Every Place in the Catalogue
1,610 spots
Kasamori Kannon
Locally knownThe hall at Kasamori stands on top of a rock outcrop and is held up on all four sides by a lattice of timber posts of di…
Sakitama Kofun Park
Locally knownNine large burial mounds stand together in a field at Gyoda, including Maruhakayama, one of the largest round mounds in…
Kehi Jingu
Locally knownThe great torii at Kehi Jingu is 10.9 metres high, built of wood, and is counted with Kasuga Taisha in Nara and Itsukush…
Sanchomachi
Locally knownObama was the port where the mackerel and everything else from the Sea of Japan came ashore for Kyoto, and the money tha…
Myotsuji
Locally knownFukui has exactly two National Treasure buildings and both are here, in a wooded valley outside Obama. The main hall dat…
Kumagawa-juku
Locally knownBefore refrigeration, the mackerel landed at Obama on the Sea of Japan was salted and carried on foot over the mountains…
Sugisawa no Sawasugi
Locally knownThis is a cedar forest growing on flat ground at sea level, fed by springs rising through the Kurobe alluvial fan — whic…
Uozu Buried Forest Museum
Locally knownTwo thousand years ago a cedar forest stood on the shore at Uozu. The Katakai River buried it in gravel, the sea rose ov…
Yamachosuji
Locally knownIn June 1900 a fire destroyed six-tenths of Takaoka. The merchants of Yamachosuji, the wealthy stretch of the old Hokuri…
Illustration — not a photographKanayamachi
Locally knownWhen Maeda Toshinaga founded Takaoka in 1609 he brought in seven metal casters from a village in Tonami and gave them la…
Inami Woodcarving Town
Locally knownInami carves wood, and it has done since the eighteenth century, when carpenters rebuilding the temple at the top of the…
Illustration — not a photographShomyo Falls
Locally knownShomyo is the tallest waterfall in Japan: 350 metres in four stages down a wall of columnar rock at the western edge of…
Shukunegi
Locally knownShukunegi is a shipowners' village packed into a ravine on Sado's southern coast, and it is built the way it is because…
Masagosoba
Locally knownTakayama ramen is called chuka soba locally and it is made differently from almost anywhere else: instead of keeping the…
Hirayu Great Falls
Locally knownHirayu Otaki drops 64 metres in a single fall on the edge of the Okuhida hot spring villages, one of Japan's hundred wat…
Mino Udatsu Townscape
Locally knownAn udatsu is a fireproof wall built up above the roofline between neighbouring houses. They were expensive, so having on…
Iwamura Castle Ruins
Locally knownIwamura stands at 717 metres, the highest domain castle in Japan, with 180 metres of vertical between the town and the k…
Eihoji
Locally knownEihoji was founded in 1313 by Muso Soseki, the monk who designed the gardens at Tenryuji and Saihoji in Kyoto, and it ho…
Ise Udon
Locally knownIse udon is thick, very soft noodles in a small amount of dark tamari-based sauce, with a little spring onion on top and…
Illustration — not a photographSeki-juku
Locally knownSeki was the forty-seventh of the fifty-three stations of the Tokaido, and it is the only one of them where the street s…
Negoroji (Iwade)
Locally knownNegoroji was, at its height in the sixteenth century, a monastic complex of some two thousand buildings with an armed fo…
Hashigui-iwa
Locally knownAbout forty pillars of rock stand in a line across the shallows at Kushimoto, running roughly 850 metres from the shore…
Kongorinji
Locally knownKongorinji is the middle of the three Kotosanzan temples strung along the foot of the Suzuka mountains, all founded in t…
Gokasho Kondo
Locally knownOmi merchants were the trading class that went out from this plain across Japan from the seventeenth century, working on…
Estimated from distance to the nearest airport or shinkansen station. Confirm actual journey times before you travel.