Shionomisaki Lighthouse

The southernmost point of Honshu, on a thirty-metre cliff above the Pacific, with a white lighthouse first lit in 1873 and a spiral of sixty-eight stone steps to the gallery. It is one of a small number of Japanese lighthouses you can climb, and from the top the ocean fills the whole southern horizon with nothing between you and it.

Behind the lighthouse is Boro no Shiba, a wide grass headland named after a naval lookout tower that stood there, now an open lawn used for camping and for watching the sun go down over Kumano bay. The Kuroshio current runs close inshore here, which is why the climate is subtropical and why the cape has had a lighthouse since the Meiji government's first programme of them. Admission to climb is ¥300.