Hidden Gems Across Japan
1,610 spots
Hakuto Shrine
The Kojiki tells of a rabbit that tricked a line of sharks into forming a bridge so it could cross to the mainland, was…
Wakasa Station and Post Town
Wakasa is the terminus of a nineteen-kilometre private railway that runs up a valley from Koge, and the whole station —…
Fudoin Iwayado
A hall about thirteen metres high fitted into a natural rock cavern beside a mountain stream, its floor carried on long…
Itaibara Village
Itaibara is a small settlement in a fold of the mountains three kilometres north-east of Chizu, reached through a tunnel…
Ishitani Residence
Chizu was a post town on the Chugoku highway, the route the Tottori lords took to Edo, and the Ishitani were its wealthi…
Nageiredo
Nageiredo is a small hall wedged into a cliff hollow on Mt. Mitoku, held up on stilts of unequal length, and it is a Nat…
Kitagishima Stone Quarry Lookout
Kitagi granite built Osaka Castle's walls, the foundations of Tokyo Station and the approach at Yasukuni Shrine, and it…
Maneki-neko Museum
This was the first museum in Japan devoted to the beckoning cat, and it is a hundred-year-old farmhouse in the hills nor…
Demi-katsu Don
Okayama's katsudon comes under demi-glace. It should not work and it has been the city's dish for ninety years. The sau…
Yakage Post Town
Yakage was the eighteenth station on the Sanyodo highway, and unusually both of its principal inns survive: the honjin,…
Mount Washu
Mount Washu is 133 metres high and stands at the southern tip of Honshu's Okayama coast, looking straight down the Seto…
Ushimado Olive Garden
Ushimado calls itself the Aegean of Japan, which sounds like tourist-board invention until you stand on the hill above t…
Makido Cave
Makido is the opposite of the other Niimi cave: horizontal, about 450 metres long and up to 25 metres wide, opening into…
Ikura Cave
Ikura is a vertical cave rather than a horizontal one. The route runs 1,200 metres into the limestone with 90 metres of…
Bitchu Kokubunji
The five-storey pagoda at Bitchu Kokubunji is the only one in Okayama Prefecture and the fixed point of the Kibiji lands…
Kinojo
Kinojo sits on a 397-metre ridge above the Kibi plain and is an ancient mountain fortress of a type built in western Jap…
Tsuyama Horumon Udon
Tsuyama has eaten beef offal since the Edo period, when the domain was permitted to keep producing yosaku medicinal beef…
Hiruzen Highlands
Hiruzen is a plateau at 500 to 600 metres under three peaks in Okayama's far north, and it is where roughly a fifth of e…
Katsuyama Preservation District
Katsuyama was a post town on the Izumo highway and became Okayama's first designated townscape preservation district in…
Yubara Onsen Sunayu
Sunayu is a set of open-air baths on the bed of the Asahi river, directly under the 73-metre wall of the Yubara dam, whe…
Nagi Museum of Contemporary Art
Isozaki Arata designed this museum in 1994 around three permanent works rather than around a collection, which is close…
Inujima Seirensho Art Museum
A copper refinery opened on Inujima in 1909 and closed ten years later when the copper price collapsed, leaving brick ch…
Kibitsu Shrine
Kibitsu Shrine enshrines Kibitsuhiko-no-Mikoto, the prince whose campaign against a local strongman named Ura is general…
Hinase Kaki-oko
Hinase is an oyster port on Okayama's eastern coast, and kaki-oko is what the fishing families there did with the ones t…
Estimated from distance to the nearest airport or shinkansen station. Confirm actual journey times before you travel.