Though today’s city is a pleasant, relaxed enough place, Aizu-Wakamatsu’s strongest ties are to its past, a history that it draws nourishment from in the present and uses to fill out the otherwise rather featureless contours of the city. A major castle town on the all important trunk road north from Edo, the city’s fortunes…

Among other claims to fame, the town of Kishiwada has the dubious honor of being the setting for director Miike Takashi’s ultra-violent, 1997 movie, Young Thugs, Innocent Blood, a harrowing account of growing up in a severely dysfunctional family. It’s difficult matching the scenes in the film with the tranquility of today’s town, though its…

You might say there are two Okinawa’s. The first we all know because it is tirelessly promoted on TV, milked to the last drop by tour operators. The other is a little harder to define: small islands out of the mainstream, where life goes on without the fuss and flurry of activity that precedes the…

The marshlands of Chiba must have seemed a forbidding and pestilential place to a young girl peering out from the wretched discomfort of a palanquin as it made its passage back to Kyoto and civilization in the year 1021. Lady Sarashina’s father had just completed a term as Assistant Governor of what is now Chiba…

Because Okinawan cuisine is so different from mainland Japanese food, it’s easy to get sidetracked into a culinary route at the expense of exploring other aspects of Miyako-jima. By the time I arrived on the island, though, the sun was already beginning to set, making it too late for any useful sightseeing. An exploration of…

If you had time to explore every stop on the Kintetsu line, from Kyoto down to, say, Ago Bay in Mie prefecture, you would discover a descending history, from grand stone fortifications and temples to the watery shores of the Ise Peninsula, its craggy fishermen and abalone divers. Matsusaka in the center of Mie, is…

Jokingly called the dead center of the capital by some locals (as a result of the huge Yanaka Reien cemetery that many still refer to as Yanaka Bochi), Yanaka and its surrounds have a lot to offer to short-term visitors and long-time locals. This is one of many so-called downtown locations in Tokyo that should…

Things were not always so good in the north. In 645 AD, Tohoku was given the official designation ‘Michi no oku no kuni,’ the ‘Land Beyond Roads,’ its inhabitants henceforth referred to as ‘Emishi’: Toad or Shrimp Barbarians. Historically, the degree of discrimination by Japanese against Japanese is extraordinary, and the northerners were not spared….

There aren’t that many neighborhoods of Tokyo that bring to mind the image of a single person as much as the Shibamata neighborhood. The working-class folk from Adachi, Sumida, Edogawa, and Arakawa go so far as to refer to this area in Tokyo’s extreme northeast as “downtown” – their own status in the eyes of…

You could quite easily plan a travel itinerary around Japan by plotting the location of its teahouses. Where there is culture, you might say, there is tea. Eclipsed by the grandeur of mountains, even the most hubristic will feel humbled. It’s something similar to the willing, shrinking of the ego that takes place when we…