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📍 Nagano, Yamanouchi 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Jigokudani Snow Monkey Park

In a steaming mountain valley in Nagano, wild Japanese macaques climb down each winter to soak in a hot spring — the only place in the world where monkeys are known to bathe in an onsen of their own.

📍 Samut Prakan, Mueang Samut Prakan 💴 Paid ⏱ Full day

Ancient City (Muang Boran)

Billed as the world's largest open-air museum — a vast park, shaped like Thailand itself, scattered with full-size and scaled replicas of the country's greatest monuments, best explored by bicycle over a whole unhurried day.

Jay Fai

A 70-something street cook in ski goggles, working two flaming charcoal woks on a Bangkok sidewalk — and holder of a Michelin star. Her crab omelette and drunken noodles draw queues for hours.

📍 Samut Songkhram, Samut Songkhram 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day

Maeklong Railway Market

A produce market built directly on active train tracks: eight times a day a train rolls through at walking pace, vendors snap their awnings back in seconds, and the stalls re-open before the last carriage has passed.

📍 Chonburi, Pattaya 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

The Sanctuary of Truth

A 100-meter-plus monument on the Pattaya shoreline built entirely of carved wood — no nails, every surface a sculpture — under construction since 1981 and deliberately never finished, with carvers working live as you walk through.

Siriraj Medical Museum (The Death Museum)

A cluster of medical museums inside Bangkok's oldest hospital — pathology, forensics, anatomy and parasitology galleries lined with preserved specimens, including the infamous mummified remains of a 1950s murderer.

📍 Trat, Ko Kut 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Treepod Dining at Soneva Kiri

On a remote island, you climb into a woven bamboo pod shaped like a weaver bird's nest and are hoisted metres up into the rainforest canopy — while a waiter delivers each course by zip-lining through the trees.

📍 Ratchaburi, Photharam 🎫 Donation ⏱ Half day

Wat Khao Chong Phran (The Bat Cave Temple)

Every evening at dusk, an unbroken river of millions of wrinkle-lipped bats pours from a cliff cave beside this Ratchaburi temple for nearly an hour — one of the great wildlife spectacles of central Thailand.

📍 Ayutthaya, Phra Nakhon Si Ayutthaya 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Wat Mahathat & the Buddha Head in the Tree

In the ruins of Ayutthaya's holiest temple, a sandstone Buddha head gazes out from inside the roots of a banyan tree that grew around it — the single most haunting image of Thailand's fallen ancient capital.

📍 Chiang Rai, Chiang Rai 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Wat Rong Khun (The White Temple)

A blinding all-white temple encrusted in mirror fragments, built by one artist as a lifetime project — you enter over a bridge crossing a pit of grasping sculpted hands, and the murals inside hide superheroes among the demons.

📍 Chiang Mai, Chiang Mai 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day 🗓 Nov 24 – Nov 25

Yi Peng & Loi Krathong

On the full moon of the twelfth lunar month, Chiang Mai releases thousands of glowing paper lanterns into the night sky while rivers fill with candle-lit floats — Thailand's most luminous festival, doubled.

📍 Kanagawa, Hakone 💴 Paid ⏱ Full day

Hakone: Owakudani & Lake Ashi

A volcanic valley of sulfurous steam vents where the local specialty is an egg boiled black in the hot springs (said to add seven years to your life), followed by a ropeway descent to a pirate-ship cruise across Lake Ashi with Mt. Fuji on the horizon.

📍 Hokkaido, Sapporo 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Hill of the Buddha (Atama Daibutsu)

A 13.5m stone Buddha buried up to its head in a man-made hill of 150,000 lavender plants — Tadao Ando's strangest, most serene work, hidden inside a working cemetery south of Sapporo.

📍 Ibaraki, Hitachinaka 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Hitachi Seaside Park

A vast coastal park where an entire hillside turns sky-blue with 4.5 million nemophila flowers each spring, then blood-red with kochia bushes in autumn — one of Japan's great seasonal color spectacles.

🌸 Spring 🍁 Autumn

📍 Hokkaido, Shari 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Kamuiwakka Hot Falls

A river in Shiretoko that IS a hot spring: you wade and scramble 500 meters up a warm volcanic stream, climbing three waterfalls, until the water hits bath-temperature at the top — helmet on, world heritage wilderness all around.

📍 Fukuoka, Kitakyushu 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Kawachi Fuji Garden Wisteria Tunnel

A private garden near Kitakyushu where two long tunnels drip with wisteria in a hundred shades of violet, pink, and white — a roughly two-week spring spectacle that draws photographers from around the world.

Ryogoku Kokugikan & Sumo Museum

The 10,000-seat home of professional sumo, with a small on-site museum holding roughly 30,000 pieces of wrestling history — ukiyo-e prints, embroidered aprons, and championship banners.

📍 Tokyo, Sumida 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Sumida Hokusai Museum

A jagged, mirror-clad building by Pritzker winner Kazuyo Sejima, built in the neighborhood where ukiyo-e master Hokusai actually lived and worked — home to reproductions and originals tracing his 90-year career, including 'The Great Wave.'

📍 Tokyo, Minato 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

teamLab Borderless (Azabudai Hills)

A borderless digital art museum where projected light, water, and flowers spill between rooms and react to visitors walking through them — no fixed floor plan, no map that fully makes sense, and no two visits quite the same.

📍 Hokkaido, Shimukappu 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Unkai Terrace (Sea of Clouds), Tomamu

A dawn gondola ride to a mountaintop terrace where, on the right morning, an entire ocean of clouds spreads out below your feet — complete with a 'Cloud Walk' catwalk and a giant net hammock suspended over the drop.

📍 Ibaraki, Ushiku 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Ushiku Daibutsu

One of the tallest statues on Earth: a 120-metre bronze Buddha visible from miles across the Ibaraki plain, with an elevator inside that lifts you to a viewing deck in its chest.

📍 Mie, Kuwana 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day 🗓 Oct 18 – May 31

Nabana no Sato Winter Illumination

One of Japan's largest light shows: millions of LEDs transform a flower park into glowing tunnels and a wall-sized animated light panorama that changes theme each year.

🍁 Autumn ❄️ Winter 🌸 Spring

📍 Yamanashi, Fujikawaguchiko 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day 🗓 Apr 18 – May 31

Fuji Shibazakura Festival

Half a million pink moss-phlox blossoms carpet the ground in waves of color beneath Mt. Fuji each spring — a knockout foreground for Japan's most famous mountain.

📍 Tokyo, Suginami 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day 🗓 Aug 29 – Aug 30

Koenji Awa Odori

A 400-year-old Tokushima folk dance transplanted to a Tokyo train-station neighborhood: 10,000 dancers in eight troupes parade a figure-eight route through Koenji over one weekend, watched by roughly a million people.

📍 Tokyo, Koto 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day 🗓 Aug 12 – Aug 16

Fukagawa Hachiman Matsuri (Mizukake Water-Splashing Festival)

One of Edo's three great festivals, where over 50 mikoshi are carried 8km through Fukagawa while bystanders and firefighters soak the bearers with buckets, hoses, and squirt guns — 2026 is a triennial 'grand festival' year.

📍 Tokyo, Fussa 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour 🗓 Jun 13

Fussa Firefly Festival

A neighborhood firefly festival in western Tokyo where Genji fireflies glow around tiny Hotaru Park — a surprisingly local summer-night detour from the city.

📍 Tokushima, Miyoshi 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day

Nagoro Scarecrow Village

A near-deserted mountain hamlet where life-size handmade scarecrows outnumber the living residents more than ten to one — sitting at bus stops, tending fields, and filling an entire schoolroom.

📍 Hokkaido, Furano 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Torinuma Park

A spring-fed pond ringed by primeval forest on the edge of Furano — kept so warm by underground water that it's the only pond nearby that never freezes, even deep in the Hokkaido winter.

📍 Baden-Württemberg, Weinsberg 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Burgruine Weibertreu

A ruined hilltop castle above Weinsberg named 'wifely loyalty' after an 1140 siege in which the town's women marched their husbands out to safety on their own backs — now a café-topped viewpoint over the vineyards.

📍 Hokkaido, Shintoku 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Sahoro Resort Bear Mountain

Japan's first free-roaming brown bear safari — Ezo brown bears wander a fenced Hokkaido forest while visitors watch from an elevated glass walkway or a caged safari bus.

📍 Hokkaido, Tsubetsu 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Shigechan Land

A private open-air art museum on a former Hokkaido pasture, its fourteen buildings named after body parts and packed with alien-like creatures built from driftwood, scrap, and bone.

📍 Hokkaido, Kushiro 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Lake Akan Marimo

A clear caldera lake in eastern Hokkaido that grows one of the world's strangest treasures: marimo, rare velvety-green balls of algae that roll along the lakebed and have their own festival — and mascot.

