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From the seventeen-metre snow walls of the Tateyama Yuki-no-Otani to the rime trees of Zao and the drift ice of Shiretoko, a working ranking of where snow does something specific in Japan.
06:30 at Cape Maeda, the carpark still half-empty, and the cliff stairs down to the dive platform feel cold in flip-flops. The Blue Cave entrance is a black slot at the foot of the cliff, the morning sun cutting in low across the water so you can see straight through to the limestone chamber beyond. … Read more
Fukuoka has roughly 100 yatai food stalls licensed to operate at night, the highest concentration of any Japanese city, and they sit a five-minute subway ride from the country’s most efficiently placed major airport. That combination, an international hub airport with the runway 3 km from the central station and a 6 pm flick of … Read more
Nagasaki rewards two nights more than Hiroshima does. Dejima, Glover Garden, the Atomic Bomb Museum, Hashima Island, Mt Inasa night view, and a bowl of champon in Chinatown.
Six-thirty in the morning at the Shiroyama Tenshukaku viewpoint, mid-January, and the village below is still in shadow. Steep thatched roofs poke through fresh snow like brown teeth. The Shogawa river is the only thing moving. No tour buses yet. No drone-buzz. Just the mountains, the smell of woodsmoke from the minshuku chimneys, and a … Read more
Aomori is the prefecture at the top of Honshu, three hours from Tokyo on the Hayabusa shinkansen. A practical guide to the Nebuta Festival, Hirosaki cherry blossom, the Oirase walk, Lake Towada, Mt Osore and the Tsugaru stove train.
Hokkaido is the size of Austria with a quarter of the population, and most travellers from Honshu underestimate the distances and overestimate the public-transit network. The first time you check Google Maps for the drive from Sapporo to the Shiretoko Peninsula and see eight hours, the trip is suddenly not the long-weekend add-on you thought … Read more
The Japan Rail Pass is no longer a no-brainer. After the October 2023 price hike a seven-day pass costs 50,000 yen. Here is the math, the breakeven for the three trips most people actually plan, what the pass covers, the Nozomi exclusion, ordinary versus Green Car, and when a regional pass beats the national one.
