Most Popular
Based on Countries Been user data.
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Tokyo
Tokyo is a city that perpetually exceeds expectation — not because it is always spectacular, which it is, but because it is also always surprising: the precise neighbourhood changes every five hundred metres, the food is genuinely world-class across every price bracket and every cuisine, and the density of things to discover in a city of thirteen million is effectively infinite. Shinjuku's Golden Gai — a network of two-metre-wide alleyways lined with bars that fit eight people each — operates a hundred metres from the world's busiest railway station; Yanaka is a maze of wooden temples and shitamachi shopfronts unchanged since the 1950s. Japan's capital is the city that ruins cities — visiting it first makes everywhere else feel slightly less organised, slightly less delicious, and slightly less able to locate itself across all centuries simultaneously.
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Kyoto
Kyoto was Japan's imperial capital for over a thousand years and is the repository of everything the country means culturally — over 1,600 Buddhist temples, 400 Shinto shrines, seventeen UNESCO World Heritage Sites, three geisha districts, the finest kaiseki restaurant scene in Asia, and a culinary philosophy of seasonal precision that has influenced kitchens around the world. The Fushimi Inari Taisha's tunnels of ten thousand vermilion torii gates wind up a forested mountain behind the railway station; the Arashiyama bamboo grove and the moss garden of Saihō-ji require early mornings or advance reservations to experience without crowds. No number of visits to Kyoto exhausts it — most travellers stop trying to complete it and simply accept the city as an ongoing relationship.
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Osaka
Osaka is Japan's most unguarded city — a place where the national tendency toward reserve drops noticeably and where the civic philosophy of kuidaore ('eat until you drop') has produced the densest concentration of great cheap restaurants in a country already obsessed with food. Dotonbori, the neon riverfront of crab signs, takoyaki stalls, and street food counters along the Ebisubashi canal, is impossible to leave without eating every thirty metres; the Kuromon Ichiba market operates as Osaka's kitchen, its vendors selling live seafood and grilled wagyu within touching distance. Osaka Castle, surrounded by original seventeenth-century stone walls and moats, remains a commanding historical presence in the centre of the most modern of Japanese cities.
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Kanagawa
Kanagawa sits immediately south of Tokyo and contains three destinations in one small prefecture: Yokohama's cosmopolitan bay city with Japan's largest Chinatown; Kamakura's medieval temple valleys and the Great Buddha of Kōtoku-in meditating in an open-air clearing of bamboo; and Hakone's volcanic highlands above Lake Ashi, from which Mount Fuji appears in its most accessible and most reflective conditions. The Hakone Open Air Museum's sculpture park, combining international contemporary art with volcanic steam and mountain scenery, is one of Japan's finest museums by any measure.
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Hokkaido
Hokkaido is Japan's great northern frontier — a sparsely populated island of volcanic mountains, flower meadows, bear-stalked forests, and powder-snow ski resorts that operates on a scale and wildness the main island cannot match. Sapporo hosts Asia's largest snow festival each February, when enormous ice sculptures fill Ōdōri Park; in summer the same park fills with flower beds and open-air beer gardens, while the surrounding nature of Daisetsuzan and the Shiretoko Peninsula remains accessible within two hours in any direction. The Shiretoko Peninsula, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is one of the few places in Japan where brown bears, Blakiston's fish owls, and Steller's sea eagles share undisturbed wilderness.
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Nara
Nara was Japan's first permanent capital, established in 710 AD, and its sixteen square kilometres of Nara Park remain one of the most immediately joyful public spaces in the country — a grassy expanse of ancient temples, moss-covered stone lanterns, and approximately 1,200 wild sika deer that roam freely, bow to receive crackers, and occasionally headbutt distracted tourists. Tōdai-ji, the world's largest wooden building, houses a fifteen-metre bronze Buddha whose raised hand in the abhaya mudra gesture is visible from the outer courtyard. Nara's Hōryū-ji, the oldest wooden structure in the world, has stood since 607 AD.
