🏯 History · 99 destinations · 636 activities
Much of pre-1868 Japan was lost to fire, earthquakes and bombing, so what survives is heavily concentrated. Twelve castles keep their original keep, a handful of towns preserve entire Edo-era quarters, and a few post road streets remain exactly as they were. These are the destinations where you can see that without having to imagine it.
The garden costs 700 yen for adults and 600 yen for groups of 25 or more, and includes the Hoshokan museum; there is no garden-only ticket. The garden opens 8:45 to 17:30 with last admission at 17:15 and the museum 9:00 to 17:00 with last admission at 16:45, every day of the year. Going into the Ho-o-do to see Jocho's Amida costs 300 yen more and works in slots every 20 minutes, from 9:30 to 16:10, with a limited quota per slot and tickets sold at the garden reception, not online. Be there 5 minutes before your assigned time; the commentary is in Japanese only (a leaflet is given in other languages) and the interior can close without notice for ceremonies. The official source gives two different capacity figures, 20 and 50 people per slot: confirm when buying.
The benchmark work of sukiya architecture and of the stroll garden, admired by Bruno Taut and by half a century of modern architects. Entry is only on a guided tour of about 60 minutes and must be applied for in advance. Since 2019 it charges 1,000 yen from age 18; ages 12 to 17 are free and under-12s cannot enter, infants included. Capacity is 20 people per tour and 480 a day in the reserved quota; the online application opens on the 1st of the month three months ahead and closes three days before, with a lottery if demand exceeds supply and the result sent by email within three working days. Another 70 places a day (10 per tour) are kept for same-day entry on a first-come basis from 8:40 at the villa itself, with a passport. There are tours aimed at foreign visitors at 9:20, 11:20, 13:20, 15:20 and 16:20. Closed Mondays (Tuesday if the Monday is a public holiday) and from 28 December to 4 January. Photo ID must be shown at the entrance. A caveat about access: the sources consulted do not agree on whether the online application is settled first-come or by lottery when demand exceeds supply. What is certain is that a prior application is needed and that there is a same-day allocation of places; it is worth confirming on the Imperial Household Agency website.
The system changed and today you walk straight in: no prior application and no ticket, it is free and reached on foot. There are free guided tours with no sign-up, in English and Chinese at 10:00 and 14:00 (around 50 minutes) and in Japanese at 9:30, 10:30, 13:30 and 14:30; you have to be in the visitors' room at the start time. It closes on Mondays (if the Monday is a public holiday it closes the following Tuesday) and from 28 December to 4 January, and it can close without notice for Imperial Household events, visits by dignitaries or bad weather. You see the Shishinden, the Seiryoden and the Oikeniwa garden; the buildings are viewed from outside.
The city's largest holding of Buddhist art, painting and ceramics, in Taniguchi Yoshio's Heisei Chishinkan wing. Open 9:30 to 17:00, with extended hours on Fridays, closed Mondays (if the Monday is a public holiday it opens and closes the following day) and at the end of the year. Important notice: the galleries are shut for building works from 7 September to 5 October 2026 and only the gardens can be walked; the car park is also closed from 7 September to 4 October. From 6 October to 29 November 2026 there is a special exhibition on the Genji Monogatari. The Meiji Kotokan, Katayama Tokuma's original brick building of 1895, does not open daily: in 2026 it opened to the public only from 11 to 20 July, with no advance registration. Confirm the calendar before going, because the museum alternates closures for installation.
The precinct and the brick Suirokaku aqueduct, part of the Lake Biwa Canal works, are free to enter; the Hojo garden and the climb up the Sanmon are paid separately, at around 500-600 yen each depending on the source (worth confirming at the ticket window). Hours 8:40-17:00 from March to November and 8:40-16:30 from December to February, with no closing days; there is a tea room with matcha and wagashi for about 500 yen. Important notice: the Nanzen-in subtemple is closed for works until the spring of 2027, so do not count on its pond garden. Following the aqueduct upstream leads to the Okuno-in and its small waterfall, almost always empty.
