2026年7月– date –

Halfway up a quiet, pine-covered hill in Aizuwakamatsu stands a wooden building unlike anything else in Japan — a pagoda whose interior spirals upward and downward along two paths that never cross, so that a monk walking in could c...

Picture a summer night in a quiet mountain-basin city, where twenty-story-tall wooden floats glide down the main street lit up like lanterns, drums pound in unison, and thousands of locals — many of them in matching happi coats represent...

Picture a mountain town where 300 wheeled lantern towers, each one lit by open flame and carried by dozens of chanting men, come crashing together in the streets after dark — while just up the hill, a reconstructed feudal castle watches ...

Picture a narrow river valley glowing amber at dusk, wooden ryokan balconies strung with paper lanterns, and steam rising off water that samurai soldiers once soaked in to heal their battle wounds. That’s Higashiyama Onsen — a hot ...

Picture this: waist-deep, bone-dry powder snow that squeaks under your boots, 21 lifts and gondolas spread across a mountain nearly the size of a small city, and barely another foreign face in sight. That’s Appi Kogen — one o...

Picture a woman in a white cotton diving suit, no oxygen tank, no wetsuit tech, plunging into the cold Pacific off Japan’s northeastern coast to hand-harvest abalone and sea urchin from the rocks below — a skill passed down through...