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Hyōgo
Hyōgo contains one of Japan's most staggering single sites — Himeji Castle, the only surviving example of a fully intact feudal castle complex, its white-plastered keeps rising above the plains in an arrangement of such grace and defensive cunning it earned the nickname 'White Heron Castle.' Kobe, the prefectural capital, is Japan's most cosmopolitan port city, its Kitano-chō foreign quarter of nineteenth-century merchant mansions on a hillside above the harbour shaped by a history of open trading with the West that left its mark in food — Kobe beef, baumkuchen, Indian curry — and architecture. Arima Onsen, in the hills above Kobe, is Japan's oldest hot-spring resort, its gold and silver springs offering two chemically distinct baths in the same narrow valley.
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Hiroshima
Hiroshima carries a weight that no other Japanese city bears — the Peace Memorial Museum and the skeletal Atomic Bomb Dome on the Ōta River have made it one of the most visited and morally significant sites in the world since 1945. The floating torii gate of Itsukushima Shrine on Miyajima Island, rising from the Seto Inland Sea at high tide, is one of Japan's three canonical scenic views. Beyond the history and the postcard icon, Hiroshima is an energetic modern city known for oysters, okonomiyaki topped with a fried egg, and an infectious local pride.
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Okinawa
Okinawa is subtropical Japan — an archipelago of coral-fringed islands in a turquoise sea that feels closer to Southeast Asia than Honshū, with a distinct Ryukyuan culture, cuisine, and architectural heritage that predates Japanese sovereignty by centuries. The Shuri Castle complex in Naha, repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt over the centuries, represents the apex of Ryukyuan palace architecture in its red-lacquered timber halls; the Churaumi Aquarium in the north has one of the world's largest main tanks. Okinawa's beaches — particularly the Kerama Islands, thirty minutes by high-speed ferry — have some of the clearest water and richest coral in Asia.
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Aichi
Aichi is Japan's industrial heartland — Toyota City is here, producing roughly eight million vehicles a year — but Nagoya, the prefectural capital, is a city of genuine historical ambition: its Honmaru Palace, reconstructed entirely in traditional cypress carpentry, is one of modern Japan's most meticulous historical restoration projects. Nagoya Castle's gilded shachihoko roof ornaments are the city's civic symbol, and the food culture is aggressively local — hitsumabushi chopped eel over rice, miso katsu in red-miso sauce — and proudly unlike the rest of Japan.
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Yamanashi
Yamanashi is Fuji country — the Fuji Five Lakes district provides the reflection shots and the hiking routes to the summit, and Kawaguchiko is the world's most photographed mountain mirrored in flat water. The Shosenkyo gorge south of Kōfu city threads through a canyon of red granite that in autumn becomes one of the most vivid fall-colour landscapes in the Kantō region. Yamanashi is also Japan's wine country — the Katsunuma district's Koshu grape, cultivated for two centuries, produces a delicate amber-skinned white wine that pairs precisely with the prefecture's hōtō udon.
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Shizuoka
Shizuoka exists largely in the shadow of Mount Fuji — the volcano's most famous photogenic profile is seen from the Suruga Bay coast here, and the Fuji Five Lakes region draws millions each spring for the cherry-blossom reflection shots that cover every Japanese calendar. The prefecture produces three quarters of Japan's green tea crop on the slopes between the mountains and the sea, and the terraced tea fields at Nihondaira, with Fuji in the background, are among the most characteristically Japanese landscapes in the country. Shimizu Port's tuna market and the historic Miho no Matsubara pine grove are overlooked by visitors fixated on the volcano above.
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Nagano
Nagano hosted the 1998 Winter Olympics, and its mountains — the Japanese Alps and the Hida range — remain the finest ski and snow terrain in Japan, with resorts at Hakuba, Nozawa Onsen, and Shiga Kōgen that attracted the world's ski circuit and never let it go. Matsumoto Castle, a sixteenth-century original with six-tiered black-lacquered keeps, is one of Japan's most beautiful — its moat reflection is one of the country's most photographed castle scenes. Zenkōji temple in Nagano city has sheltered a hidden Buddha image for fourteen centuries, attracting seven million pilgrims a year and welcoming all sects, any believer, any seeker.