📍 Hokkaido, Kushiro 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Kamuy Lumina

A 1.2km night walk through the forest by Lake Akan, wired with lights, projection mapping, and sound into an Ainu legend you carry a glowing staff through — the world's first Lumina night walk inside a national park.

📍 Hokkaido, Kushiro 🎫 Varies ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Akan Ainu Kotan

Hokkaido's largest Ainu settlement, a lakeshore street of 30+ carving and embroidery shops run by the roughly 120 people who live there, plus Japan's first theater built solely for Ainu dance.

Shinei-no-Oka View Park

A 360-degree hilltop lookout on Biei's back roads, roughly halfway between two train stations, with the Tokachidake mountains to the east and salvia and sunflower fields underfoot in summer.

Ken and Mary Tree

A 90-plus-year-old poplar on a Biei hillside, named after the couple in a 1972 Nissan Skyline commercial filmed right beside it — now one of Hokkaido's most photographed trees.

Seven Stars Tree

A solitary Japanese oak on a Biei hillside that became a national icon in 1976 when it was printed on the Seven Stars cigarette pack — still standing alone on the Patchwork Road.

📍 Kyoto, Kyoto 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Otagi Nenbutsu-ji — 1,200 Stone Monks, Each Carved by a Different Amateur

A quiet hillside temple above Arashiyama covered in 1,200 moss-flecked stone rakan statues, hand-carved between 1981 and 1991 by ordinary visitors, no two faces or expressions alike.

📍 Aichi, Nagoya 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Antarctic Observation Ship Fuji — a Real Icebreaker Parked in Nagoya Port

A retired Japanese Antarctic icebreaker, permanently moored at Nagoya Port since 1985 and left exactly as her crew left it — bunks, sick bay, barbershop, and all — now a ¥300 museum you can walk through top to bottom.

📍 Shizuoka, Shizuoka 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Chōjiya — 430-Year-Old Grated-Yam-Soup Inn on the Old Tōkaidō

A working restaurant in the old Mariko post town that has served the same wild-yam tororo-jiru since 1596 — Shizuoka's oldest surviving eatery, painted by Hiroshige and name-dropped by Bashō.

📍 Hokkaido, Biei 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Kita Kouboh Coffee Roastery

A tiny self-roasting coffee shop in central Biei, Hokkaido, open since 1989 — shoes off at the door, long bar seating to watch the roast, and a signature blend cut with local low-pesticide soybeans.

📍 Aichi, Nagoya 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Sauna Fuji — Sakae's Retro Capsule-and-Cold-Pool Sauna

A men-only capsule hotel and sauna deep in downtown Nagoya's Sakae district, built around a startling 20-meter, 110cm-deep cold plunge pool and 368 stacked capsule rooms, all wrapped in a lovingly kept Showa-era retro atmosphere.

Heiwa-dōri Kaimono Kōen (Peace Street Sculpture Walk)

Japan's first permanent pedestrian mall, a kilometer of car-free street running from Asahikawa Station lined with roughly 100 outdoor sculptures — including a 28-metre stainless-steel question mark.

📍 Hokkaido, Asahikawa 🎫 Varies ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Gallery PuruPuru

A tiny art space run by Hiroshi Abe — the picture-book illustrator who spent 25 years as an Asahiyama Zoo keeper before becoming one of Japan's best-loved children's authors — with a new exhibition every couple of months.

📍 Hokkaido, Asahikawa 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Asahikawa Ramen Village

Eight of Asahikawa's most famous ramen shops under one roof, plus a joke shrine with a torii gate where you can pray to the ramen gods.

📍 Hokkaido, Asahikawa 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Nakahara Teijiro Memorial Asahikawa City Sculpture Museum

A sculpture museum inside a Nationally Important Cultural Property — a 1902 Imperial Army officers' club — showing the work of Rodin-influenced sculptor Teijirō Nakahara alongside actual Rodin pieces.

Asahikawa Design Center

A free furniture 'museum' where roughly 30 of Asahikawa's famed woodworking makers show off around 1,200 pieces in a UNESCO City of Design showroom-turned-gallery.

Otokoyama Sake Brewery Museum

Free museum inside a working Hokkaido sake brewery with 350+ years of history — Edo-period brewing tools, ukiyo-e prints, and free tastings straight from the tanks.

Kamuikotan Gorge

A schist gorge where the Ishikari River carved house-sized potholes over 100 million years — and where Ainu legend says a god turned a demon to stone, marked today by an old rail line and a shrine.

📍 Hokkaido, Asahikawa 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Kawamura Kaneto Ainu Memorial Museum

Japan's oldest Ainu museum, opened in 1916 by a Kamikawa Ainu railway surveyor and still run by his family — 500 artifacts, a reconstructed thatched cise house, and live cultural performances.

📍 Hesse, Mörlenbach 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Solardraisine Überwaldbahn

A heritage rail line through the Odenwald forest that closed to trains in 1994 and reopened as a self-pedaled, solar-assisted rail-cart route through two tunnels and past four viaducts.

📍 Hesse, Erbach (Odenwald) 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Deutsches Elfenbeinmuseum (German Ivory Museum)

Europe's only museum devoted entirely to ivory carving, built into a Baroque castle in the Odenwald town that turned imported tusks into a 250-year craft tradition.

📍 Baden-Württemberg, Abstatt 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

The Rällinge of Abstatt

Thirty-nine oversized painted tomcat sculptures scattered across a small Swabian wine town, each hand-decorated by a different local club or business, born from a folk legend about lovesick young men who used to meow under women's windows.

📍 Baden-Württemberg, Abstatt 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Burg Wildeck

A hilltop castle above the wine town of Abstatt that survived the Peasants' War and the Thirty Years' War, then quietly became a state-run vineyard laboratory breeding new German wine grapes.

📍 Kanagawa, Kawasaki 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Cat Museum Lucky Field

A tiny, cat-themed rescue space in Kawasaki where Yoshino-san has taken in stray cats for 16 years — pay a small fee, get a cold drink, and sit quietly with cats who are still learning to trust people again.

📍 Washington, North Bonneville 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Fort Cascades National Historic Site

A quiet 1.5-mile loop trail through the earthworks and building footprints of an 1855 Army fort — built to guard the Columbia's toughest portage — now a National Historic Landmark with the vanished town of Cascades still underfoot.

📍 Washington, Vancouver 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Fort Vancouver National Historic Site

A rebuilt 1825 Hudson's Bay Company fur-trading fort on its original footprint, with a working blacksmith shop, cannons flanking the gate, and live musket demonstrations under one stockade.

📍 Washington, Stevenson 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Columbia Gorge Museum

A regional history museum whose top floor holds the world's largest rosary collection — nearly 4,000 strands, from a pinhead-sized miniature to a 16-foot styrofoam giant, donated by everyone from a Boys Town founder to a young John F. Kennedy.

📍 Tokyo, Tachikawa 🎫 Varies ⏱ Half day 🗓 Oct 10 – Oct 12

Tachikawa Yokai Bon Odori

A three-day October festival at Tachikawa's GREEN SPRINGS complex where thousands dress as yokai and dance around a bon-odori tower, capped by a nighttime 'Night Parade of 100 Demons.'

Uwara Risokyo

A 2.3-kilometer clifftop loop past a hand-carved tunnel, a bell for good luck, and a string of named capes above the Pacific — a rias-coast hike that starts five minutes from a train station.

Uwara Beach

A gently shelving cove ranked among Japan's 100 best beaches, where a white torii gate stands facing the sea and shallow, calm water has drawn swimming families for generations.

Katsuura Morning Market

One of Japan's three largest morning markets, running on the same two streets since 1591 — fishers and farmers still set up stalls before dawn, six days a week, over 400 years later.

Cape Hachiman Park

A former castle cape juts into Katsuura Bay with a sea-view plaza, playground equipment, walking paths, and a statue of the shogun's mistress who once lived on this ground.

JAXA Katsuura Space Communication Center

Free, walk-in exhibition hall beneath JAXA's giant satellite-tracking dishes, with life-size satellite models, a Hayabusa asteroid-mission simulator, and rockets to gawk at — no reservation needed for small groups.

📍 Chiba, Katsuura 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Katsuura Undersea Park Underwater Observation Tower

A tower 60 meters offshore where a spiral staircase drops 8 meters below the waves so visitors can watch wild fish swim past the windows — Japan's largest underwater observatory.

📍 Shizuoka, Ito 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Mount Omuro

A perfectly conical, 4,000-year-old volcano on the Izu Peninsula that you ride a chairlift up and walk clean around the crater rim — walking up is banned, but archery at the crater's bottom is not.

📍 Chiba, Futtsu 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Mother Farm

A 250-hectare hillside ranch on the Boso Peninsula where roughly 150 sheep run the 'Great Sheep March' every day and shearing shows, cow milking, and rapeseed fields keep families busy for hours.

