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In-depth stories behind Japan's destinations
Local Hero
Nobu Shirase — Akita's Polar Explorer
Shirase Nobuichi (白瀬矗, 1861–1946) was born in what is now Nikaho City on Akita's southern coast. As a young man, he developed an intense ambition for polar exploration. To harden himself for the cold he intended to face, he reportedly gave up drinking tea as a disciplinary practice in his boyhood — and pushed his endurance further by sleeping without bedding through Akita's brutal winters and walking barefoot on snow.
Shirase originally planned to reach the North Pole, but when Robert Peary claimed it in 1909, he pivoted south. In 1910, with funding scraped together from private donors and a wooden vessel called the Kainan Maru, he departed Japan with a crew of 27. Arriving in Antarctica in 1912, his advance party pushed inland and reached 80°05' South latitude, planting Japan's flag and naming the region the Yamato Snow Plain (大和雪原).
The expedition returned to a hero's welcome — and a mountain of debt. Shirase had borrowed heavily to finance the voyage, and for years afterwards he toured Japan giving public lectures and selling his memoir to repay every creditor. He succeeded. Shirase died in 1946 at age 84, his debts cleared and his name inscribed in the polar record alongside Amundsen and Scott.
Shirase Antarctic Expedition Memorial Museum (白瀬南極探検隊記念館) Nikaho City — JR Uetsu Main Line to Nikaho Station, then a 15-minute walk north.
Notable Figure
Ken Domon at Muro-ji — The Photograph That Defined a Career
Ken Domon (土門拳, 1909–1990) spent much of his career travelling Japan's ancient temple circuit, and no single image from those journeys has endured more stubbornly than one made at Muro-ji in the mountains of southern Nara. Domon made several winter visits to the remote Shingon Buddhist temple before capturing, in 1954, the scene he had been waiting for: the temple's weathered five-storey pagoda — the smallest national-treasure pagoda in Japan — half-buried in fresh snow, the forest behind it white and perfectly still. The photograph is widely regarded as the finest ever made of Japanese Buddhist architecture.
Muro-ji drew Domon precisely because it was difficult. The temple sits deep in the Muro River valley, accessible only by a long mountain path, and its pagoda — exposed to full weather on an open terrace — accumulates snow that larger, more sheltered structures never see. For a photographer committed to showing the world without flattery or artifice, the combination of extreme weather, aged timber, and the pagoda's asymmetric human scale offered something that no studio arrangement could replicate: a subject that had simply been there, enduring, long before any camera existed.
In 1968, Domon suffered a severe stroke that left him partially paralysed. He did not retire. With modified equipment and assistants, he continued photographing Japan's ancient temples from a wheelchair for more than a decade — returning to Nara, to Kyoto, and to Fukuoka with the same intensity he had brought to every earlier assignment. He died in 1990. The Domon Ken Museum of Photography (土門拳記念館) in Sakata, Yamagata, holds the definitive collection of his prints, including the Muro-ji series.
Muro-ji Temple (室生寺) Uda City, Nara — Kintetsu Osaka Line from Kintetsu-Namba (Osaka) to Muroguchi-Ono Station (approx. 1 hour), then local bus to Muroji (25 min). The five-storey pagoda is a short walk from the main gate.
Notable Figure
Ken Domon — Japan's Unsparing Eye
Ken Domon (土門拳, 1909–1990) was born in Sakata, a port city on Yamagata's Sea of Japan coast. He became Japan's most consequential realist documentary photographer, declaring that the camera must show the world as it is — stripped of artifice. His landmark series include Hiroshima (1958), a devastating record of atomic bomb survivors living with disfigurement two decades after the war, and Chikuho (1959–61), portraits of coal-mining families in Fukuoka — children playing beside black slag heaps, mothers with worn hands and empty eyes.
Among his most beloved images is one taken far from Yamagata, at Muroji Temple deep in the mountains of Nara Prefecture. Domon made several winter visits and in 1954 captured the scene that would define his legacy: the temple's weathered five-storey pagoda half-buried in fresh snow, utterly still, surrounded by white silence. The photograph is widely regarded as the finest ever made of Japanese Buddhist architecture.
In 1968, Domon suffered a severe stroke that left him partially paralysed. He did not retire. With modified equipment and the help of assistants, he continued photographing Japan's ancient temples from a wheelchair for more than a decade — pushing deeper into Nara, Kyoto, and Fukuoka than many photographers manage on foot. He died in 1990. The Domon Ken Museum of Photography (土門拳記念館) in Sakata, designed by architect Taniguchi Yoshio, holds the definitive collection of his prints.
Domon Ken Museum of Photography (土門拳記念館) Sakata City — JR Uetsu Main Line to Sakata Station, then a 10-minute taxi ride.
Notable Figure
Hideyo Noguchi — From Inawashiro to the Rockefeller Institute
Hideyo Noguchi (野口英世, 1876–1928) was born in Inawashiro, Fukushima, into a family so impoverished that when the toddler Noguchi fell into the open hearth and severely burned his left hand, neighbours had to pool money to fund surgery that partially restored its function. That act of collective generosity left a permanent impression — and a permanent scar. Noguchi vowed to repay the community's faith by excelling in medicine.