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Fukuoka
Fukuoka is the gateway to Kyushu and one of Japan's most consistently enjoyable cities — compact, walkable, excellent food, and low prices by Japanese standards, with a confidence that comes from being the largest city on the island and Japan's closest major port to the Asian continent. Hakata ramen — the intensely rich tonkotsu broth that spawned a global style of noodle — was invented here and is still best consumed at a yatai food stall on the Nakasu riverbank after midnight. The Dazaifu Tenman-gū shrine draws students seeking the blessing of the deified scholar Sugawara no Michizane before university entrance exams.
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Ishikawa
Ishikawa's capital Kanazawa is Japan's great overlooked city — a castle town that survived the Second World War entirely intact and wears its Edo-period wealth in three geisha districts, two samurai neighbourhoods, and Kenroku-en garden, ranked by tradition as one of Japan's three finest. The Higashi Chaya district's two-storey tea-house buildings, their latticework windows glowing gold at dusk, are exactly as they were when geisha performed there in the nineteenth century. The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, a circular building of equal doors by SANAA, made Kanazawa a contemporary art destination as well as a historical one.
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Nagasaki
Nagasaki is the city that was both Japan's only open window to the outside world during two centuries of near-total isolation and the target of the second atomic bomb in August 1945 — these twin facts have given it a historical density and an outward-facing temperament unlike any other Japanese city. The Glover Garden's Victorian merchant mansions on a hillside above the harbour, the reconstructed Dejima Dutch trading island in the city centre, and the Meganebashi stone arch bridge spanning the Nakashima River represent the European centuries; the Nagasaki Peace Park and the Urakami Cathedral, rebuilt after the bomb, hold the other history. The city's Champon noodle dish — thick noodles in a milky pork and seafood broth — was invented in Chinatown and became Nagasaki's defining food.
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Kumamoto
Kumamoto is defined by its castle — a sixteenth-century hilltop fortress of curved stone walls and multiply tiered keeps, considered alongside Himeji and Matsumoto as one of Japan's three finest, currently undergoing painstaking reconstruction after the 2016 earthquake. Mount Aso, the world's largest volcanic caldera, dominates the prefecture's eastern half: a surreal landscape of grass-covered outer crater walls and an active inner cone whose smoke column is visible from fifty kilometres. The Kurokawa Onsen village, tucked in a forested river gorge, is Japan's most atmospheric hot-spring town — wooden inns over a rushing stream, open-air baths cut into the riverbank.
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Mie
Mie's entire identity is anchored by Ise Jingū — the Grand Shrine, the holiest site in Shinto and the spiritual home of the imperial family, a complex of two main shrines in a cedar forest that has been ritually demolished and rebuilt in identical form every twenty years for fourteen centuries. The Inner Shrine, approached across a wooden bridge over the Isuzu River, has a gravity even secular visitors feel: the main sanctuary is visible only as a thatched roof above a series of wooden fences, deliberately hidden from profane eyes. Toba's ama diving women of Ise-Shima still harvest seafood in traditional white costumes in a practice continued from the Jōmon period.
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Wakayama
Wakayama is the spiritual backbone of Japan — the Kii Peninsula contains Kōya-san, the mountaintop monastery town founded by the monk Kūkai in 816 AD where esoteric Shingon Buddhism has been practised continuously ever since, its Okunoin cemetery a forest of moss-covered stone lanterns and the tombs of samurai lords stretching for kilometres beneath cedar trees. The Kumano Kodō pilgrimage routes, three converging trails through the Kii mountains to the Kumano Grand Shrines, are UNESCO-listed and walked by both religious pilgrims and secular hikers seeking the meditative rhythm of stone-paved forest paths. Staying overnight in a shukubō temple lodging on Kōya-san, attending the dawn fire ceremony, and eating Buddhist vegetarian shōjin ryōri is among the most memorable nights in Japan.
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Tochigi
Tochigi contains Nikkō — Japan's most extravagantly decorated historical complex, where Tokugawa Ieyasu's mausoleum is buried beneath a mountain forest of cryptomeria and the Tōshō-gū shrine's carved façades have every surface gilded, lacquered, and carved until the total effect is simultaneously overwhelming and magnificent. The Nasu highlands, north of Nikkō, are a high plateau of volcanic hot-spring inns, hiking trails above Chausu peak, and Tochigi wagyu beef served at the finest tables in Tokyo. Ashikaga Flower Park's wisteria tunnels in May — century-old vines drooping with lavender and white blooms — are among Japan's most spectacular seasonal events.
