Hamamatsu and Lake Hamana

Chubu, Japan · City, Lake, Sea / Beach

The city the Tokaido shinkansen crosses and nobody gets off at: there are a hundred and ninety kilometres between Nagoya and Shizuoka and this is in the middle. It has the castle where Ieyasu lived for seventeen years, from twenty-nine to forty-five, with the rough-stacked stone walls still standing and a keep the townspeople paid for by subscription in 1958. It has the musical instrument museum of the city that makes Japan's pianos and motorcycles, with thirteen hundred instruments from all over the world. It has a four-hundred-and-fifty-year-old kite festival in which a hundred and seventy districts cut each other's lines over a dune. And it has Lake Hamana, brackish, where eel farming in Japan began around 1900, with oysters in winter and a cycling route right round it. On the coastal dunes, loggerhead turtles nest from May to August.

The essentials

Getting there

Train — Hamamatsu is a Tokaido shinkansen stop, and it matters which train: every Kodama stops and some Hikari, but no Nozomi at all, so check before you book. From Tokyo or from Nagoya you are here in a little over an hour and a half. What happens next is that the city is enormous — Hamamatsu absorbed half of western Shizuoka — and the interesting things are spread out. The centre is walkable: ten minutes from the station to the instrument museum, twenty to the castle. The rest needs a bus or a car: fifteen minutes by bus to the Nakatajima dunes, fifty to Ryotan-ji. The Air Park is the extreme case: there is exactly one direct bus a day each way, so it is a taxi (half an hour) or a car. For Lake Hamana there are Bentenjima and Araimachi stations on the Tokaido line itself, and for the north the Tenryu-Hamanako railway, which is one of the things to see in its own right.

Frequently asked questions about Hamamatsu and Lake Hamana

What to do in Hamamatsu and Lake Hamana: 13 activities

• The kite war, 3 to 5 May 4 h must-see only 3, 4 and 5 May, fixed dates

  It is not a temple or shrine festival: it celebrates children being born. When a family has its first child, the district makes a kite with the child's name and flies it, and that is the hatsudako. The custom, according to the tourism office, is four hundred and fifty years old and starts in the Eiroku era with a kite bearing the name of the Iio lord's firstborn. About a hundred and seventy districts take part. The battle is on the Nakatajima dunes on the 3rd and 4th from 10:00 to 15:00 and on the 5th from 12:00 to 15:00, and it is not about flying prettily: the lines are tangled and whoever cuts the other's by friction wins, which is why they are called fighting kites. On the nights of the 3rd and 4th, 18:30 to 21:00, the yatai come out, carved floats with lanterns: the tourism office counts a hundred and four in all, of which eighty-three parade through the centre.

• Thirteen hundred instruments from all over the world 2 h must-see

  Hamamatsu makes Japan's pianos — Yamaha and Kawai both came from here — and in April 1995 the city opened a museum to match: thirteen hundred instruments on show from around the world, not only Western ones, with headphones to hear them and a room where you can play. The museum calls itself Japan's only public musical instrument museum; the national museum directory calls it the first, which is not quite the same thing, and both versions are given here. Eight hundred yen for adults, ¥400 high school, free up to junior high and from the age of seventy. Open 9:30 to 17:00, closed the second and fourth Wednesday of each month (not in August) and over New Year. Ten minutes on foot from the station.

• The Nakatajima dunes 1.5 h must-see

  Eight hundred metres east to west, six hundred north to south, forty-eight hectares of sand facing the Enshu sea. They are usually called one of Japan's three great dune fields, and the site's own page has the honesty to warn that which three depends who is telling it: Tottori is almost always in, and then people argue between Fukiage in Kagoshima, Kujukuri and this one. What is particular to here is the fumon, the ripple pattern the strong west wind leaves in the sand. By bus from stop 6 at Hamamatsu station it is about fifteen minutes; there are two hundred free parking spaces. It is also the battlefield for the May kites.

