History & Culture– category –

Imagine standing before a mausoleum so exquisitely ornate — carved dragons curling around every pillar, gold leaf glinting through the ancient cedar forest — that you have to remind yourself you’re looking at a tomb. Zuihoden is th...

Imagine standing before the reconstructed wooden pillars of a 5,500-year-old settlement, realizing you’re looking at something older than the Egyptian pyramids — and that you’re the only foreign tourist here. That’s the...

Picture a city where the post boxes are shaped like giant shogi pieces, where every taxi driver can explain the difference between a bishop and a rook, and where once a year hundreds of people dressed in full samurai costume play out a l...

There is a single pine tree standing on the Iwate coast that changed Japan. In March 2011, a 70,000-tree forest called Takata-Matsubara was almost entirely destroyed by a tsunami that struck the town of Rikuzentakata with a wave reaching...

Tucked away in the mountains of southern Yamagata Prefecture, Yonezawa is one of Japan’s most historically significant yet criminally undervisited cities. This is where the legendary samurai lord Uesugi Kenshin established his doma...

When the Rugby World Cup came to Japan in 2019, Kamaishi — a small coastal city of around 33,000 people in Iwate Prefecture — became one of the competition’s most extraordinary stories. Just eight years after the devastating 2011 G...

Tsuruoka doesn’t announce itself loudly. There’s no single explosive spectacle here — no neon canyon, no famous landmark on every visitor’s checklist. What Tsuruoka offers instead is something rarer: a city that has qui...

If you’ve ever wrapped your hands around a heavy iron teapot and felt an almost meditative calm wash over you, you already understand why Nanbu Tekki has captured hearts around the world. Made in Morioka, the charming castle town t...

Long before written history, Tohoku’s communities expressed their deepest hopes — for good harvests, protection from evil, gratitude to the mountain gods, and connection with the spirits of ancestors — through music, dance, and dra...

Tohoku harbors a Japan that most tourists never see: a landscape of weathered concrete apartment blocks slowly surrendering to moss, mountain resorts where the corridors last echoed with footsteps decades ago, and rural homesteads where ...