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Ōita
Ōita is Japan's undisputed hot-spring capital — the prefecture produces more hot-spring water per day than any other in the world, and the city of Beppu is so geothermally active it resembles a permanent steam bath, its 'hells' of bubbling mud, cobalt-blue water, and boiling clay drawing visitors who photograph the steam before lowering themselves into it. Yufuin, inland from Beppu, is Japan's most refined onsen resort town — a single-street village of craft shops, café-galleries, and lake-view inns beloved by Japanese couples on anniversary weekends. Kunisaki Peninsula's ancient Buddhist temples, carved into mountainside clifftops, are walked by a fraction of the visitors who pack Beppu, which makes them all the more rewarding.
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Ehime
Ehime wraps around the northwestern corner of Shikoku, its Seto Inland Sea coastline of mikan orange groves and terraced hillsides producing the sweetest citrus in Japan. Matsuyama Castle, one of only twelve original surviving castles in Japan, stands atop a hill above Dōgo Onsen — Japan's oldest hot-spring resort, believed to be the inspiration for the bathhouse in Spirited Away and still operating after three thousand years of recorded use. The Shimanami Kaidō cycling road, crossing six bridges over Inland Sea islands to Hiroshima, is considered one of the world's finest cycling routes.
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Kagoshima
Kagoshima looks across a five-kilometre strait to Sakurajima, one of Japan's most active volcanoes, which erupts on average four hundred times a year, raining grey ash on the city below in a relationship of resigned cohabitation that residents have managed for centuries. The prefecture's Ibusuki sand baths, on a volcanic beach where thermal heat beneath the black sand is enough to cook you if you stay long enough, are Japan's most eccentric spa experience. Yakushima Island, accessible by ferry from Kagoshima port, is a UNESCO World Heritage island of cryptomeria cedars over two thousand years old, the primeval forest that inspired the setting for Princess Mononoke.
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Gifu
Gifu's most famous image is Shirakawa-gō — a valley of thatched gassho-zukuri farmhouses whose steeply angled roofs shed the region's enormous snowfalls while housing silkworm cultivation in the upper lofts, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site that looks surreal in winter snowfall. Takayama, the 'little Kyoto of the mountains,' has an immaculately preserved Edo-period merchant district of sake breweries, lacquerware shops, and morning markets where farmers sell red turnips and mountain vegetables at dawn. The Hida Folk Village is an open-air museum of rescued traditional mountain buildings worth more than a morning but given much less by most itineraries.
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Miyagi
Miyagi's singular geographical claim is Matsushima — a bay of 260 pine-covered islets considered one of Japan's three official scenic views and best seen from a wooden boat at dawn when the islands emerge from mist. Sendai, the prefectural capital and Tōhoku's largest city, is the 'City of Trees,' its wide zelkova-lined boulevards and excellent beef tongue restaurants providing a level of urban comfort unusual in the region. The Date clan's Zuiganji temple at Matsushima, rebuilt by the warlord Date Masamune in 1609, contains lacquered sliding-door paintings of surprising ambition in a cedar cave complex carved from solid rock.
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Kagawa
Kagawa is the smallest prefecture in Japan by area — a compact territory on the Seto Inland Sea known as the 'Udon Prefecture' for the thin, firm Sanuki noodles its residents eat three times a day and visitors consume in dedicated pilgrimages through the province's hundreds of noodle shops. Naoshima Island, just offshore, is one of the world's most remarkable contemporary art destinations: a sparsely populated island whose rice paddies and fishing villages are dotted with buildings by Tadao Andō, Yayoi Kusama, and James Turrell. The Kotohira-gū shrine requires 785 steps to reach its inner sanctuary — Japan's most famous flight of stairs, worn smooth by centuries of devoted feet.
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Niigata
Niigata faces the Sea of Japan and receives more snow than almost any populated place on earth — its Echigo-Yuzawa and Myōkō Kōgen ski areas were the birthplace of Japan's domestic ski industry in the 1920s and still offer some of the deepest and most reliable powder outside Hokkaido. The prefecture is Japan's largest rice producer and the source of the Koshihikari grain prized above all others for sushi; the same cold, clean water that grows the rice feeds sake breweries that have set the national standard for junmai daiginjo since the Edo period. Sado Island, accessible by ferry, preserves gold-mine history, traditional tub-boat fishing, and the percussion ensemble Kodo who practise taiko drumming at the edge of a cliff above the Japan Sea.