📍 Tochigi, Nakagawa 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Hoshi no Mieru Oka Nouen (Star-Viewing Hill Farm)

A small, naturally-farmed vineyard in the hills near Nasu where you pick straight off ~100 vines across 14 grape varieties and pay by the kilo — no flat entry fee, just cheap fruit you carry home yourself.

📍 Kanagawa, Yokohama 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Nissan Water Park

A heated indoor water park built directly under the east-gate stands of Nissan Stadium — Japan's largest stadium — where you can swim laps beneath the seats that once held a World Cup final.

🛸 Oddity Seasonal event

ROBO-ONE

Human-sized humanoid robots throw real punches, kicks, and judo-style throws at each other in a boxing-style ring — Japan's 24-year-running bipedal robot combat tournament, free to walk in and watch.

📍 Kanagawa, Yokohama 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day 🗓 Sep 26 – Sep 27

📍 Tokyo, Nakameguro 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Starbucks Reserve Roastery Tokyo

A four-floor, Kengo Kuma–designed coffee cathedral in Nakameguro with its own roasting floor, a cocktail bar, a tea room, and a Milanese bakery — one of the largest Starbucks Reserve Roasteries on Earth.

📍 Hanoi, Hanoi 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Bún Chả Hương Liên (Bún Chả Obama)

The family-run Hanoi noodle shop where Barack Obama and Anthony Bourdain shared a $6 dinner in 2016 — the very table now enshrined under glass upstairs.

📍 Ho Chi Minh City, Ho Chi Minh City 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Ho Chi Minh City Museum of Fine Arts — the 99-Door Mansion

Vietnam's southern art trove fills the 1930s mansion of Saigon's richest family — a feng-shui palace famous for its 99 doors and the first elevator in the city, shaped like a palanquin.

📍 Hanoi, Hanoi 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Vietnamese Women's Museum

Four floors in Hanoi devoted to the women who carried Vietnam — street vendors, war couriers, mothers, and matriarchs — told through 25,000 artifacts and first-person stories.

📍 Ho Chi Minh City, Ho Chi Minh City 🎫 Varies ⏱ Half day

The Café Apartment of Nguyễn Huệ

A weathered 1960s apartment block on Saigon's walking street where nearly every flat has become a café or boutique — nine floors of coffee, one balcony-stacked facade.

📍 Hanoi, Hanoi 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Café Giảng — the Birthplace of Egg Coffee

Down a narrow Old Quarter alley hides the café where egg coffee was invented in 1946 — a Metropole bartender's answer to a milk shortage, still whisked by his family today.

📍 Chiang Mai, Mae Taeng 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day

Bua Tong Sticky Waterfalls

A waterfall you climb UP, barefoot, with no ropes: the mineral limestone is so grippy your feet stick to it even under flowing water — one of the strangest physical sensations in Thailand, and completely free.

📍 Hokkaido, Shakotan 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day

Cape Kamui (Shakotan Blue)

A 770-meter ridgeline path out to a lighthouse at the tip of the Shakotan Peninsula, with 300-degree views over water so improbably turquoise the locals gave the color its own name: Shakotan Blue.

📍 Samut Songkhram, Mueang Samut Songkhram 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day

Don Hoi Lot

A vast sandbar at the mouth of the Mae Klong River, famous for its colonies of razor clams — at low tide locals wade out to harvest them, and a strip of seafood shacks serves the catch within metres of where it was dug.

Khlong Toei Market

Bangkok's largest and rawest fresh market — a sprawling, chaotic maze where the city's restaurants buy their produce, seafood still flips on the ice, and the sights and smells are as intense as Thai market life gets.

MOCA Bangkok (Museum of Contemporary Art)

Five gleaming floors of modern Thai art in a striking white building — surreal, often spiritual, sometimes nightmarish paintings and sculpture, including a hall of vast, hyper-detailed canvases that have to be seen to be believed.

📍 California, Inglewood 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Randy's Donuts — Inglewood

24-hour donut shop famous for its colossal 32-foot giant donut sign atop the building. An LA icon since 1952, featured in films, commercials, and countless photo pilgrimages.

📍 Kanchanaburi, Sai Yok 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day

Sai Yok Noi Waterfall

A wide, easygoing roadside waterfall near Nam Tok where the river fans down a limestone face into shallow pools — a favourite local cool-off spot at the far end of the Death Railway line.

📍 Gunma, Nakanojo 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Shibu Pass

Japan's highest paved national road, 2,172m up on the Gunma–Nagano border, where dawn temperature inversions bury the valley in a sea of clouds below your feet.

📍 Kanchanaburi, Sai Yok 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day

Tham Krasae & the Wang Pho Viaduct

A curving wooden trestle of the WWII Death Railway that clings to a limestone cliff above the River Kwai — trains still rumble across it, and a small cave shrine sits right where the tracks hug the rock.

📍 Mae Hong Son, Pang Mapha 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Tham Lod Cave

A vast river cave you float through on a bamboo raft by lantern light, past stalactite chambers, ancient teak coffins on high ledges, and a dusk sky that fills with hundreds of thousands of swifts pouring in to roost.

📍 Samut Songkhram, Bang Khonthi 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Wat Bang Kung (The Temple in the Tree)

A small Ayutthaya-era ordination hall completely swallowed by the roots of four enormous banyan and bodhi trees — the living wood now forms the temple's outer walls, with a Buddha image glowing in the green gloom inside.

📍 Kanchanaburi, Tha Muang 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Wat Tham Suea (Tiger Cave Temple, Kanchanaburi)

A hilltop temple crowned by an enormous seated golden Buddha, reached by a dragon-railed stairway — the terrace looks out over a patchwork of rice fields and the Mae Klong dam, especially gorgeous at sunset.

📍 Nagano, Yamanouchi 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Yokoteyama Skylator

A 1967 outdoor moving walkway hauls you up Mt. Yokote's summit for a sea-of-clouds view before 9am, then a crumpet cafe and Japan's highest bakery.

📍 Gunma, Nakanojo 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Chatsubomi Moss Park

A neon-green stream of rare acid-loving moss fed by a hot mineral spring called Anajigoku — 'the hell pit' — inside a former iron mine deep in the Gunma mountains.

📍 Gunma, Tsumagoi 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Onioshidashi Park

A black lava field below Mt. Asama, frozen mid-flow by the catastrophic 1783 eruption, with walking paths winding through the rock to a hillside memorial temple.

🌸 Spring 🍁 Autumn

📍 Nagano, Yamanouchi 🎫 Varies ⏱ Half day

Shibu Onsen

A hot-spring town below Shiga Kogen where overnight guests unlock nine separate wooden bathhouses with a single key and wander stone lanes in yukata after dark.

📍 New York, New York 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Bogardus Plaza Clock

New York City's only hand-wound sidewalk clock — a 1,500-pound, 17-foot cast-iron tower clock built in 1910 for a Michigan jeweler, rescued decades later and installed in Tribeca's Bogardus Plaza, where volunteers still wind it by hand every week.

📍 Ibaraki, Goka 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Yakult Ibaraki Factory

A free, hour-long tour of the plant that grows Yakult's Shirota-strain lactic acid bacteria and bottles the drink, ending with a tasting.

📍 Gunma, Tatebayashi 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Calpis "Mirai" Museum

A free factory tour at Asahi's Gunma plant tracing Calpis from its 1919 invention to the fermentation tanks making it today, with a tasting at the end.

📍 California, Los Angeles 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Watts Towers

Seventeen interconnected steel-and-mosaic spires — the tallest nearly 100 feet — built single-handedly by Italian immigrant Simon Rodia over 33 years, with no scaffolding, no welds, and no plans. A National Historic Landmark in the Watts neighborhood of LA.

📍 Colorado, Rye 🎫 Donation ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Bishop Castle

A 160-foot stone castle with a fire-breathing dragon and swaying iron bridges, hand-built by one stubborn man over 50 years in the Colorado mountains — free to climb.

📍 Texas, Amarillo 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Cadillac Ranch

Ten vintage Cadillacs buried nose-first in a Texas field at the angle of the Great Pyramid — a Route 66 art icon you're invited to spray-paint yourself.

📍 Nebraska, Alliance 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Carhenge

Stonehenge rebuilt from 39 gray-painted vintage American cars on the Nebraska plains — a son's memorial to his father, and the High Plains' strangest monument.

📍 Florida, Homestead 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Coral Castle

A heartbroken Latvian immigrant single-handedly carved 1,100 tons of limestone into a castle of megalithic furniture — including a 9-ton gate a child can push open.

📍 Washington, Seattle 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Fremont Troll

An 18-foot concrete troll crushing a real Volkswagen Beetle in one giant hand, lurking under a Seattle bridge — public art with a hubcap eye and a great backstory.

📍 Wisconsin, Spring Green 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

House on the Rock

A retreat built atop a 60-foot rock chimney that spiraled into a fever dream of collections — the world's largest carousel, an Infinity Room, and rooms that defy explanation.

