Yamagata– category –

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...

Imagine stepping into a painting: a narrow valley carved by a rushing river, flanked on both sides by four- and five-story wooden inns draped in soft lamplight, snowflakes drifting past gas-lit lanterns, the faint smell of sulfur driftin...

Somewhere in the mountains of Yamagata Prefecture, skiers are gliding down freshly carved powder turns as wildflowers bloom on the ridgelines above them — and it’s the middle of July. This isn’t a hallucination, and it’...

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...

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...

A castle on the hill, steam rising from the streets below, vineyard rows stretching across the valley, and a festival in February where townsfolk drench performers in icy water for good luck — welcome to Kaminoyama Onsen, one of Yamagata...

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...

Tucked away on Yamagata’s Sea of Japan coastline, Sakata is the kind of city that seasoned Japan travelers whisper about like a secret. Once one of Japan’s wealthiest merchant cities — a prosperous port where rice, sake, and ...

Picture 10,000 dancers flooding the streets of Yamagata City on a warm August evening, each one waving a flower-adorned straw hat overhead and chanting a hypnotic folk song in unison — the air thick with taiko drum beats, the street aliv...

There’s a crater lake in the mountains of Yamagata that changes color. Not subtly — not the way a lake might shift from blue to gray as clouds pass overhead — but dramatically, alchemically, in shades that seem to defy ordinary che...