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Aomori
Aomori is Japan's northernmost main-island prefecture, its Nebuta Festival one of Japan's most spectacular: enormous illuminated float-lanterns of historical warriors and mythological figures, some ten metres tall, paraded through the city streets to a cacophony of drums and flutes while dancers in happi coats swarm around them. Lake Towada, a double-caldera lake in the national park, is fringed by beech forest that turns a perfect amber-and-scarlet in October. Hirosaki Castle, one of Japan's twelve original surviving castles, sits in a park of 2,600 cherry trees whose blossom moat reflections are considered the most beautiful in Tōhoku.
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Akita
Akita is Tōhoku in its most rural and atmospheric form — the Oga Peninsula's Namahage demon festival, where roaring demons in straw capes pound on household doors demanding good behaviour from children, is one of Japan's most viscerally theatrical folk traditions, now UNESCO-listed. Kakunodate's samurai district preserves Edo-period warrior residences behind earthen walls and weeping cherry trees, its spring blossom so celebrated that visitors barely see the buildings behind the pink curtain of flowers. Lake Tazawa, Japan's deepest lake, is a caldera of intense cobalt blue in the Tazawako highlands where the legendary Tatsuko — transformed into a dragon for her prayer to remain eternally beautiful — is said to live at the bottom.
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Yamagata
Yamagata is defined by two experiences separated by an hour's drive — Yamadera, the cliff-hanging Risshaku-ji temple complex whose thousand stone steps lead through cedar forest to worship halls perched above a river valley, and Ginzan Onsen, a single street of five-storey Taisho-era wooden ryokan on either side of a rushing stream, illuminated by gas lamps in winter and straight out of Spirited Away's conceptual design reference folder. Yamagata's fruit production — Satonishiki cherries, La France pears, and Delicious apples from orchards on the flanks of Zao volcano — supplies the finest fruit counters in Tokyo's department stores. Zao Onsen's outdoor baths, their sulphurous water turning copper jewellery black, are heated by the same volcano that produces the snow-monster ice formations in winter.
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Chiba
Chiba stretches east of Tokyo on the Bōsō Peninsula and is where Tokyo's international airport lands — Narita Airport sits in the middle of rice paddy farmland — but the prefecture extends far beyond its transit function. Naritasan Shinshōji temple draws twelve million visitors a year in one of Japan's most-visited compounds; its incense smoke, giant cooking pots, and New Year crowds represent everyday Japanese religious life at its most visceral. The Bōsō Peninsula's Pacific coast has some of the best surfing in the Kantō region, and the wild Nakatajima sand dunes at the tip are a surprisingly remote reward at the end of a local train line.
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Saitama
Saitama is the prefecture that Tokyoites escape to for the suburbs they can no longer afford in the capital, but it contains two sites that reward a deliberate journey: Kawagoe, a preserved Edo-period merchant town of kura storehouse towers and sweet potato confections just thirty minutes from Shinjuku, nicknamed 'Little Edo' with complete justification. The Chichibu region's limestone mountains shelter a Shinto shrine complex at Chichibu Jinja and a series of thirty-four Buddhist temples forming a pilgrimage circuit that rewards the walker with a compact countryside unmarked by the industrialisation filling the prefecture's flatter eastern half.
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Shiga
Shiga holds Lake Biwa — Japan's largest lake, a shallow freshwater sea that has supplied Kyoto and Osaka with drinking water, freshwater fish, and scenic inspiration since the Heian period. Hikone Castle, one of only four castles in Japan to hold the highest national designation as a national treasure, rises above the lake shore with its original keeps and turrets intact. The Miho Museum, designed by I. M. Pei in a cedar forest on a remote hillside and reached through a glass-and-steel tunnel, houses Persian, Egyptian, and ancient Chinese artefacts in a building that appears to float.