📍 Hawaii, Holualoa 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Kokoleka Lani Farms — Kona Cacao & Chocolate

A regenerative Kona hillside farm whose cacao won 'Best in World' in Paris — tour the orchard and taste single-origin chocolate grown in the only US state that farms cacao.

📍 New Jersey, Margate City 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Lucy the Elephant

A six-story elephant-shaped building from 1881 standing on the Jersey Shore — the oldest surviving roadside animal architecture in America, and a National Historic Landmark.

📍 Gunma 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Morinji Temple — Bunbuku Chagama

1426 Zen temple famous for the Bunbuku Chagama folktale; 21 tanuki statues line the approach, and the legendary tea kettle (11.2kg purple gilt bronze) is on display.

📍 Buriram, Chaloem Phra Kiat 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Phanom Rung Historical Park

A thousand-year-old Khmer temple crowning an extinct volcano, where four times a year the rising or setting sun lines up perfectly through all fifteen sanctuary doorways in a single blazing shaft of light.

📍 Prachuap Khiri Khan, Sam Roi Yot 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Phraya Nakhon Cave

A royal pavilion built inside a collapsed cave chamber, reachable only by beach and jungle trail — at mid-morning a single shaft of sunlight drops through the ceiling hole and sets the pavilion glowing.

📍 Nevada, Las Vegas 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Pinball Hall of Fame

A nonprofit warehouse holding the largest playable pinball collection on Earth — 700+ machines from the 1950s to the '90s, all on free play... er, coin-op, and all yours to play.

📍 Udon Thani, Kumphawapi 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Red Lotus Sea (Talay Bua Daeng)

For three months each winter, a shallow lake in Isan blooms into millions of pink lotus flowers stretching to the horizon — longtail boats cruise through the bloom at dawn, when every flower is open.

📍 New Mexico, Roswell 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

International UFO Museum & Research Center

Housed in a 1930s movie theater, this earnest, exhibit-crammed museum is the beating heart of Roswell's 1947 'flying saucer' legend — and its annual alien festival.

📍 California, Niland 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Salvation Mountain

A hillside painted top to bottom in adobe and donated house paint — one man's 30-year folk-art love letter to the desert, near the Salton Sea.

🏚️ Abandoned

Sathorn Unique Tower (The Ghost Tower)

A 49-storey luxury skyscraper abandoned half-built during the 1997 financial crash — now a hauntingly empty concrete shell looming over central Bangkok, one of the world's most famous unfinished buildings.

📍 Nevada, Las Vegas 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Seven Magic Mountains

Seven towers of fluorescent, stacked boulders rising 30+ feet from the Mojave — Ugo Rondinone's day-glo answer to the desert, 10 miles south of Las Vegas.

📍 Maryland, Linthicum Heights 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Star Toys Museum — 14,000 Star Wars Pieces

One man's home turned into perhaps the world's most complete Star Wars museum: 14,000+ figures, models, and a holographic Princess Leia, near Baltimore, by appointment.

📍 California, El Cajon 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Unarius Academy of Science

Headquarters of one of America's oldest UFO religions, its El Cajon storefront wearing a giant flying-saucer mural — awaiting a fleet of 33 crystal starships.

📍 South Dakota, Wall 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Wall Drug Store

A Depression-era drugstore that beat 'the geographical center of nowhere' by giving away free ice water — now a sprawling roadside empire of signs, donuts, and a jackalope.

📍 Nakhon Pathom, Sam Phran 🎫 Donation ⏱ Half day

Wat Samphran (The Dragon Temple)

A 17-story bubblegum-pink cylindrical tower with an enormous green dragon coiled around its full height — and the dragon is hollow: its body is the staircase to the roof.

📍 California, San Jose 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Winchester Mystery House

The rifle heiress's 160-room mansion, built nonstop for 38 years, with staircases to nowhere, doors opening onto walls, and windows in the floor — grief turned to architecture.

📍 California, Baker 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Zzyzx — Desert Oasis at the End of the Alphabet

A vowel-less name invented to be 'the last word,' Zzyzx is a former quack health resort turned desert research station, hidden off a dead-end road in the Mojave.

📍 Ayutthaya, Phra Nakhon Si Ayutthaya 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Ayutthaya River Prawns (Kung Mae Nam)

The old capital's signature feast: enormous freshwater river prawns — often longer than your hand — grilled in the shell until the head fills with rich orange roe, served at riverside restaurants ringing the island city.

Baan Silapin (The Artist's House)

A century-old wooden house on a Thonburi canal, now a bohemian café and gallery — best known for its free traditional Thai puppet shows performed beside the water beneath an old white stupa.

🏪 Old Shop

Ban Bat (The Monk's Bowl Village)

The last surviving alley of artisans who still hand-beat monks' alms bowls from eight pieces of metal — a tiny, fading craft community where you can watch each bowl hammered and fired the centuries-old way.

Bangkok Snake Farm (Queen Saovabha Institute)

The world's second-oldest antivenom facility — a working Red Cross research centre where you can watch live venom-extraction shows and meet cobras, vipers, and king cobras in the heart of the city.

Bangkokian Museum (The Bangkok Folk Museum)

A quiet compound of preserved wooden houses and a leafy garden, frozen in the 1930s–50s — an intimate, free window into middle-class Bangkok life before the city exploded into the metropolis it is today.

📍 Kanchanaburi, Mueang Kanchanaburi 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

The Bridge on the River Kwai

The black steel bridge of book and film fame — part of the WWII Death Railway built by POW and conscripted labour at terrible cost — still carrying trains across the Khwae Yai at Kanchanaburi.

📍 Nakhon Pathom, Sam Phran 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Bubble in the Forest Café

A lakeside café west of Bangkok where you dine inside a private see-through geodesic bubble — a transparent dome set among palms and water that its fans compare to eating inside a snow globe or a Maldives villa.

📍 Bangkok, Bangkok 🎫 Varies ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Cabbages & Condoms

A genuinely good Thai restaurant with a cheeky mission — decorated entirely in condoms (mannequins, lampshades, a 'Captain Condom' figure), with all profits funding a long-running rural family-planning and development charity.

Chang Chui (The Plane Night Market)

A creative-junkyard market built around a full-size decommissioned airliner, with sculpture made from scrap, a skull-themed bar, indie food stalls, and an art-school sense of glorious mischief.

📍 Kanchanaburi, Si Sawat 💴 Paid ⏱ Full day

Erawan Falls

Seven tiers of waterfall descending through jungle, each pooling into water so improbably turquoise it looks dyed — swim in most of them, while resident fish nibble your feet whether invited or not.

📍 Samut Prakan, Samut Prakan 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Erawan Museum

A three-headed bronze elephant fourteen stories tall standing on a pink museum building — you climb a spiral staircase inside a hind leg into the elephant's belly, which holds a stained-glass cosmos.

📍 Kanchanaburi, Mueang Kanchanaburi 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

The Giant Rain Tree (Chamchuri Giant Tree)

A single colossal monkeypod (rain) tree more than a century old, its canopy spreading so wide that a boardwalk loops beneath it — a quiet, cathedral-like green giant on the outskirts of Kanchanaburi.

The Giant Swing (Sao Ching Cha)

A towering 21-metre teak arch in old Bangkok, painted brilliant red — all that remains of a daredevil Brahmin harvest ceremony in which men once swung up to grab a bag of coins with their teeth.

📍 Kanchanaburi, Sai Yok 🎫 Donation ⏱ Half day

Hellfire Pass Memorial

A deep rock cutting on the WWII 'Death Railway,' hewn by hand by Allied POWs and Asian labourers under unimaginable conditions — now a moving memorial and forest walk along the vanished tracks, with one of Asia's most thoughtful museums.

Jek Pui Curry Rice (The Tableless Curry)

A 70-year-old Chinatown curry stall with no tables at all — you grab a red plastic stool on the pavement, balance your plate on your lap, and eat elbow-to-elbow with strangers. Locals call it 'musical chairs curry.'

The Jim Thompson House

The exquisite teak home of the American who revived Thai silk — six traditional houses joined into one, packed with Asian art — and whose own story ends in mystery: he vanished without trace in the Malaysian jungle in 1967.

Jodd Fairs Night Market

A buzzing, photogenic night market behind Rama IX — hundreds of food and drink stalls, vintage shopping, and the viral 'leng saap' volcano of stacked pork-rib soup, all framed by the glittering city skyline.

📍 Chiang Mai, Chiang Mai 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Khantoke Dinner (Lanna Banquet)

A northern Thai feast eaten cross-legged on the floor around a low pedestal tray called a khantoke — a rotating spread of Lanna dishes shared from small bowls while traditional music and hill-tribe dances unfold beside you.

📍 Ratchaburi, Mueang Ratchaburi 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Khao Bin Cave (Tham Khao Bin)

A long, well-lit show cave near Ratchaburi threading through a series of named chambers full of dramatic stalactites and flowstone formations — cool, quiet, and easy to walk.

