
Oma is the northern tip of Honshu, a small town on the Tsugaru Strait, and its tuna sells for more than any other tuna i…
Myoko
Kuroishi's local dish is a solution to a specific problem: what to do with yakisoba in a town where the snow reaches the…
Sukayu Onsen
The bath at Sukayu is a single room of 160 tatami mats, floored and walled entirely in hiba cypress with no metal or til…
Tanesashi Coast
The unusual thing about Tanesashi is that the grass runs to the rocks. Natural turf — grazed by horses for centuries, wh…
Tsuru no Maihashi
Three timber arches in a row across a reservoir, three hundred metres end to end, built in 1994 from three thousand logs…
Shayokan
Dazai Osamu wrote No Longer Human and The Setting Sun, drowned himself in 1948 at thirty-eight, and is read by essential…
Inakadate Rice Paddy Art
In 1993 the village of Inakadate, looking for something to do about a declining population, planted a small design in a…
Tsugaru Railway Stove Train
The Tsugaru Railway runs twenty kilometres north from Goshogawara across the flat snow country of the Tsugaru plain, and…
Stairway National Route 339
National Route 339 runs up the Tsugaru peninsula to Cape Tappi, and for 388 metres of its length it is a flight of 362 c…
Juniko Aoike
Juniko is a scatter of thirty-three lakes and ponds in beech forest at the western edge of the Shirakami mountains, form…
Hotokegaura
Two kilometres of white volcanic tuff on the western shore of the Shimokita peninsula, eroded by wind and sea into tower…
Furofushi Onsen
The outdoor bath at Furofushi is built on the rocks at Ogonzaki, on the western edge of Aomori, close enough to the Sea…
Tatehana Wharf Morning Market
Every Sunday from March to December, more than three hundred stalls set up on a quay in Hachinohe fishing port and run f…
Nakamachi Komise Street
Komise are covered wooden arcades built out from the front of a house over the public footway — a private roof over a pu…
Takayama Inari Shrine
Everyone photographs the tunnel of torii at Fushimi Inari in Kyoto, packed shoulder to shoulder. Takayama Inari has some…
Nakaoka Shintaro Museum
Sakamoto Ryoma is on every poster in Kochi. Nakaoka Shintaro, who brokered the Satsuma-Choshu alliance alongside him and…
Yokogurayama Museum
Mt. Yokogura in Ochi is a limestone massif holding some of the oldest rock in Shikoku, a considerable concentration of e…
Tojindaba Megaliths
On a plateau above Cape Ashizuri, in an area that has produced stone tools and pottery from the early Jomon period aroun…
Befukyo Gorge
Befukyo is at the head of the Monobe river in the Tsurugi quasi-national park, an hour and twenty minutes into the mount…
Yatai Yasube
Kochi has a street-stall drinking culture that has largely disappeared from the rest of Japan, and its emblem is gyoza.…
Ino Paper Museum
Tosa washi is among the thinnest handmade paper in the world — the finest grades are measured in hundredths of a millime…
Sakawa Sake Warehouse Street
Sakawa was the castle town of the Fukao family, chief retainers of the Tosa domain, and the merchants who settled along…
Tatsukushi Coast
Tatsukushi is a shore of eroded sandstone laid down in the Paleogene and worked by the sea into shapes that have all acq…
Estimated from distance to the nearest airport or shinkansen station. Confirm actual journey times before you travel.