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Okayama
Okayama holds two of Japan's three officially designated 'Great Gardens' — Kōrakuen, a seventeenth-century strolling garden of teahouses, lawns, and plum groves beside the Asahi River, is considered the finest example of its type. The nearby Bikan Historical Quarter in Kurashiki — white-walled merchant storehouses on a willow-lined canal — preserves an Edo-period townscape so complete it has become a film location of choice. Okayama also serves as the gateway to Naoshima and the Setouchi art islands, a contemporary art destination of international stature.
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Miyazaki
Miyazaki occupies the southeastern coast of Kyushu in a subtropical climate warm enough for palm trees and bougainvillea, its Nichinan coastline of volcanic rock formations and crashing Pacific surf making it a surfing destination unlike anywhere else in Japan. Takachiho Gorge, where the Gokase River has carved a narrow slot canyon through basalt columns in the inland mountains, has been sacred since Japan's mythological founding — the cave where the sun goddess Amaterasu hid is said to be nearby. Cape Toi's wild horses, descendants of medieval warhorses that have roamed the headland since the ninth century, graze on the clifftop grass above the Pacific.
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Tokushima
Tokushima is best known internationally for the Naruto whirlpools — tidal maelstroms up to thirty metres wide that form in the Naruto Strait as the Pacific and Inland Sea tides clash, viewable from a glass walkway beneath the bridge. The Awa Odori festival, held each August, transforms Tokushima city into a spectacle of 1.3 million dancing participants in conical hats and yukata — Japan's largest and most exuberant summer dance festival, dating to the sixteenth century. The Iya Valley, deep in the Shikoku mountains, is one of the most isolated traditional landscapes in Japan: thatched farmhouses on impossibly steep forested gorge walls, connected by vine suspension bridges that shudder underfoot.
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Kochi
Kochi occupies the entire southern face of Shikoku, its Pacific-coast exposure giving it the most rainfall in Japan and a lush subtropical vegetation quite unlike the Japan of tourist brochures. Cape Muroto and Cape Ashizuri thrust dramatically into the Pacific, and the Shimanto River — marketed as Japan's last 'clear stream' — is navigated by traditional riverboat in a landscape of chestnut groves and thatched farmhouses. The local katsuo no tataki — seared bonito presented on a straw bundle and eaten with garlic and ponzu — is the prefecture's defining food and one of the best things to eat anywhere in Japan.
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Saga
Saga is the ceramic heart of Japan — the town of Arita has been producing porcelain since the early seventeenth century, when Korean potters discovered kaolin clay in the local hills and established the kilns that supplied the first Japanese porcelain exported to Europe. The Yoshinogari Historical Park reconstructs a vast Yayoi-period settlement of around 400 BC, the most complete Bronze Age site in Japan, with watchtower villages and ritual buildings enclosed by double moats. Saga's tidal flats along the Ariake Sea are one of the few places in Japan where traditional mudskipper fishing on wooden sleds is still practised.
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Toyama
Toyama faces the Sea of Japan from the base of the Northern Japan Alps, its Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route — a series of cable cars, ropeways, and tunnel trolley buses crossing the roof of Japan at 3,000 metres — one of the most dramatic mountain-crossing journeys in the world. The Kurobe Gorge railway, Japan's narrowest-gauge line, threads through a canyon of moss-covered rock above a turquoise river in a landscape so compressed that the sun reaches the bottom for only a few hours each day. Toyama's glacial snowmelt water has made the region famous for its firefly squid and some of Japan's finest sake.
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Fukui
Fukui is a deeply undervisited prefecture with a startling depth of riches — the Eiheiji temple, founded by Zen master Dōgen in 1244 and still a functioning monastery of around two hundred monks, is one of the most spiritually immersive temple experiences in Japan. The Tōjinbō cliffs, basalt columns rising from the Sea of Japan in formations that resemble organ pipes, are as dramatic a coastal landscape as Japan possesses. Fukui is also the Dinosaur Prefecture — its Katsuyama quarries have produced more dinosaur fossils than any other site in Japan, celebrated in a museum designed to look like a meteorite impact from the air.
