For many first-time visitors to Japan the most important task is to go online and start exploring by means of their smartphone or mobile device. However, with most mobile providers offering 2-year contracts and elaborate deals created for a Japanese-speaking audience, it can be hard to find a simple solution for you. This article intends to…

Scheduled to open in October 2018, FUFU KAWAGUCHIKO JAPAN, a ryokan near Mount Fuji, is the latest addition to the Kato Pleasure Group’s “Fufu” luxury accommodations. Ryokan are a kind of traditional Japanese inn dating back to about the eighth century during the Keiun Period. Ryokan were used by people traveling along Japan’s roads, drawing…

Even though nobility once wore the feathers and furs taken from its tropical wildlife, and its precious rainforest hardwoods were used to build imperial palaces, few mainland Chinese set foot on the island of Hainan until recent years. Tropical storms and typhoons, a fear of bloodthirsty pirates, and the island’s reputation as a remote place…

When evening falls on Miyazaki and its ubiquitous scarlet and indigo evening sky drops behind the phoenix palms that line many of the city’s roads and boulevards, you could be forgiven for thinking that you are strolling through a middle-class quarter of Cairo or Marbella. The city reminded travel writer Will Ferguson fleetingly of Miami,…

It’s always better to have expectations crushed right at the start, to ascend from zero appreciation of a new destination. In the case of Kurashiki, there’s certainly nothing outstanding about the cheesy area facing the station’s south exit. The north exit is only a little more promising, with the painted walls and turrets of Kurashiki…

Since the publication in English of Yukio Mishima’s 1954 The Sound of Waves, an uncharacteristically romantic novel of young love flowering on an islet in the Seto Naikai, there has been a fondness for visualizing the Inland Sea and its islands of olives, oranges, sunburnt fisherfolk, and midday siestas, as somehow Mediterranean in flavor, its…

The skies of Provence are, to be sure, a rare and unique phenomena. The light they cast down over the sycamore, cypresses, plane trees, baked roof tiles and the high, aerial villages perched on their improbable rock escarpments, provides just the right touch of chiaroscuro and drama to enhance all the best loved components of…

Spain has always been regarded as the most exotic and barbarous country in Europe, and foreigners for their part have always tended to romanticize the country. Even the Muslims in the eighth century, casting covetous eyes across the 27-kilometer stretch of water that separates Morocco from Spain, idealized the place as a kind of Africa…

The single line train from Hashimoto to Koya-san is worth the entire trip in itself. The track cuts and winds into the side of mountains, creating an observation shelf down into steep, densely forested valleys. Glimpses onto the tiled rooftops of villages, narrow, fine tooth-combed fields fitted between forested slopes and unhurried stops at wooden…

Shanghai may have impressed early writers, but there is little affection or warmth for the city in their observations. Charles Halcombe, a gifted journalist who worked for the North China Daily News in the late 1880s, wrote of “ﾉnot wishing to enter the gloomy precincts of the French Concession, with its unpretentious buildings of miscellaneous…