• Gyoza, and why being number one is a mirage 1 h

  Hamamatsu gyoza is served in a ring, arranged in a circle in the pan, with a heap of boiled bean sprouts in the middle. The filling has plenty of cabbage, minced pork and garlic, seasoned so that it is eaten without sauce. The city has over three hundred places serving it, and the style began in the mid-1950s with stalls opened near the station by people repatriated from China. Now the interesting part: Hamamatsu and Utsunomiya have spent years disputing the title of the city that eats the most gyoza, and Shizuoka prefecture's own statistics centre explains why that fight does not mean what it looks like. The ministry's household survey counts only gyoza bought in shops, raw or ready-cooked: it does not count frozen gyoza or what you eat in a restaurant. On that data, says the statistics office itself, you cannot tell which city eats more gyoza. What can be said is that here it is good.

• Ryotan-ji and the Kobori Enshu garden 1.5 h Iinoya, Hamana, Hamamatsu · 50 min

  A Rinzai Zen temple and the mausoleum of forty generations of the Ii clan, the one that eventually produced Ii Naomasa, one of Tokugawa's four generals, and Ii Naosuke, the regent at the end of the Edo period. The garden is attributed to Kobori Enshu and is a national place of scenic beauty, one of four in Shizuoka prefecture. Inside is the nightingale corridor, boards that squeak when trodden on, set as an alarm against intruders. Seven hundred yen from high-school age and three hundred for schoolchildren, with a good hour's visit. On the hours the two sources disagree: one gives 9:00 to 16:00 with the gates closing at 16:30 and the other 9:00 to 16:30 closing at 17:00; both agree it closes on 15 August and 22 to 27 December. By bus from bay 15 at the station it is about fifty minutes.

• Tezutsu hanabi: the fireworks you hold in your arms 3 h Toyohashi (Aichi) · 60 min only the festival starts on the third Friday of July; in 2026 it fell on the 17th

  A man takes a bamboo tube packed with gunpowder into his arms and holds it while a column of fire comes out of the top and the shower of sparks falls on him. That is tezutsu hanabi, and you watch it in the grounds of Yoshida Shrine on the first night of Toyohashi's Gion Matsuri, from 18:30, along with the large tubes and the randama. They are prepared more than two months ahead, starting by cutting the bamboo, and set off by the festival association and the young men of the eight districts. The next day, Saturday, there are aerial fireworks on the bank of the Toyokawa river, around 12,000 of them, and for that night there is paid seating. The festival starts on the third Friday of July: in 2026 that was the 17th, and the 2027 dates were not published as of October 2026. Get off at Toyohashi station and walk about twenty minutes; there is no parking during the festival and the organisers ask people to come by public transport. Yoshida Shrine is held to be the birthplace of tezutsu, though Aichi tourism says so with reservations and elsewhere credits the wider Higashi-Mikawa district.

• The brackish lake and what comes out of it 3 h

  Hamana is not a freshwater lake: it is open to the Enshu sea and the waters mix, which explains what comes out of it. Eel farming in Japan began here, and the city puts it in those terms: Hamamatsu is the birthplace of eel aquaculture and has been at it for over a hundred years, with the Lake Hamana eel brand recognised nationally; it also raises soft-shell turtles outdoors in ponds and is among the country's top producers. In winter there are oysters and in spring raw shirasu. The other way to use the lake is by bicycle: there is a circuit route called Hamaichi and bike hire all round the shore. At the southern end, Bentenjima park has a red torii standing in the water that at sunset is the photograph. To the north is the Kanzanji hot-spring resort.

• The castle of promotions 1.5 h

  Tokugawa Ieyasu lived here for seventeen years, from twenty-nine to forty-five, and it was from here that he set out to unify the country: hence the nickname castle of promotions and Hamamatsu selling itself as the city where you get ahead. What is really worth looking at are the walls, of unworked stone piled up, the technique called nozura-zumi, which the tourism office says look as they did the day they went up over four hundred years ago. The keep is not original: the present one was completed on 26 April 1958, stands thirteen metres and cost fourteen million yen raised partly by a public subscription among residents, and the following year it was designated a municipal cultural property. The keep gate was restored in 2014. Two hundred yen, free up to junior high, 8:30 to 16:30, closed 29 to 31 December. Twenty minutes on foot from the station or six from the city hall bus stop.

