From hidden temples to lively festivals, old tales to everyday scenes - stories, photos, and videos of the Japan that lives between the headlines and the guidebooks.
There is a red-brick tunnel on the old Tokaido, lit end to end, swept clean, and open to walk through, above a village t...
Before there was a road over the mountain, travelers got past it by running between waves. The stretch was called “paren...
The guardian shrine of eight villages in Ohara, set apart from them all, out on a forest pass north of Kyoto. Its gods w...
South of Kyoto, on the Kizu River, there’s a wooden footbridge that looks a hundred years out of date. It’s one of the l...
Tanukidani-san Fudō-in is a quiet temple in the hills above Kyoto, guarded by a wrathful deity and some three hundred ra...
The man who built this town was dead within ten years, ordered to cut his own belly open by the uncle who gave him the l...
Something moved in the water as I passed the pond, too fast to see. I didn’t look closer. An abandoned shrine near the t...
After six days and close to 600km, only one stretch of road was left, the run from Omihachiman into Kyoto. A lake shrine...
From the battlefield at Sekigahara down to the shore of Lake Biwa, and the company the day turned up along the way: a Ne...
Out of Nagoya into the flooded paddies of Gifu, where a massive curved structure I’d wondered about for years turned out...
From Toyohashi to Nagoya, past a shogun’s birthplace, the old Tokaido, and rice fields that follow you into the city. I...
After Day 2’s climbs, the road finally leveled out and ran along the Pacific coast. A beach that could have been Okinawa...