The grounds' gates are open from 5:00 to 17:00 and the Miedo and the Jikido are free; the Kondo and the Kodo cost 800 yen for adults, 400 yen for upper secondary and 300 yen up to lower secondary, from 8:00 to 17:00 with last entry at 16:30. The Kodo holds twenty-one sculptures arranged as a three-dimensional mandala following Kukai's design, and that is what has to be seen even if the pagoda is what appears in the photographs. The Kanchi-in is paid for separately, 600 yen, from 9:00 to 17:00. The Homotsukan opens only in spring and autumn for 600 yen; in 2026 the autumn round runs from 20 September to 25 November.
One of Japan's three most beautiful gardens, offering a different look with each season.
The thirteenth Maeda lord, Nariyasu, built it in 1863 so his mother could live looking onto Kenroku-en, and it is one of Japan's best-preserved late-Edo lordly residences: the Gunjo room painted with imported ultramarine, and the sliding doors with birds in the Netsuke-no-ma. 700 yen, 9:00-17:00 (last entry 16:30), closed Wednesdays.
Cobblestone streets lined with well-preserved traditional teahouses.
On Saturdays in July and August the prefectural theatre runs the Kannō no Yūbe series: one noh play and one kyogen, doors at 16:00, performance 17:00-19:00, for 1,500 yen and free for school-age visitors. Tickets go on sale in early June at the theatre itself, the Noh Museum and Korinbo Daiwa, and are not sold online.
The castle park is free, but going inside the diamond-shaped Hishi turret, the Gojikken Nagaya storehouse and the Hashizume gate tower costs 320 yen (500 combined with Kenroku-en) and is open only 9:00-16:30, last entry 16:00. They were rebuilt in 2001 with traditional joinery and you can see the bare beam structure, with no steel nails.
Kaga cooking is not only jibuni: it is a full menu served on five-colour Kutani porcelain and lacquer bowls, with Sea of Japan fish and Kaga vegetables, at houses such as Tsubajin, open since 1752. Lunches start around 8,000 yen and dinners run to double that or more; book several days ahead, and note that many houses close one fixed day a week.
Seven preserved houses of the foreign residents, all free to enter: Berrick Hall and House 234, the Diplomat's House and House 111 by the lookout, the British House, the Ehrismann Residence and Bluff No. 18. All open 9:30 to 17:00, and you cannot do the whole circuit on any given day because each closes on a different day of the month, usually the second or fourth Wednesday: check the calendar first. The walk takes a couple of hours between Motomachi-Chukagai and Ishikawacho.
The inner half of Sankeien is the part silk merchant Hara Sankei kept for himself: Rinshunkaku, a Tokugawa villa built in 1649 on the Kino River in Wakayama and moved here piece by piece between 1906 and 1917, and Kakushokaku, where he hosted painters such as Yokoyama Taikan. Rinshunkaku is an Important Cultural Property and is normally not open inside; you walk around it, along the corridor and over the bridge. Garden admission is 900 yen for adults and 200 for schoolchildren, 9:00 to 17:00 with last entry at 16:30, and the only annual closure is 26-31 December.
Launched in 1930 for the Yokohama-Seattle run and now an Important Cultural Property, it is the only surviving prewar Japanese ocean liner: you walk the art deco first-class cabins, the dining saloon, the bridge and the engine room. Admission 300 yen for adults and 100 for schoolchildren, cash only, 10:00 to 17:00 with last entry at 16:30, closed Mondays. The NYK Maritime Museum that used to face it has been closed since April 2023 and will not reopen until spring 2027.
Chinatown has ten gates and four of them mark the cardinal points with the feng shui guardian animals: Choyomon to the east with the azure dragon, Suzakumon to the south with the vermilion bird, Enpeimon to the west with the white tiger and Genbumon to the north with the black tortoise, each painted in its colour. The most photographed, the 13.5-metre Zenrinmon, went up in 1955 as a symbol of postwar recovery. Doing all ten is a good hour's walk, best early before the streets fill.
Foreign sailors named the port's three towers after playing cards: Jack is the Port Opening Memorial Hall (1917, brick and stained glass), Queen is the Customs House (1934, green dome) and King is the Kanagawa Prefectural Government building (1928). All three can be visited free, and King opens its rooftop and a history room on weekdays. Local lore says there are three spots in the city from which all three are visible at once, and there are stamps to prove you found them.
