Ikeshima: The Abandoned Coal Island You Are Actually Allowed to Walk Around
Everyone queues for Battleship Island. Nobody goes to the one where the shops are still standing and 100 people still live.
Read →Yamadera: 1,015 Steps Up a Cliff to the Most Famous Silence in Japan
A temple built into a rock face, and the spot where a 17th-century poet listened to cicadas and wrote the seventeen syllables…
Read →Shodoshima: Greece, Except the Soy Sauce Has Been Fermenting Since 1910
Olive groves, a sandbar that only exists at low tide, a valley of century-old soy sauce warehouses, and a gorge that goes…
Read →Oku-Matsushima: The Famous View, Minus the Coaches
The eastern end of one of the Three Views of Japan, where you can kayak between the islets and then eat oysters at a shack with…
Read →Katsuyama: A Rice-Farming Town That Found So Many Dinosaurs It Rebranded Itself
Fukui produces most of Japan's dinosaur fossils, and this town of 22,000 has responded with the enthusiasm of a place that…
Read →Nakagusuku: A 15th-Century Castle, and the Hotel Nobody Ever Finished Building Next to It
One of the best-preserved castle ruins in Okinawa, with the concrete skeleton of an abandoned resort standing directly uphill…
Read →Hang on — the rest of this site is in Japanese?
It is. JAPAN NOW is the English corner of 英会話学習ラボ, a site that teaches English to Japanese learners. Which means the other 600 pages are the exact mirror of this one: what Japanese people find impossible about your language, what they are taught, and where the misunderstandings actually begin. If this page was fun, that is the other half of the same joke.
Look at the Japanese side