📍 Chonburi, Sattahip 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Khao Chi Chan (Buddha Mountain)

A 109-metre golden Buddha laser-etched and gold-inlaid into the sheer face of a limestone cliff — a serene giant gazing out over a lake and lotus garden, created to save the scarred quarry mountain from further blasting.

📍 Ratchaburi, Mueang Ratchaburi 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day

Khao Ngu Stone Park

A reclaimed limestone quarry turned tranquil park, where emerald flooded pits sit beneath sheer cliffs — one of them carved with an ancient Dvaravati-era Buddha relief, reached by a short climb to a breezy viewpoint.

Lhong 1919

A restored 19th-century Chinese merchant warehouse and pier on the Chao Phraya, its courtyard shrine to the sea goddess Mazu surrounded by faded original murals — now a riverside heritage, art, and design space.

Museum of Counterfeit Goods

A law firm's private museum displaying thousands of seized fakes — counterfeit watches, medicines, car parts, liquor and electronics — side by side with the genuine articles, in a fascinating gallery of forgery.

Museum of Floral Culture

A serene museum of Thai and Asian floral art set in a century-old colonial-style teak mansion and garden — guided tours through rooms of intricate garlands, offerings, and the craft of flowers across cultures.

Museum of Illusions Bangkok

A playful indoor museum of optical tricks, tilted rooms, and mind-bending installations — walk through an infinity room, shrink and grow in the Ames room, and photograph yourself defying gravity.

Na Oh (Dining Inside a Grounded Airplane)

A high-concept restaurant built inside a decommissioned airliner at the Chang Chui creative park — a moody, post-apocalyptic 'survival' dining room where a set menu is served amid the salvaged fuselage.

Or Tor Kor Market

A famously clean, top-quality fresh market across from Chatuchak — pyramids of perfect mangoes, pungent ranks of durian, glistening curries and prepared foods, regularly rated among the world's best food markets.

🏪 Old Shop

Pak Khlong Talat (The Flower Market)

Bangkok's great 24-hour flower market, where the pavements vanish under marigolds, roses, orchids and jasmine garlands — most magical after midnight, when trucks unload and the whole quarter glows and smells of fresh blooms.

Patpong Museum

A surprisingly thoughtful museum hidden above the famous night-market street, telling the layered history of Bangkok's most notorious red-light district — from CIA listening post and Vietnam-war R&R to neon nightlife legend.

📍 Krabi, Ao Nang 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Phra Nang Princess Cave

A seaside grotto on a stunning Krabi beach crammed with hundreds of carved and painted wooden phalluses — offerings to a sea princess spirit from fishermen seeking safe passage and a good catch.

📍 Nakhon Pathom, Nakhon Pathom 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Phra Pathom Chedi

At 120 metres, the tallest Buddhist stupa in the world — a colossal orange-gold bell rising over Nakhon Pathom on the site where Buddhism is believed to have first reached the region nearly two millennia ago.

📍 Kanchanaburi, Mueang Kanchanaburi 🎫 Varies ⏱ Half day

River Kwai Floating Raft Restaurants

On the Kwai in Kanchanaburi, whole restaurants — and hotels — float on bamboo-and-drum rafts moored to the bank. You eat river fish over the water, the current tugging gently beneath your feet, and can slip straight in for a swim.

Royal Barges National Museum

A canal-side boathouse sheltering Thailand's astonishing royal barges — gilded, mythical vessels up to 45 metres long, their prows carved as nagas and the great swan-bird Suphannahong, used only for rare royal river processions.

📍 Nong Khai, Nong Khai 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Sala Kaew Ku Sculpture Park

A riverside field of towering, surreal concrete deities — a seven-headed naga, a wheel of life, and a 25-metre Buddha — built by a self-taught mystic who blended Hindu and Buddhist visions into one of Asia's strangest sculpture gardens.

Talat Noi

A tangled riverside old-town quarter where a century-old Chinese community, vintage car-part workshops, and bold street murals share narrow lanes — one of Bangkok's most photogenic neighbourhoods to simply get lost in.

📍 Krabi, Ao Nang 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

The Grotto (Cave Dining at Railay)

A restaurant set inside a natural limestone cave on Krabi's Phra Nang Beach — you dine among stalactites and rock formations right at the sand's edge, with the Andaman Sea a few steps away.

📍 Bangkok, Bangkok 🎫 Varies ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Unicorn Café

A gloriously over-the-top pastel fever dream off Silom — rainbow everything, a wall of plush unicorns, sparkly unicorn onesies to borrow, and rainbow spaghetti and candyfloss drinks served under a haze of glitter.

Victory Monument Boat Noodles

A canalside alley of stalls serving 'boat noodles' in deliberately tiny bowls — rich, dark, offal-and-blood-thickened broth eaten a few slurps at a time, with diners stacking their empty bowls into towers to tally the bill.

📍 Ayutthaya, Phra Nakhon Si Ayutthaya 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Wat Chaiwatthanaram

The most majestic temple ruin in Ayutthaya — a Khmer-inspired complex of a tall central prang ringed by smaller towers on the riverbank, breathtaking at sunset and a favourite backdrop for traditional Thai-dress photos.

Wat Pariwat (The David Beckham Temple)

A working Bangkok temple whose ornate decoration hides pop-culture cameos — most famously a small gilded figure of footballer David Beckham among the traditional guardians at the base of the main altar.

📍 Lopburi, Lopburi 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day 🗓 Nov 29

Lopburi Monkey Buffet Festival

Once a year the old town of Lopburi lays out towering pyramids of fruit, vegetables, and sweets on red tablecloths in front of an ancient Khmer shrine — a lavish banquet held entirely for the city's thousands of resident macaques.

📍 Hokkaido, Abashiri 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Abashiri Drift Ice Icebreaker

Board a bright-orange icebreaker and crunch out into the frozen Sea of Okhotsk, where for a few weeks each winter the ocean itself turns into a shifting white plain of pack ice.

📍 Tokyo, Aogashima 💴 Paid ⏱ Multi-day

Aogashima — the Island Inside a Volcano

A green volcanic island 360 km out in the Pacific, with a smaller volcano nested inside its crater and a village of about 170 people — one of Japan's most remote and surreal inhabited places.

📍 Ehime, Ozu 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Aoshima Cat Island

A tiny fishing islet off Ehime where cats outnumber the handful of human residents many times over — no shops, no hotels, no cars, just a sleepy harbor overrun by friendly felines.

📍 Hokkaido, Asahikawa 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Asahiyama Zoo Penguin Walk

At Japan's northernmost zoo, the winter highlight isn't an exhibit — it's a parade of king penguins waddling right past your feet through the snow, twice a day.

📍 Tochigi, Ashikaga 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Ashikaga Flower Park

Home to a single 160-year-old wisteria whose violet canopy spreads over a thousand square metres — a spring spectacle so unreal it lights up at night, and whose winter illumination ranks among Japan's best.

🌸 Spring ❄️ Winter

🎏 Festival

Atami Sea Fireworks Festival

A hot-spring bay shaped like a mortar amplifies these fireworks into a stadium-like roar — Atami runs roughly 15 shows a year, several of them landing on late-summer weekends, each ending in a 'Great Sky Niagara' finale reflected on the water.

📍 Shizuoka, Atami 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day

📍 Tochigi, Nakagawa 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Bato Hiroshige Museum of Art

A serene, award-winning Kengo Kuma building wrapped head to toe in fine local-cedar latticework, built to hold ukiyo-e by Hiroshige — architecture that turns the artist's famous slanting rain into wood and light.

📍 Oita, Beppu 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

The Hells of Beppu (Jigoku Meguri)

A tour of seven boiling, steaming, technicolor hot springs you absolutely cannot bathe in — cobalt-blue, blood-red, and one with crocodiles — where the only thing you soak is an egg.

The Blue Pond of Biei

An artificial pond that glows an unreal cobalt blue, with ghostly drowned larch trees rising from the water — an accidental landscape born of erosion control that became one of Hokkaido's most surreal sights.

📍 Yamagata, Yamagata 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Bunshokan (Former Yamagata Prefectural Office)

A grand English-Renaissance government hall from 1916 with a landmark clock tower, free to wander — marble stairs, a chandeliered assembly chamber, and balconies that make it Yamagata City's most unexpectedly elegant indoor stop.

📍 Hokkaido, Wakkanai 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Cape Sōya — Japan's Northernmost Point

The literal top of Japan: a windswept cape on the Sea of Okhotsk marked by a stark triangular monument, where on clear days you can see the Russian island of Sakhalin across the water.

📍 Chiba, Choshi 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Choshi Electric Railway

A tiny, perpetually broke seaside railway at the eastern tip of Chiba that famously stays alive by selling rice crackers — a 6.4 km line of vintage carriages, cabbage fields, and cheerful gallows humor.

📍 Osaka, Ikeda 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Cup Noodles Museum, Ikeda

A shrine to instant ramen on the spot where it was invented — design your own Cup Noodle, walk a tunnel wall of 800 packages, and salute the shed where Momofuku Ando changed dinner forever.

