Every Place in the Catalogue
1,610 spots
Kadokawa Culture Museum
Little knownKuma Kengo clad this building in about 20,000 slabs of granite hung at angles so the whole thing reads as a rock that ha…
Oshi Castle
Little knownOshi Castle held out in 1590 when Ishida Mitsunari, under Toyotomi Hideyoshi, dammed the surrounding rivers and tried to…
Yoshimi Hyakuana
Little knownA hillside outside Yoshimi is drilled with 219 openings, cut into the soft tuff between the late sixth and late seventh…
Kinchakuda
Little knownKinchakuda is a loop of flat land inside a hairpin bend of the Koma river, shaped like a drawstring purse, which is what…
Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel
Little knownFifty metres under a football pitch in Kasukabe is a concrete hall 177 metres long and 78 wide, held up by 59 pillars ea…
Karikomi Pond
Little knownA pond four hundred metres around and four and a half metres deep, at the foot of Mt. Gankyoji in the Hakusan national p…
Echizen Daffodils
Little knownOne of the three great wild daffodil grounds in Japan is on the cliffs of the Echizen coast, and it flowers in December…
Ryusogataki Falls
Little knownSixty metres of water down a rock face in a narrow valley in Ikeda, one of the least populated municipalities in Fukui,…
Uriwari Falls
Little knownThe name means the melon splitter, from a story that the water was so cold that a melon left in it cracked. It comes out…
Urushi no Sato Kaikan
Little knownEchizen lacquerware has been made in the Kawada valley for around fifteen hundred years — the origin story involves a fi…
Megane Museum
Little knownAround ninety-five per cent of the spectacle frames made in Japan come from Sabae, a city of sixty thousand people in in…
Port of Humanity Tsuruga Museum
Little knownTsuruga was the Japanese end of a shipping route from Vladivostok, and twice in the twentieth century that made it a pla…
Taniguchiya
Little knownFukui eats more fried tofu per household than any other prefecture in Japan, by a wide margin, and the reason is partly…
Rainbow Line Summit Park
Little knownMikata Goko is five lakes lying side by side behind the Wakasa coast, and the reason they are famous is that they are fi…
Jinguji Omizuokuri
Little knownEvery 12 March, water is drawn from a well at Todaiji in Nara in the ceremony called Omizutori. The belief is that the w…
Nanamachi Morning Market
Little knownFour hundred years of the same arrangement: farmers bring what they have grown into Ono, sit down on the street, and lay…
Echizen Ono Castle
Little knownOno sits in a mountain basin, and on cold still mornings from autumn into spring the basin fills with cloud while the ca…
Hakusan Heisenji
Little knownIn the medieval period Heisenji was one of the largest religious complexes in Japan — six thousand monks, forty-eight ha…
Toga
Little knownToga is a mountain village at the top of a valley in Nanto, seventy minutes by road from Toyama city and considerably fu…
Okado Somen
Little knownOkado somen does not come in the straight bundles that somen comes in everywhere else. It is hand-stretched, then coiled…
Shiroebi-tei
Little knownShiroebi are tiny translucent shrimp, three or four centimetres long, that live in the deep trench running through Toyam…
Takaoka Daibutsu
Little knownTakaoka has made bronze since 1609 and this is the industry's demonstration piece: a seated Amida sixteen metres high, c…
Illustration — not a photographFugan Canal Kansui Park
Little knownThe Fugan canal was dug in the 1930s to link central Toyama to its port, fell out of use, and the basin at the city end…
Illustration — not a photographJohana Betsuin Zentokuji
Little knownZentokuji was founded around 530 years ago by Rennyo, the eighth head of the Honganji and the man who turned Jodo Shinsh…
Estimated from distance to the nearest airport or shinkansen station. Confirm actual journey times before you travel.