• The loggerheads and their hatchlings 2 h only spawning from May to August; the hatchlings emerge from about sixty days later

  Every year from May to August, loggerhead turtles come up onto the Nakatajima sand at night to lay. The figures are what make it make sense: about a hundred and twenty eggs per clutch, three to five clutches, close to five hundred eggs per female, and about sixty days until they hatch. A local NGO, Sanctuary, handles it, has been fencing and watching for thirty-four years, and in 2001 opened a centre at the entrance to the dunes, open 9:00 to 17:00 and closed Wednesdays and Thursdays. They run hatchling releases you can attend, with a talk beforehand at the centre, booked through their site. One note from them: the turtles start arriving just after the kite festival.

• The railway with thirty-six protected properties 3 h

  The Tenryu-Hamanako line is 67.7 kilometres and 39 stations looping round the north of the lake, taken over in 1987 from the old national railway. What makes it different is that it was never modernised: along the whole route there are thirty-six properties on the national register, and not only stations. They are wooden station buildings, platforms, bridges over five rivers, tunnels, a raised water tank of about seventy tonnes from around 1940 and another of eighteen from around 1938, the engine depot office, the pump room, the rest room and even the staff bathhouse. The railway buildings were registered in December 1998 and the stations and bridges in January 2011. It is a journey to make sitting by the window and getting off somewhere.

• Toyohashi's Hada festival: the other fireworks you hold in your arms 4 h Toyohashi (Aichi) · 50 min only the first Saturday and Sunday of October

  Toyohashi has two tezutsu hanabi festivals - the bamboo tubes packed with gunpowder that a man holds in his arms - and they should not be confused: the Gion one is in July, at Yoshida Shrine, and this is Hada Hachimangu's, in October. On how many are set off one has to be honest, because the figures do not match: one database says eight hundred over two days, but that is a 2024 figure; Toyohashi tourism says around seven hundred counting tezutsu and the large tubes together; and the local paper gave about seven hundred tezutsu over two days and some four hundred on the first. What is certain is that the offering before the altar begins at four in the afternoon on the first day. Besides the fireworks there are mikoshi from the nineteen central districts, which go round the city and are purified in the grounds, a flower float pulled by children, and maidens' dances. It is one of Toyohashi's three great festivals, though neither the shrine nor the tourist office says which the other two are. The date is the first Saturday and Sunday of October; in 2025 it was the 4th and 5th. The shrine is said to have been founded in 672, and its priest opened a library here in 1848, the Hada Hachimangu Bunko. It is an eight-minute walk from the west exit of Toyohashi station. No source consulted publishes a heritage designation for the festival, a price, or what happens if it rains.

• The Air Park, free, with one catch 2.5 h

  Hamamatsu air base has the only public-information centre the Air Self-Defense Force runs in Japan open to visitors, and it charges nothing. In the hangar there are retired fighters whose cockpits you can sit in, rescue aircraft, trainers and a Blue Impulse machine; upstairs, a Blue Impulse simulator and the VIP cabin of a former government aircraft. The dome theatre runs three programmes, six showings a day of about twenty minutes, and admission there is free too. Open 9:00 to 16:00, closed Mondays (or the next working day when that is a holiday), the last Tuesday of each month, three days in the second week of March for maintenance, and over New Year. The catch is getting there: there are a hundred and forty-six free parking spaces, but by bus from the station only one direct service runs each way per day; by taxi it is about thirty minutes.

• The Tenryu-Futamata turntable 1.5 h Futamata, Tenryu, Hamamatsu · 45 min

  At Tenryu-Futamata they keep in working order what almost nowhere else does: the turntable that was used to turn locomotives round, about eighteen metres across, and the fan-shaped shed that surrounds it, built partly from local pine and Tenryu cedar. Both have been on the national register since December 1998, and the turntable, once pushed by hand, now runs on a motor. The station building went up in June 1940, when the Futamata line fully opened. There are fifty parking spaces.

What only happens on specific dates

• The kite war, 3 to 5 May 3, 4 and 5 May, fixed dates
• The loggerheads and their hatchlings spawning from May to August; the hatchlings emerge from about sixty days later
• Tezutsu hanabi: the fireworks you hold in your arms the festival starts on the third Friday of July; in 2026 it fell on the 17th
• Toyohashi's Hada festival: the other fireworks you hold in your arms the first Saturday and Sunday of October

Chains well with

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