📍 Tochigi, Nikko 💴 Paid ⏱ Full day

Edo Wonderland Nikko Edomura

A living theme park that rebuilds an entire Edo-period town — costumed townsfolk, ninja shows, an oiran procession, and a 'haunted temple' — where you can rent a kimono and spend a day in the age of the samurai.

📍 Kanagawa, Fujisawa 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Enoshima Island

A small tidal island off Kanagawa reached on foot over a causeway, packed onto one hill: a sea-dragon shrine, candlelit sea caves, a beachside lighthouse tower, and sweeping Sagami Bay views — all in a single easy loop.

📍 Kanagawa, Kawasaki 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Fujiko F. Fujio Museum

A joyful museum in Kawasaki devoted to the creator of Doraemon and friends — original manga art, a rooftop play world, and that famous blue robot cat waiting in the garden.

📍 Hokkaido, Nakafurano 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day

Farm Tomita Lavender Fields

Hokkaido's most famous flower farm, where July turns whole hillsides into stripes of purple lavender and rainbow flowers — and everyone leaves clutching a lavender soft-serve.

📍 Yamagata, Obanazawa 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day

Ginzan Onsen

A hot-spring village that looks frozen in 1920: a narrow river lined on both banks by tall wooden Taisho-era inns, their lanterns and gas lamps reflecting in the water at dusk — Tohoku's most cinematic onsen street.

📍 Hokkaido, Hakodate 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Goryōkaku Star Fort

A Western-style fortress in Hakodate built as a perfect five-pointed star — best seen from the tower above, and unforgettable in spring when 1,600 cherry trees turn the whole star pink.

📍 Nagasaki, Nagasaki 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

🏚️ Abandoned

Gunkanjima (Battleship Island)

A tiny abandoned island so crammed with crumbling concrete apartment blocks it looks like a warship steaming out of the sea — once the most densely populated place on Earth, now a silent ruin.

📍 Yamagata, Tsuruoka 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day

Mount Haguro Five-Story Pagoda

At the foot of sacred Mt. Haguro, a 600-year-old wooden five-story pagoda stands alone among giant cedars — reached by a hushed avenue of 2,446 stone steps lined by 1,000-year-old trees, one of Tohoku's most atmospheric walks.

📍 Yamagata, Okura 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Hijiori Onsen

A hot-spring village hidden in the crater of an ancient volcano, with one of Japan's oldest springs, a lantern-lit street of wooden inns, and a daily morning market where local grandmothers sell mountain vegetables straight off the ground.

📍 Hokkaido, Hokuryu 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day

Hokuryu Sunflower Village (Himawari no Sato)

Two million sunflowers across 23 hectares of hillside — one of Japan's largest sunflower fields, grown by a tiny farming town of 1,600 people, with sunflower mazes, rental bikes, and sunflower soft-serve at peak bloom.

📍 Kagoshima, Ibusuki 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Ibusuki Natural Sand Baths

Get buried up to your neck in naturally steaming volcanic sand on a black-sand beach at the southern tip of Kyushu — a 300-year-old bathing ritual found almost nowhere else on Earth.

📍 Chiba, Choshi 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Inubosaki Lighthouse

A tall white lighthouse on the windy cape at Japan's far east, where the mainland catches one of the country's earliest sunrises over the Pacific — climb it for a horizon that curves.

📍 Hokkaido, Kiyosato 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Kaminoko Pond (Child of God Pond)

A tiny pond hidden down a forest gravel road, fed by underground water from Lake Mashu — so cold and so clear that fallen trees lie preserved on the cobalt-blue bottom like specimens in glass.

📍 Yamagata, Kaminoyama 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Kaminoyama Castle & Onsen

A storybook white castle keep crowning a green hill above a 560-year-old hot-spring town threaded with free street footbaths — climb the tower for valley views, then soak your feet on a bench in the lane below.

📍 Chiba, Kamogawa 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Kamogawa Sea World

A seaside aquarium on the Boso coast famous for its powerful orca show — killer whales leaping against the backdrop of the open Pacific — plus belugas, dolphins, and a walk-through polar zone.

📍 Tochigi, Nikko 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Kanmangafuchi Abyss

A short, mossy gorge walk in Nikko lined with a row of stone Jizo statues in red bibs — the 'Bake Jizo,' famous for the local saying that you can never count them and get the same number twice.

📍 Yamanashi, Koshu 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Katsunuma Grape Picking (Grapark)

Japan's wine country, a short trip from Tokyo: an entire hillside of vineyards where you pay by weight to pick and eat 16+ grape varieties straight off the vine, from Kyoho and Delaware to Shine Muscat.

📍 Saitama, Kawagoe 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day

Kawagoe — Little Edo

A castle town an hour from Tokyo that still looks like the Edo period: a street of black-walled clay merchant warehouses crowned by a wooden bell tower that has rung the hours for centuries.

📍 Kanagawa, Kawasaki 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Kawasaki Daishi

A grand, bustling temple on the edge of Tokyo — home to a five-story pagoda, clouds of fragrant incense, and a shopping street where shopkeepers chop herbal candy in rhythmic time.

📍 Tokyo, Kuramae 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Kuramae Shrine

A 1693 shrine founded by a shogun, and — largely unknown outside Tokyo — the actual birthplace of kanjin-zumo, the fundraising sumo tournaments that grew into the sport as it exists today.

Kyu-Yasuda Teien

A free Edo-period daimyo garden by the Sumida River whose pond once rose and fell with the tide — now kept alive by pumps that recreate the same slow rhythm — tucked right behind the sumo stadium.

📍 Tokyo, Meguro 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Meguro Parasitological Museum

A tiny, free, two-floor museum dedicated entirely to parasites — home to a preserved 8.8-metre tapeworm and a gift shop selling parasite keychains. Tokyo's most gleefully strange date spot.

📍 Hokkaido, Sapporo 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day

Moerenuma Park

A former landfill on the edge of Sapporo, reborn as a vast piece of land-art by sculptor Isamu Noguchi: geometric grass pyramids, a glass pyramid, and a fountain that performs like a show.

📍 Yamagata, Tozawa 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Mogami River Boat Ride

Drift down the broad, green Mogami — one of Japan's three great rapid rivers — in a flat-bottomed wooden boat while the boatman poles you past gorge walls and waterfalls and sings the old river song by heart.

📍 Tochigi, Nasushiobara 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Momijidani Otsuribashi (Shiobara)

A 320-metre pedestrian suspension bridge swaying high over a forested river gorge near Shiobara Onsen — quietly thrilling year-round, and ablaze with red and gold maple in autumn, just as its name ('maple valley') promises.

📍 Yamagata, Yuza 🆓 Free ⏱ Full day

Mount Chokai (Dewa Fuji)

A nearly perfect 2,236-metre volcano rising straight from the Japan Sea coast, so symmetrical locals call it 'Dewa Fuji' — with snow lingering into summer, alpine flower meadows, and the cold spring-water falls of Motodaki at its base.

📍 Hokkaido, Hakodate 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Mount Hakodate Night View

The 'million-dollar night view': a 3-minute ropeway to a summit where Hakodate's lights pour across an hourglass isthmus pinched between two dark seas — a Michelin Green Guide three-star panorama.

📍 Tochigi, Nasu 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Mount Nasu Ropeway (Chausu-dake)

A ropeway lifts you toward the steaming summit of Chausu-dake, the active volcano that crowns the Nasu highlands — a short, rocky scramble from the top station to a crater rim that vents real sulfur.

📍 Saitama, Nagatoro 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Nagatoro River Rafting

A pole-steered raft trip down the Arakawa River past Iwadatami — a government-designated 'cultural landscape' of flat, layered rock shelves — alternating calm float-and-swim stretches with sudden rapids, about two hours from Tokyo.

📍 Hokkaido, Kamishihoro 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day

Naitai Highland Farm

Japan's largest public dairy ranch — 17 square kilometers of open grass, 2,000 grazing cows, a 7km driving road climbing to a glass-walled hilltop terrace, and soft-serve made from the herd below you.

📍 Chiba, Narita 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day

Naritasan Shinshoji Temple

A vast, thousand-year-old temple complex minutes from Narita Airport — pagodas, a great main hall, fire rituals, and a long approach street of grilled-eel restaurants — the perfect first or last stop in Japan.

📍 Tochigi, Nasu 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Nasu Onsen Shrine

A 1,300-year-old mountain shrine at the top of Nasu Yumoto, wrapped in cedars beside the steaming killing-stone field — guardian of the hot springs, a giant 'lucky' tree, and the samurai archer Nasu no Yoichi.

📍 Tochigi, Nasushiobara 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day

Nasu Senbonmatsu Farm

A breezy dairy farm on the Nasu plain where you can drink the milk fresh as soft-serve, pet the animals, try archery or fishing, and — on calm mornings — drift up over the fields in a tethered hot-air balloon.

