naoyasaijo– Author –

Picture this: you're standing in an open, snow-dusted field in the mountains of Miyagi Prefecture, and more than a hundred foxes — russet red, silvery gray, and even a few with jet-black "cross" markings — are trotting past you, curling ...

Picture this: it’s before dawn, the temperature is well below freezing, and a bonfire crackles in a snow-covered pine grove. Suddenly, a line of dancers wearing towering, horse-shaped headdresses begins to sway and stomp in perfect...

Picture this: 10,000 dancers moving in perfect rhythm through the streets of a small northern Japanese city, backed by an army of taiko drummers whose thunder you can feel in your chest from two blocks away. This is Sansa Odori, and if y...

Ask most travelers to name a Japanese mountain and you’ll hear “Fuji” before anything else. But two hours north of Tokyo, in a prefecture most foreign visitors skip entirely, stands a volcano that inspired one of Japan&...

If Japan had a hall of fame for samurai history, Tsurugajo Castle would occupy the top spot. Rising above the city of Aizuwakamatsu with its distinctive red-tiled roof and perfectly proportioned white walls, this iconic fortress is not j...

Tucked into a narrow mountain valley where two rivers meet in a spot the distillery’s founder called “the perfect blending ground of Scotland and Japan,” Miyagikyo Distillery is one of the most rewarding — and least cro...

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 ...