Every Place in the Catalogue
1,610 spots
Fujiya
Locally knownOkinawan zenzai is not the hot red bean soup served everywhere else in Japan under the same name. It is cold: sweetened…
Daiichi Makishi Public Market
Locally knownThe market grew out of a black market in the rubble after 1945 and became the food hall of Naha — the ground floor is fi…
Tsuboya Yachimun Street
Locally knownIn 1682 the Ryukyu kingdom consolidated its scattered kilns into one district in Naha, and Tsuboya has been making potte…
Kinjocho Stone Path
Locally knownThe Madama-michi was the road the Ryukyu kings took south out of Shuri Castle, laid in the early sixteenth century with…
Nakamura House
Locally knownAlmost every traditional building in Okinawa was destroyed in 1945. The Nakamura house, a wealthy farming family's compo…
Gesashi Mangrove Forest
Locally knownThe largest mangrove stand on Okinawa Island is at the mouth of the Gesashi river in Higashi, on the Pacific side of Yan…
Ishibashi Memorial Park
Locally knownBetween 1840 and 1849 five arched stone bridges were built across the Kotsuki river in Kagoshima by Iwanaga Sangoro, a m…
Iriki Fumoto Samurai District
Locally knownIriki is the fumoto that shows the technique best. The walls here are tamaishi-gaki — built from rounded river cobbles r…
Tenmonkan Mujaki
Locally knownShirokuma is shaved ice under condensed milk with fruit and beans on top, and it is Kagoshima's, invented at this shop i…
Kamo no Ogusu
Locally knownThe largest tree in Japan stands in a shrine compound in a small town in Aira. The numbers do not prepare you. The base…
Izumi Fumoto Samurai District
Locally knownSatsuma did not concentrate its samurai in one castle town. It scattered them across more than a hundred fortified admin…
Izumi Crane Observation Centre
Locally knownMore than ten thousand cranes fly in from Siberia to winter on the reclaimed farmland at Izumi — mostly hooded and white…
Illustration — not a photographMimitsu
Locally knownMimitsu was the port of the Takanabe domain at the mouth of the Mimitsu river, and in the late Edo and Meiji periods its…
Beppu Reimen
Locally knownBeppu's cold noodles came back from Manchuria. A returnee opened a grilled meat shop in the town after the war and tried…
Hakusui Dam
Locally knownHakusui is an irrigation weir, 14 metres high and 87 metres across, built between 1934 and 1938 on the upper Ono river,…
Fukiji
Locally knownThe Great Hall of Fukiji is the oldest wooden building in Kyushu and one of three surviving Amida halls in Japan of the…
Kitsuki Castle Town
Locally knownKitsuki is the only sandwich-shaped castle town in Japan. Samurai districts sit on two facing plateaus, the north and th…
Usuki Stone Buddhas
Locally knownAround sixty Buddhist figures are carved directly into the tuff cliffs of a small valley outside Usuki, cut between the…
Hitomoji Guruguru
Locally knownA spring onion, briefly blanched, folded in half and then wound round its own white base into a tight coil, served with…
Ikinari Dango
Locally knownA thick slice of raw sweet potato and a spoonful of sweet bean paste, wrapped in a plain wheat dough and steamed. That i…
Taipien
Locally knownTaipien is a bowl of clear chicken and pork broth with mung bean vermicelli in it, topped with stir-fried pork, cabbage,…
Yachiyoza
Locally knownYachiyoza was built in 1910 by the merchants of Yamaga, who put up the money themselves for a proper playhouse in a town…
Tsujun Bridge
Locally knownThe plateau at Yabe had no water. In 1854 the village headman Futa Yasunosuke had this built to get it there: a stone ar…
Mt. Bandai
Locally knownMt. Bandai (磐梯山, 1,816m) is an active stratovolcano that dominates Fukushima's central landscape, known as 'Aizu-Bandai-…
Estimated from distance to the nearest airport or shinkansen station. Confirm actual journey times before you travel.