Sightseeing & Nature– category –

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 ...

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&...

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...

Picture this: you’re behind the wheel of a rental car, windows down, the Pacific Ocean stretching endlessly to your right. Dramatic 200-meter (650-foot) sea cliffs plunge into jade-green waters below, fishing boats dot hidden coves...

Picture a coastline where ancient black lava cliffs tumble into the Pacific, where natural lawn meadows roll right up to the cliff edge, and where a sacred island shrine is so densely packed with nesting seabirds that visitors literally ...

Just steps away from Matsushima Bay’s famous pine-dotted islands lies one of Japan’s most magnificent Zen temples — a place so awe-inspiring that even the great haiku poet Matsuo Basho fell silent upon arriving. Zuiganji Temp...

There is a railway in Akita Prefecture that almost no foreign tourist has ever heard of, and that is precisely what makes it extraordinary. The Akita Nairiku Jukan Railway (秋田内陸縦貫鉄道) winds 94 kilometers (58 miles) through the ver...

Japan’s craft beer revolution began quietly in 1994, when the government slashed the minimum annual production requirement for beer licenses from 2 million liters to just 60,000 — unleashing an explosion of small-batch, artisan bre...

Imagine sitting on a wooden bench beside a rushing mountain river, watching a basket whiz across a rope overhead and land at your feet — inside, freshly made dango and a cup of green tea, delivered from a shop on the opposite cliff by a ...