Half a kilometre of walkway between Sakuragicho and the red brick warehouses, laid out in 1997 on the 1911 harbour railway alignment, with the original rails still set into the ground. You cross three historic truss bridges, two of them built by the American Bridge Company in 1907, and at the far end sits the preserved platform of the old Yokohama-ko station. At dusk it is the best place to watch the Ferris wheel light up.
Just 460 metres from the hypocentre: a hundred and sixty pupils and sixteen teachers died. The messages survivors chalked on the stairwell walls looking for their families are preserved, found under layers of paint in 1999. It is free, shattering, and almost always empty.
A memorial and museum dedicated to the atomic bombing, with the Atomic Bomb Dome standing as its testimony.
Around a hundred and seventy trees survived the bombing and are marked with plaques, twelve of them within a thousand metres of the hypocentre. The closest is a weeping willow at 370 metres that fell and regrew from the root, and the second a holly at 410 that burned and resprouted in 1949. The oleander is the city's official flower precisely because it flowered again in 1946. It lets you read the city through what stayed alive, not only through what was destroyed.
The museum arranges talks by hibakusha and, increasingly, by denshosha, people trained to pass on the testimony of a specific survivor. The average survivor is now over 86 and direct talks are scarce: request weeks or months ahead.
The school closest to the hypocentre, across the river from the Dome. The basement of the 1928 concrete building is preserved, with its blackened walls. It is free and is done on the same morning as Fukuromachi.
A half-buried Tange building inside the park, separate from the museum and free: it holds the database of victims' names and photographs and the written and video testimonies of survivors. You can search by name and listen to readings of memoirs.
Japan's most important museum, with the Honkan devoted to Japanese art by period, the Toyokan to continental Asia, and Taniguchi Yoshio's Horyu-ji Treasures gallery to seventh-century Buddhist bronzes. 1,000 yen, free under 18 and over 70.
What survives of Edo Castle, once the largest castle in the world: the stone base of the keep that burned in 1657 and was never rebuilt, the Fujimi-yagura turret and the Hundred-Guard house. Free and no booking needed, but it closes on Mondays and Fridays, and winter hours are short (November to February it shuts at 16:00).
Begun in 1629 by the Mito Tokugawa and finished in 1637, with landscapes copied from China and Japan: the Engetsukyo stone bridge whose reflection completes a full circle, a rice paddy the family actually farmed, and a miniature Mount Lu. ¥300, open daily 9:00-17:00 except at New Year. The bulk of Tokyo Dome looming over the maples is part of the experience; autumn colour arrives late here, around the first half of December.
A Shinto shrine dedicated to Emperor Meiji, surrounded by a lush forest next to Harajuku.
One of Edo's three great festivals, held in full ONLY in odd years: on Saturday a procession of nearly a thousand people covers thirty kilometres through Kanda, Nihonbashi and Marunouchi; on Sunday more than two hundred mikoshi enter the shrine. Even years bring the kage-matsuri, a reduced, near-internal version.
Thirty buildings dismantled and rebuilt here, from an Edo farmhouse to Kunio Maekawa's home and a shitamachi shopping street that inspired Miyazaki. 400 yen, closed Mondays, and it is in Koganei, not central Tokyo.
Carved in dry lacquer in 734, three-faced and six-armed with the face of a worried teenager, the Ashura is one of Japan's most loved sculptures and it is here, five minutes from the station. The museum opens 9:00-17:00 (last entry 16:45) and costs 900 yen; a combined ticket with the Central and Eastern Golden Halls is 1,600.
The first full-scale Buddhist temple ever built in Japan, founded in 596, with a bronze Buddha cast in 609 that still sits where it was made: cracked and pieced back together after several fires, and the monks let you photograph it and explain the story without rushing. It is small and plain, nothing like the Great Buddha of Nara, and that is the point.
Asuka was the capital before Nara and is now a rice valley scattered with tombs, temples and carved stones, with a signposted loop you can ride in a day. Bikes are rented beside Kintetsu Asuka station, 8:30-17:00, cash only, for about 1,200 yen a day (1,700 for electric, worth it because there are hills). From Nara it is roughly fifty minutes with a change at Kashiharajingu-mae.
A 120-hectare open field where the palace of Japan's 8th-century capital stood, with the Suzakumon gate and the throne hall rebuilt full size, plus the Tōin garden, the oldest palace garden in Japan. Entry is free and it is a ten-minute walk from Yamato-Saidaiji, but be warned: it is a vast treeless plain with the buildings far apart and a railway line running straight through it, so it disappoints anyone expecting a standing palace.
