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 →Nageiredo: The National Treasure Nobody Can Fully Explain, Wedged Into a Cliff by a Flying Monk
A thousand-year-old wooden hall sitting in a crack in a cliff face, reached by tree roots, an iron chain and a shoe inspection…
Read →Nagoro: A Village of 27 People, Nearly 400 Dolls, and One Woman Refusing to Let It Empty
Deep in Shikoku's Iya Valley, a life-size doll stands in almost every spot a real neighbour used to — at the bus stop, in the…
Read →Sado Island: The Gold Mine, the Exiled Playwright, and the Bird Japan Let Go Extinct
Japan's sixth-largest island: four centuries of shogunate gold, six hundred years of banished geniuses, and a national bird…
Read →Aogashima: The Tokyo Village Built Inside Its Own Volcano
About 170 people live on the inner wall of a live double caldera 358 km south of Shibuya, cook their eggs in volcanic steam…
Read →Mount Osore: The Buddhist Hell You Reach by Municipal Bus, With Free Hot Springs Attached
One of Japan's three most sacred mountains is a sulfur-stained volcanic caldera where pilgrims pay a blind medium to speak with…
Read →Tsuboyu: The Only World Heritage Site You Are Allowed to Get Undressed In
A stone bathtub the size of a large armchair, built directly over an 1,800-year-old hot spring on a pilgrimage route in the…
Read →Ibusuki: The Beach Where They've Been Burying People in Hot Sand for 300 Years
On the southern tip of Kyushu, staff with wooden shovels bury you up to the neck in sand heated to 55°C by the volcano…
Read →Iwami Ginzan: The Silver Mine You Can Still Walk Straight Into, No Booking Required
A mountain that Japan's own heritage authorities say once supplied close to a third of the world's silver, now a UNESCO World…
Read →The Train Line Japan Rebuilt for 49 Passengers a Day
A two-car train crosses a lattice bridge over a fog-filled valley in rural Fukushima a handful of times a day — on a line the…
Read →Okawachiyama: The Village Where the Checkpoint Searched You on the Way Out, Not In
A valley of about thirty working porcelain studios in the mountains of Saga, sealed off by an armed guard post for two…
Read →Genbikei: The Dango Shop That Has Never Let a Customer Cross the River
A National Monument gorge carved by a volcano nine million years ago, and beside it, a hundred-year-old teahouse that still…
Read →Doai Station: Get Off the Train, Then Climb 462 Steps Out of the Mountain
A working JR station on the Gunma–Niigata border where the platform sits 70 metres underground inside a 13.5-km tunnel, and the…
Read →Jigoku Nozoki: The Ledge That "Peers Into Hell" Was Never Meant to Be a View
A narrow spur of rock hangs above a sheer drop on a mountain in Chiba, a two-hour train ride from Tokyo — and nobody designed…
Read →Akiyoshidai: The Grassland That Only Looks Ancient Because Someone Burns It Down Every February
Japan's largest karst plateau sits directly on top of Japan's longest cave. The grass on top looks like it has never been…
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