📍 Kanagawa, Kawasaki 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Nihon Minka-en Open-Air Folk House Museum

A wooded hillside in Kawasaki where two dozen real thatched-roof farmhouses, a kabuki stage, and a watermill — rescued from across Japan and rebuilt board by board — form a village out of time.

📍 Hokkaido, Noboribetsu 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Noboribetsu Hell Valley (Jigokudani)

A steaming red-and-ochre volcanic crater that fuels Hokkaido's most famous hot-spring town, watched over by cheerful demon statues who are basically the local mascots.

📍 Chiba, Futtsu 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Nokogiriyama & the Hell Peek

Climb a former quarry mountain to 'Jigoku Nozoki' — a railed rock ledge jutting over a sheer drop — then find Japan's largest seated stone Buddha and 1,500 mossy arhat statues hidden in the forest below.

📍 Wakayama, Koya 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day

Okunoin Cemetery, Koyasan

Japan's largest cemetery: a two-kilometre path through towering cedars and 200,000 moss-covered tombs to a lantern hall that has kept the same flames burning for nine hundred years.

📍 Hiroshima, Takehara 💴 Paid ⏱ Full day

Okunoshima (Rabbit Island)

A small island in the Inland Sea overrun by hundreds of friendly wild rabbits — and a sobering secret past as a hidden poison-gas factory the maps once deliberately erased.

📍 Saitama, Saitama 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Omiya Bonsai Village

A quiet Saitama neighborhood that is the spiritual home of bonsai — a cluster of working nurseries and a dedicated museum where centuries-old miniature trees are tended like living heirlooms.

📍 Aomori, Mutsu 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Mount Osore (Osorezan)

A sulfur-belching volcanic wasteland Buddhists call the gateway to the afterlife, scattered with stone cairns, red pinwheels spinning for dead children, and a milky-blue 'lake of paradise.'

📍 Hokkaido, Otaru 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Otaru Canal

A short, romantic canal lined with old stone warehouses and lit by gas lamps at dusk — the postcard heart of a faded herring-boom port, at its most magical under falling snow.

📍 Chiba, Kamogawa 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Oyama Senmaida Rice Terraces

Hundreds of tiny terraced rice paddies stair-step down a Chiba hillside, mirroring the sky in spring and glowing with thousands of LED candles on winter nights — the closest 'thousand rice fields' to Tokyo.

🌸 Spring ❄️ Winter

📍 Saitama, Saitama 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

The Railway Museum, Omiya

A cathedral of trains in Saitama: real locomotives from steam to shinkansen parked in a vast hall, a turntable that spins a steam engine to a whistle, and driving simulators for would-be conductors.

📍 Tochigi, Nasu 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Sessho-seki, the Killing Stone

On a steaming sulfur field in Nasu sits a legendary rock said to hold the spirit of a murderous nine-tailed fox — and which famously cracked in two in 2022, prompting half-joking fears the demon escaped.

📍 Hokkaido, Biei 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Shikisai-no-Oka Flower Hills

Fifteen hectares of Biei hillside striped in ribbon-bands of flowers — ride a tractor-pulled 'Norokko' wagon through the color, then feed the alpacas at the ranch on top. Peak stripes run late July through September.

📍 Tokyo, Ueno 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Shitamachi Museum

A tiny museum at the edge of Shinobazu Pond that rebuilds a whole vanished Tokyo — full-size Meiji-era row houses, a lantern shop, a candy store — and lets you actually walk in and touch things.

📍 Hokkaido, Sobetsu 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Showa Shinzan

A steaming red lava dome that pushed up out of a flat wheat field in the 1940s — Japan's youngest mountain, born in wartime and lovingly documented by the local postmaster who watched it grow.

📍 Miyazaki, Takachiho 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Takachiho Gorge

A narrow basalt canyon of columnar cliffs and a waterfall plunging straight into emerald water — row a small boat to its base, through a landscape woven into Japan's oldest creation myths.

📍 Hyogo, Asago 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Takeda Castle Ruins — Castle in the Sky

Stone ramparts crown a mountain ridge in Hyogo, and on still autumn dawns a sea of cloud rises around them until the ruins seem to float — Japan's real-life 'castle in the sky.'

📍 Yamagata, Sakata 💴 Paid ⏱ Full day

Tobishima Island

Yamagata's only inhabited offshore island, a tiny green dot an hour by ferry from Sakata — clear blue water, seabird colonies, fresh-grilled fish, and a slow, salt-air pace that feels a world away from the mainland summer.

📍 Tochigi, Nikko 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Tobu World Square

A theme park near Nikko where you tower like a giant over the whole world: 100-plus famous landmarks — the Pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, Tokyo — rebuilt in flawless 1:25 miniature, peopled by 140,000 tiny figures.

📍 Tottori, Tottori 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day

Tottori Sand Dunes

Japan's largest sand dunes stretch for kilometers along the Sea of Japan — a pocket desert with camel rides, wind-carved ridges, and sandboarding, hiding a quiet sand museum nearby.

📍 Hokkaido, Tsurui 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day

Tsurui Red-Crowned Cranes

In the snowfields of eastern Hokkaido, Japan's rare red-crowned cranes gather each winter to feed — and to dance, leaping and bowing in pairs in one of nature's most elegant displays.

📍 Chiba, Kisarazu 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Umihotaru

A five-story rest stop on an artificial island marooned in the middle of Tokyo Bay, exactly where the Aqua-Line highway stops being a bridge and dives into an undersea tunnel — shops, sea views, and a giant tunnel-boring cutter on display.

📍 Tochigi, Utsunomiya 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Utsunomiya, the Gyoza Capital

The Tochigi city that eats more gyoza than anywhere in Japan — dozens of specialist dumpling shops, a friendly rivalry with Hamamatsu, and a beloved stone statue of a gyoza wrapped in its own dumpling skin.

Yokoamicho Park & Tokyo Memorial Hall

A quiet park built over the site where roughly 44,000 people died in a single firestorm during the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake — now a memorial hall holding the ashes of that disaster's victims and, later, of the 1945 Tokyo firebombing dead.

📍 Kanagawa, Yokohama 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

🎏 Festival

Yokohama Night Flowers

A recurring series of free five-minute fireworks bursts over Yokohama's harbor on scattered weekend nights from spring through autumn — a low-key, no-ticket-needed alternative to the big citywide hanabi festivals.

📍 Miyagi, Shiroishi 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Zao Fox Village

A mountain forest in Miyagi where more than a hundred fluffy foxes roam free around you — red, silver, and arctic-white — dozing in heaps and cheerfully ignoring every rule posted about them.

📍 Yamagata, Yamagata 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Zao Onsen & the Okama Crater

A historic sulfur hot-spring village high on Mt. Zao that swaps its winter 'snow monsters' for cool green summer hikes — the headline a short walk to the Okama, a perfectly round crater lake that glows an unreal emerald.

📍 Yamagata, Yamagata 💴 Paid ⏱ Full day 🗓 Dec 20 – Mar 8

🌲 Nature Seasonal event

Zao Snow Monsters (Juhyo)

Whole forests of fir trees freeze into towering, ghostly 'snow monsters' on the slopes of Mt. Zao each deep winter — ride a ropeway among them, then see them lit up after dark.

📍 Hokkaido, Toyako 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour 🗓 Apr 28 – Oct 31

Lake Toya Long-Run Fireworks

Fireworks every single night for six months straight: from late April to the end of October, a boat cruises Lake Toya's shoreline launching a 20-minute show — visible from every onsen hotel, footbath, and lakeside bench in town.

📍 Akita, Akita 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day 🗓 Aug 3 – Aug 6

Akita Kanto Festival

Performers balance 12-metre bamboo poles hung with up to 46 glowing paper lanterns — on their palms, foreheads, and hips — in a swaying river of light through the summer streets of Akita.

📍 Kanagawa, Yokohama 🎫 Varies ⏱ Half day 🗓 Aug 24

Yokohama Minato Mirai Festival (GREEN×EXPO 2027 Fireworks)

A one-night waterfront festival at Yokohama's Minato Mirai promoting the upcoming GREEN×EXPO 2027, combining live music and street performers with a large-scale fireworks finale over the harbor.

Ekoin Temple

Founded after a fire that killed 100,000 people in 1657, this Ryogoku temple hosted sumo tournaments for 76 straight years and holds the grave of Nezumi Kozo, an Edo-era thief students still visit for exam luck.

📍 Tokyo, Ryogoku 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Japanese Sword Museum

A dedicated katana museum in Ryogoku, run by the foundation that preserves Japan's sword-making tradition, where masterwork blades are displayed like sculpture — beautiful and, up close, unnervingly sharp-looking.

📍 Tokyo, Kuramae 🎫 Varies ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Kakimori

A Kuramae stationery shop where you hand-pick the cover, paper, binding, and closure to build a one-of-a-kind notebook — plus a spin-off next door where you mix your own custom fountain-pen ink.