A grid six hundred by three hundred metres holding some 1,500 buildings, around five hundred of them merchant houses from the 17th to 19th centuries: it was a walled self-governing town that minted its own currency and grew so rich that seven of every ten coins in Yamato were said to be in Imai. These are private homes, not a museum; only a few, such as the Imanishi house of 1650 and the Hana-iraka centre, can be entered. It is ten minutes on foot from Yagi-Nishiguchi station.
Japan's largest stone burial chamber, 7th century and attributed to the nobleman Soga no Umako: its earth mound washed away centuries ago, leaving thirty granite blocks exposed, one of them over seventy tonnes, and you can duck inside. Open 9:00-17:00 daily (ticket desk to 16:45); the fee was revised on 1 April 2026, so check the current price on the village website.
A mining island abandoned in 1974, now a World Heritage Site. Four licensed operators land there, but it depends on the swell and is cancelled often even in fine weather: book it for the first available day of your trip. Only a walkway of about 220 metres is accessible. It matters to know that forced Korean labourers and Chinese prisoners worked here, a historical dispute still very much open.
Completed in 1864, it is the oldest standing Christian church in Japan, the first Western-style building designated a National Treasure and part of the Hidden Christian Sites World Heritage listing. The so-called discovery of the hidden Christians happened here in 1865.
A memorial dedicated to the victims of the second atomic bombing.
A sponge cake of 16th-century Portuguese origin, adapted with rice syrup and with the characteristic layer of sugar grains at the bottom. The Fukusaya house was founded in 1624 and its main shop is a historic building.
On Nishizaka hill, the site of the crucifixion of 26 Christians in 1597 on Hideyoshi's orders, with the bronze relief by Yasutake Funakoshi. It is an official Catholic pilgrimage site and John Paul II visited it in 1981.
Built on the site of the city magistrate's office, with part of the building faithfully reconstructed, including the room where Christians were put on trial. It is the best place to understand the 250 years in which Nagasaki held a monopoly on Japan's foreign trade.
The castle's residential palace, burnt down in 1945 and rebuilt between 2009 and 2018 in hinoki cypress, with traditional joinery and copies of the original screen paintings, which survived because they had been taken down and stored during the war. You enter barefoot and nothing may be touched. It is covered by the castle's 500-yen ticket (9:00-16:30, buildings until 16:00). Worth knowing: the main keep has been closed since May 2018 over earthquake risk, and its timber reconstruction is not expected before 2032, so for now it can only be seen from the outside.
Behind the main hall, six hectares of woodland hide what almost nobody looks for: the Nobunaga-bei, a mud-and-tile wall Oda Nobunaga paid for in 1560 in thanks for his victory at Okehazama; the thousand-year-old camphor tree attributed to Kobo Daishi; and Kamichikama-sha, where people leave clay pots with very specific requests. The grounds are open twenty-four hours and free, but this is a working shrine: no tripods, and no photographs inside the main hall.
The oldest surviving wooden keep in Japan, and next to it an open-air museum of Meiji-era buildings moved here whole, including the lobby of Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel.
Atsuta keeps the sword Kusanagi, one of the three imperial regalia, which is never displayed and which not even the priests see. What you can see is in two buildings: the Kusanagi-kan, devoted to swords, with the largest naginata in Japan and replicas you are allowed to lift to feel the weight, and the Homotsukan, showing part of the more than six thousand objects donated to the shrine. Each costs 500 yen, both open 9:00 to 16:30 (last entry 16:00) and both close on the last Thursday of the month and the day before.
The inherited treasure of the Owari branch of the Tokugawa, including the 12th-century illustrated Genji scrolls, which because of their fragility are shown only a few days a year.
Two 1930s office buildings facing each other beside the castle, with Western concrete bodies and a Japanese castle roof set on top: the teikan style the militarist era imposed before the war. Both are Important Cultural Properties, both can be entered freely during office hours on weekdays, and you can go up to the Prefectural Office roof terrace; the ceremonial rooms open only on booked tours and on Culture Day, 3 November. The copper roof was restored in 2025 and has gone back to its original reddish colour.
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