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Shimane
Shimane is ancient Japan in the most literal sense — the Izumo Taisha Grand Shrine, dedicated to the deity of marriage and one of the oldest Shinto shrines in existence, draws pilgrims who believe the gods of Japan gather here every October in the lunar calendar. The Adachi Museum of Art in Yasugi maintains what has been voted Japan's finest Japanese garden for twenty consecutive years, its sand-and-stone compositions framed through windows designed to be viewed as living paintings. Shimane is one of Japan's least-visited prefectures by foreign tourists, which makes its extraordinary depth of Shinto heritage feel like a genuine discovery.
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Tottori
Tottori is famous for one thing that surprises visitors who assumed Japan had no deserts — the Tottori Sand Dunes, wind-sculpted hills of golden sand rising from the Sea of Japan coast in a landscape that belongs to another continent. The dunes can be explored on camelback, by sandboard, or simply by climbing barefoot to watch the sea below, and the adjacent Sand Museum displays monumental sculptures carved from sand by artists from around the world. Beyond the dunes, the Misasa onsen town and Daisen mountain offer the rural solitude that makes Tottori one of the San'in coast's quietest rewards.
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Yamaguchi
Yamaguchi occupies the westernmost tip of Honshū and the Mōri clan who ruled from here in the sixteenth century briefly made their castle town a rival to Kyoto in cultural ambition, attracting Jesuits, Portuguese traders, and the painter Sesshū. Hagi, the former castle town on the Japan Sea coast, preserves a samurai district of earthen walls and lattice gates where the future leaders of the Meiji Restoration — Itō Hirobumi among them — studied at Shōkasonjuku Academy, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Akiyoshidai plateau, Japan's largest karst upland, hides the Akiyoshidō cave beneath its limestone grasslands.
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Iwate
Iwate is the largest prefecture in Honshū and one of the least visited, its interior a sweep of agricultural plain and forested mountain where Tōno valley's folk tales — collected by Kunio Yanagita in 1910 and still told in riverside kappa-demon storytelling performances — feel close to the surface of daily life. Hiraizumi, the eleventh-century capital of the Northern Fujiwara clan, preserves the Chūson-ji temple's Golden Hall — a lacquered room plated in gold and mother-of-pearl around the mummified Fujiwara lords — as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Morioka's Zaimoku-chō district of stone-built banks and Meiji-era bookshops beside the Kitakami River is one of Tōhoku's most underrated urban pleasures.
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Fukushima
Fukushima carries the weight of its 2011 nuclear accident, but the prefecture's interior — particularly Aizu-Wakamatsu, the old castle town of the Aizu domain — represents traditional Japan at its most intact and least touristed. Tsuruga Castle is flanked by samurai residence lanes and the Bukeyashiki mansion preserved as the Byakkotai memorial to the teenage samurai who died defending it in 1868. The Bandai-Asahi National Park's Goshiki-numa coloured ponds — formed by the 1888 eruption of Mount Bandai — change colour from turquoise to milky blue to rust-red depending on mineral content and light.
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Gunma
Gunma is Tokyo's mountain backyard — two hours from Shinjuku and home to three of Japan's most celebrated hot-spring towns: Kusatsu, whose highly acidic waters are believed to cure every illness except lovesickness; Ikaho, a stone-stepped spa town on a forested slope; and Minakami, where the Tone River runs through the first canyons accessible from Tokyo for white-water rafting. The Tomioka Silk Mill, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in southern Gunma, was Japan's first state-operated silk mill, established in 1872 using French machinery to launch the industry that funded the Meiji Revolution. Gunma's mountain vegetables — fuki burdock, warabi bracken, and the intensely flavoured Shimonita negi onion — supply Tokyo's finest restaurants via the daily vegetable train from Takasaki.
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Ibaraki
Ibaraki faces the Pacific north of Tokyo, its Hitachi Seaside Park becoming nationally famous each April when nemophila flowers cover entire hillsides in an undulating ocean of pale blue, and each autumn when the kochia hills turn scarlet. Mito's Kairakuen garden, one of Japan's three great gardens, planted three thousand plum trees in 1842 to create a February flowering that remains the nation's finest plum-blossom viewing destination, drawing three million visitors in a single month. The Tsukuba Science City, purpose-built around the University of Tsukuba, represents a different Japan: a planned research city beneath a distinctive twin-peaked mountain that marks the prefecture's western skyline.