Every Place in the Catalogue
1,610 spots
Okishima
Little knownOkishima is the only inhabited island in a freshwater lake anywhere in Japan. About 250 people live on a rock 1.5 kilome…
Azuchi Castle Ruins
Little knownOda Nobunaga built Azuchi between 1576 and 1579 on a hill over Lake Biwa and it stood for three years. The keep was seve…
Taga Taisha
Little knownTaga Taisha enshrines Izanagi and Izanami, the pair who in the Kojiki make the islands of Japan and most of the gods in…
Eigenji
Little knownEigenji is the head temple of its own branch of Rinzai Zen, founded in 1361 in a bend of the Aichi river where the valle…
Koka Ninja House
Little knownThis is the house of the Mochizuki family, head of the fifty-three Koka ninja households, built in the Genroku era and s…
Miho Museum
Little knownI. M. Pei built this museum into a mountain in the Shigaraki hills with about eighty percent of it underground, on the e…
Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park
Little knownShigaraki is one of the six ancient kilns of Japan and its clay is unusually coarse, full of feldspar that bursts throug…
Mount Ibuki
Little knownIbuki stands 1,377 metres on the Shiga and Gifu border, alone rather than in a range, which is why it takes the full for…
Samegai Baikamo
Little knownSamegai was the sixty-first station on the Nakasendo, and the Jizo river runs straight down the middle of it, fed by a s…
Makino Metasequoia Avenue
Little knownAbout 500 metasequoias line 2.4 kilometres of the approach road to the Makino highland, planted in 1981 as part of a fru…
Harie Shozu no Sato
Little knownIn Harie, spring water comes up inside the houses. Groundwater filtered through the Hira mountains is tapped in a struct…
Illustration — not a photographFormer Japanese Navy Underground Headquarters
Little knownIn 1944 the Imperial Navy dug a command post into a hill in what is now Tomigusuku, using picks and hoes: about four hun…
Hamahiga Island
Little knownHamahiga is a small island off the Katsuren peninsula, reachable by road over the Kaichu Doro causeway, and it holds two…
Kafu Banta
Little knownKafu means good fortune and banta means cliff, so the name is the cliff of happiness — a viewing point about seventy met…
Minatogawa Stateside Town
Little knownIn the 1960s the American administration built housing for its personnel in Urasoe: single-storey concrete boxes with fl…
Kudaka Island
Little knownKudaka is eight kilometres round, low, and in Ryukyuan belief the first land the creation deity Amamikiyo made. Kings of…
Yachimun no Sato
Little knownOkinawan pottery is called yachimun and it was concentrated in Tsuboya in Naha until the 1970s, when smoke regulations i…
Cape Hedo
Little knownThe northern tip of Okinawa Island, where the East China Sea and the Pacific meet over a shelf of raised coral limestone…
Daisekirinzan
Little knownThe limestone at the northern tip of Okinawa was laid down about two hundred and fifty million years ago and has weather…
Bise Fukugi Tree Road
Little knownFukugi is a dense evergreen with thick leathery leaves, and Okinawan villages planted it in rows around every house as a…
Chiran Peace Museum
Little knownChiran was an army airfield, and in the last months of the Pacific war it was the main departure point for special attac…
Myoken Onsen
Little knownMyoken is the largest of the hot springs strung along the Amori river gorge north of Kirishima, in a group known as the…
Lake Imuta
Little knownImuta is a crater lake about four kilometres round, sixty hectares in area, and remarkably shallow — the deepest point i…
Napoleon Rock
Little knownThe Koshiki islands lie fifty kilometres off the Satsuma coast and their western shore is a wall of sea cliff running fo…
Estimated from distance to the nearest airport or shinkansen station. Confirm actual journey times before you travel.