Tottori

Tottori is a narrow strip caught between the sea and the mountains, and almost every place you would travel for sits on the one corridor running west to east along the coast. That geometry is unusually helpful for planning: instead of choosing a base and radiating out, you move along the strip in one direction and sleep wherever you stop. Trips that go wrong here are almost always trips that treated one end as a base for the other.

The corollary is that anything off the corridor costs disproportionately. The valleys running south into the mountains hold some of the most interesting things in the prefecture, but each is a spur you drive in and back out of, and the public transport thins to almost nothing once you leave the coast. Decide before you arrive whether you are doing the line or the line plus one valley, because there is no realistic version where you improvise a detour and still make the far end the same day.

There is no shinkansen in Tottori, and that shapes every itinerary. From Okayama on the Sanyo Shinkansen, the Super Inaba limited express takes about two hours to Tottori; from Osaka, the Super Hakuto takes roughly two and a half. Tottori Airport and Yonago Airport both take flights from Haneda in about an hour and a half. The San'in Main Line connects Tottori, Kurayoshi and Yonago, but trains are infrequent and slow, and buses cover the last stretch — 20 minutes and ¥370 from Tottori Station to the dunes, ¥930 from Yonago to the foot of Daisen. For Nageiredo, the Chizu valley, the Uradome coast headlands or anything off the main line, a rental car is effectively required.

Two days. Tottori is the least populous prefecture in Japan and it has two things that draw visitors — the sand dunes on the coast and the folklore town of Sakaiminato — plus a hot-spring town and a mountain, and they are strung along the coast rather than clustered.

Tottori City and the dunes are at the eastern end; Yonago and Sakaiminato at the western, about an hour and a half apart by train. Mount Daisen sits between them, roughly fifty minutes inland from Yonago by bus, and is the best walking in the region.

Two days as a coastal traverse — dunes in the east, an overnight, folklore and Daisen in the west — works well and can continue into Shimane, which is the sensible way to see this coast. One day is enough only if the dunes are the entire ambition. Tottori is often paired with Shimane rather than visited alone, and that pairing is the right instinct.

The sand here was carried down by rivers and piled up by wind coming off the sea, and it is still being rearranged — the ridges are not a fixed landscape and the shape of them genuinely differs after a storm. Understanding that changes what you go looking for. The photograph everyone has seen is one particular ridge from one particular angle in low light, and it is a small part of a field that extends along the coast and down to the water.

Practically: there is no shade anywhere on the sand, the surface gets far hotter than the air, and walking up a dune face in loose sand is much harder work than it looks from the car park. Go early or late, take more water than seems reasonable, and wear something you are willing to empty out afterwards. Sandals are a mistake in both directions — too hot in summer, useless in wind.

The coastal railway links the towns and is slow but adequate; the dunes are a short bus from Tottori Station, and Sakaiminato has its own branch line decorated end to end with the manga characters that made the town famous.

Mount Daisen and the inland valleys want a car, as does anything off the coastal strip. This is a rural prefecture with thin services and early evenings, so a car buys you a great deal of freedom — but the two headline sights genuinely do not need one. Winter brings heavy Sea of Japan snow to Daisen and the inland roads; the coast gets it too, less reliably.

Matsuba crab season is fixed by regulation — November 7 to March 20 — and December and January are when the boats land the most. Winter here is grey and snowy rather than merely cold; the Sea of Japan dumps snow on the coast, and Daisen's ski season runs December to March. Summer is humid with August highs around 32–33°C, and the dunes get hot enough that most people walk them at 6:00–8:00 or in the last hour of light. Pear picking runs August to October. The Shan-Shan festival fills central Tottori in mid-August. May and late October are the mildest.

Midwinter, unless you are going to Daisen for the snow. The coast is grey and wet, the dunes are cold and exposed, and the towns shut early even by rural Japanese standards.

August is hot and the dunes are genuinely punishing in it — the sand surface temperature is the thing people underestimate, and there is no shade whatsoever. Early morning and late afternoon are the only sensible times to be out there in summer. The good windows are April to June and September to November, when the coast is mild and Daisen's trails are open and clear.

Matsuba crab is the winter fixture, and you can watch it change hands at the Sakaiminato market auction from 6:00 to 7:30 in season before paying for it at dinner. Kurayoshi is pear country: the twentieth-century variety ripens from August into October, and orchards there sell picking by the half hour. Two everyday things are worth trying — tofu chikuwa, a soft tofu-and-fish paste roll eaten around Tottori City, and the beef-bone ramen that Kurayoshi shops have made since the postwar years. Daisen's dairy farms supply the soft-serve at the mountain base.

A first visit is the dunes, and the specific advice is to go at the beginning or end of the day rather than the middle. A two-kilometre stretch of sand rising forty metres above the Sea of Japan is genuinely strange in a country this green, and at dawn or dusk with the wind patterning it, it is one of the more memorable landscapes in western Japan. The sand museum beside it, which carves enormous sculptures from sand each year, is better than it sounds.

A second visit should be Daisen and Sakaiminato. The mountain is a serious walk with a shrine at its base and beech forest on its flanks; the port town is where the creator of Japan's great yokai manga grew up, and the whole main street is given over to bronze statues of the monsters. That combination — a mountain and a street of goblins — is a very Tottori day.