📍 Tokyo, Asakusabashi 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Yoshitoku Doll Shop

Tokyo's oldest doll maker, founded in 1711 in the heart of Asakusabashi's doll-wholesaler district — with a 4th-floor exhibition room of Hina and Gogatsu dolls most visitors have no idea is open to the public.

📍 Yamagata, Sagae 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day

Cherryland Sagae

A roadside park entirely themed around cherries in the town that grows Japan's finest — a Ferris wheel, a cherry museum, all-you-can-pick orchards in June, and cherry soft-serve, jam, and sweets the rest of the year.

📍 Chiba, Sakura 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

DIC Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art

A world-class art museum hidden in the woods and gardens of inland Chiba, with a hushed room of seven Rothko paintings designed to be sat with in silence — an unexpected pilgrimage for art lovers.

Fujishiro Seiji Museum

A theater-like museum devoted to Seiji Fujishiro's luminous 'kage-e' shadow art — jewel-colored cut-paper fairytale worlds — reached through a garden where a cat sculpture quietly shows you the way.

📍 Gunma, Ota 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Japan Snake Center

A delightfully old-school research park in Gunma devoted entirely to snakes — hundreds of them, from rat snakes to vipers — where you can watch a feeding, hold a python, and meet the staff's scaly stars.

📍 Yamagata, Tsuruoka 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Kamo Aquarium (Jellyfish Dream)

A white aquarium on the Tsuruoka coast that holds the world's largest jellyfish collection — a Guinness record 50-plus species — climaxing in a five-metre 'Jellyfish Dream' tank where 2,000 moon jellies drift in slow, glowing circles.

📍 Yamagata, Nakayama 💴 Paid ⏱ Full day

Lina World

Yamagata's homegrown amusement park: a friendly, unflashy spread of roller coasters, a big Ferris wheel, a water ride, carousels and character shows — the kind of all-day, low-stress fun that's perfect for families with younger kids.

🏪 Old Shop

Mashiko Pottery Town

A laid-back Tochigi town that breathes ceramics — climbing kilns on the hillsides, hundreds of pottery shops and studios, and twice-yearly fairs where you buy rustic Mashiko-ware straight from the people who made it.

📍 Tochigi, Mashiko 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day

📍 Chiba, Futtsu 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Mother Farm

A huge hilltop farm-park on the Boso Peninsula with sheep races, hand-feedable capybaras and alpacas, seasonal flower fields, and Tokyo Bay views — wholesome chaos with a Ferris wheel.

📍 Kagawa, Naoshima 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Naoshima's Yellow Pumpkin

A giant polka-dotted yellow pumpkin by Yayoi Kusama sits at the end of a concrete pier on an art island in the Inland Sea — so beloved it was rebuilt after a typhoon swept it out to sea.

📍 Tochigi, Nasu 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Nasu Animal Kingdom

A sprawling highland zoo where you can hand-feed capybaras, walk among free-roaming birds and alpacas, watch a thrilling raptor flight show — and, in winter, see capybaras soak in their own steaming hot bath.

Nasu Flower World

A hillside of striped flower terraces high on the Nasu plateau — tulips, poppies, salvia and broom turning the slopes into bands of color, all rolling up toward the bare volcanic cone of Mt. Nasu behind.

📍 Tochigi, Nasu 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day

Nasu Heisei-no-Mori & Komadome Falls

A former Imperial forest opened to the public in 2011, where free boardwalk trails wind through old-growth woods to viewpoints over the 20-metre Komadome Falls — gentle, hushed, and royally well-kept.

📍 Tochigi, Nasu 💴 Paid ⏱ Full day

Nasu Highland Park

A forest amusement park near the foot of Mt. Nasu with ten roller coasters and dozens of rides among the trees — from a wooden-style woodie to a spinning 'Camelback' — plus zip lines and an adventure forest.

📍 Tochigi, Nasu 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Nasu Safari Park

Drive your own car through a free-range park of around 70 species — lions, tigers, giraffes, rhinos — feeding them from the window, and come back after dark for a thrilling night safari among rare white lions.

Nasu Stained Glass Museum

A museum built like an English manor house, its little stone chapels glowing with antique stained glass from the 1800s — wander between the windows as live pipe-organ and music-box notes drift through.

Nasu Teddy Bear Museum

A cozy English-cottage museum in the Nasu highlands stuffed with antique and artist teddy bears from around the world — plus a beloved life-size Totoro-and-Catbus room that delights every visitor.

Nasu Trick Art Museum

A highland gallery of mind-bending optical illusions where the paintings reach out and grab you — pose to be eaten by a shark, hang off a cliff, or shake hands with the Mona Lisa, camera ready.

📍 Tochigi, Nasushiobara 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

N's YARD — Yoshitomo Nara's Museum

The artist Yoshitomo Nara's own private museum, tucked in the Nasu woods: five intimate rooms of his big-headed, big-eyed paintings, his record and toy collections, and a quiet garden café.

📍 Tochigi, Utsunomiya 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Oya-ji Temple & the Heiwa Kannon

Beside the underground Oya quarry, a temple built into a cave shelters Japan's oldest stone Buddhas carved in the cliff — and next door a 27-metre goddess of peace stands hewn straight from the rock face.

📍 Yamagata, Sakata 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Sankyo Soko Rice Warehouses

A photogenic row of black-walled wooden rice warehouses from 1893, screened by a line of tall zelkova trees that keep the rice cool — a serene slice of old Sakata made famous by the TV drama 'Oshin.'

📍 Chiba, Katori 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day

Sawara — Chiba's Little Edo

A canal town in northern Chiba where willow-draped waterways and Edo-period merchant houses survive almost intact — glide through by boat in the home town of the man who first mapped Japan.

Shika-no-yu, Nasu's Oldest Hot Spring

A 1,300-year-old wooden bathhouse at the top of Nasu Onsen, where you soak in six cypress tubs of milky, sulfurous water at rising temperatures — a hot-spring ritual nearly unchanged for centuries.

📍 Gunma, Takasaki 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Takasaki Byakue Daikannon

A serene 41.8-metre goddess of mercy in gleaming white concrete stands on a hill above Takasaki — you climb a staircase inside her body, past tiny windows, all the way up to her shoulders.

📍 Toyama, Tateyama 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Tateyama Snow Wall (Yuki-no-Otani)

Each spring, plows carve the deepest snow on the Tateyama alpine route into a corridor walled by snow up to 20 metres tall — you walk a road with white cliffs towering on both sides.

📍 Yamagata, Tendo 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day

Tendo, the Shogi-Piece Town

The town that carves about 95% of Japan's shogi (Japanese chess) pieces leans all the way in — giant chess pieces on the streets, shogi-shaped everything, craftsmen you can watch at work, and an April festival played on a board of costumed humans.

📍 Chiba, Sodegaura 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Tokyo German Village

A flower-and-amusement park in Chiba that is famously neither in Tokyo nor especially German — but redeems the name each winter with one of the Kanto region's largest and most beloved light illuminations.

📍 Yamagata, Yonezawa 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day

Uesugi Shrine & Yonezawa Beef

A dignified shrine on the moated site of Yonezawa Castle, honoring the warlord Uesugi Kenshin — and the gateway to one of Japan's three great wagyu brands, Yonezawa beef, grilled and sizzling all over town.

📍 Yamagata, Yamagata 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Yamadera (Risshaku-ji)

A thousand stone steps climb through cedar forest and rock to a cliffside temple where the poet Bashō once paused — the reward is a wooden hall clinging to the precipice and a view straight down the green valley.

📍 Yamagata, Tsuruoka 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day

Yunohama Beach

A long, gentle sand beach on the Japan Sea coast near Tsuruoka, with shallow swimming water, a torii standing out in the waves, and famously glowing sunsets — Yamagata's easygoing summer seaside, with a hot spring right behind it.

📍 Yamagata, Yamagata 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day 🗓 Aug 5 – Aug 7

Yamagata Hanagasa Festival

One of Tohoku's great summer festivals: for three August nights, thousands of dancers in flower-decorated straw 'hanagasa' hats sweep down the main street of Yamagata City to thundering drums and the cry of 'Yassho, makasho!'

📍 Yamagata, Tsuruoka 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day 🗓 Aug 15

Akagawa Fireworks Festival

Billed as 'Japan's most moving fireworks show': on one August night, 12,000 fireworks are launched in choreographed bursts synced to music across a 700-metre stretch of the Akagawa river in Tsuruoka — one of Tohoku's very best hanabi.

📍 Yamagata, Yamagata 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day 🗓 Sep 20

🍜 Food Seasonal event

Yamagata Imoni Festival

A whole city gathers on a riverbed each September to share a single pot of taro-and-beef stew — a SIX-metre cauldron stirred by a construction crane, cooking 30,000 bowls of 'imoni' for everyone who shows up.