Working his way up through sheer determination, Noguchi learned English, moved to Tokyo, and emigrated to the United States, joining the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York. He earned an international reputation for work on syphilis, snake venom, and tropical diseases, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine three times. His face appeared on the Japanese ¥1,000 banknote from 2004 to 2024.
In 1927, Noguchi travelled to Accra, in what is now Ghana, to investigate a yellow fever outbreak. He contracted the disease himself and died on 21 May 1928, aged 51 — consumed by the same illness he had gone to combat. His preserved notebooks, photographs, and personal effects are on display at the Noguchi Hideyo Memorial Museum in his home village of Inawashiro.
Noguchi Hideyo Memorial Museum (野口英世記念館) Inawashiro Town — JR Ban-Etsu West Line to Inawashiro Station, then a 10-minute walk.
Historical Figure
Kawai Tsuginosuke — The Last Strategist of Nagaoka
Kawai Tsuginosuke (河井継之助, 1827–1868) was the chief administrator of the Nagaoka Domain in Echigo Province (present-day Niigata). In the spring of 1868, as the Boshin War tore Japan apart, Kawai attempted something unprecedented: genuine armed neutrality. He believed Nagaoka should fight for neither the old Tokugawa shogunate nor the new Meiji imperial government. To make this credible, he had procured one of the first Gatling guns to arrive in Japan — a weapon that gave Nagaoka's small force a decisive edge in close combat.
Neutrality failed. After negotiations at Zenigata collapsed, Nagaoka was swept into the conflict and branded one of eleven 'rebel' domains (賊軍, zokugun) by the imperial government. The resulting Hokuetsu War (北越戦争, summer 1868) was one of the bloodiest regional campaigns of the Boshin period. Kawai directed Nagaoka's defence with extraordinary tactical skill — retaking the castle town once after its fall — but the numerical imbalance was overwhelming.
Wounded severely in the thigh during the final fighting, Kawai retreated north into present-day Fukushima and died at Yanagiminato on 16 September 1868, aged 41. The ruined Nagaoka eventually rebuilt — and the city's famous spirit of resilience, expressed in its annual fireworks festival, is sometimes traced back to the dignified determination Kawai showed in those final months.
One episode that long cast a shadow over local memory was the defection of the neighbouring Shibata Domain (新発田藩). Though initially aligned with the northern coalition, Shibata switched sides mid-conflict and opened its territory to imperial forces — a move that accelerated Nagaoka's fall and was resented for generations by the people of both Nagaoka and the wider region. Today, however, no lasting animosity divides the two cities. Nagaoka and Shibata have moved well beyond that rupture, and relations between the communities are ordinary and cordial — a reminder that local history, however painful, need not define the present.
Kawai Tsuginosuke Memorial Museum (河井継之助記念館) Nagaoka City — JR Joetsu Shinkansen to Nagaoka Station, then 5 minutes by taxi towards Nagaoka Castle ruins.
Traditional Music
Minyo — The Folk Songs Japan Nearly Forgot
Minyo (民謡) are the songs that grew out of the daily lives of ordinary Japanese people — fieldwork chants, lullabies, festival songs, sea shanties. Unlike art music composed for an audience, minyo were functional: they set the rhythm of labour, marked the seasons, and carried local knowledge from one generation to the next entirely by ear. Each region of Japan developed its own repertoire, its own melodic idiom, and its own vocal style, making minyo one of the most geographically diverse bodies of song in the world.
That living chain of transmission has weakened sharply over the last half-century. As rural communities shrank and agricultural work mechanised, the occasions that once sustained minyo — communal rice-planting, festival processions, communal fishing — became rarer or disappeared. The songs survived in archives, in school curricula, and among specialist practitioners, but the natural, unforced passing of a melody from parent to child in the course of everyday work became increasingly uncommon.
Against that backdrop, the Tokyo-based collective Minyo Crusaders (民謡クルセイダーズ) found an unexpected route back to relevance. Formed around guitarist Hamada Etsuro, the group began fusing traditional Japanese folk songs with Afro-Latin rhythms — cumbia, salsa, merengue, bossa nova — treating minyo not as museum pieces but as raw material with the same groove potential as any popular song. Their treatment of Aizu Bandaisan (会津磐梯山), a celebrated song from Fukushima's Aizu region that has been performed at festivals for centuries, became a particular favourite: the original melody remains intact, but the rhythmic bed beneath it opens the song to listeners who might never have sought out traditional music.
For those who want to hear Aizu Bandaisan performed in its original setting, Aizu-Wakamatsu in Fukushima's western interior is the natural destination. The Aizu Festival (会津まつり), held each September, features historical processions through the castle town around Tsuruga-jo, and the song is woven into the event's programme. More broadly, the Tohoku region remains one of Japan's richest repositories of living minyo tradition, with performances at outdoor stages, shrine festivals, and community halls throughout the summer months.
Street Art
Design Manholes — Japan's Art Hidden Underfoot
Japan has more than 12,000 distinct manhole cover designs, each commissioned by a local municipality, and nowhere are they taken more seriously than in Takaoka — a city in western Toyama Prefecture that has spent four centuries refining the art of casting metal. Most of the world treats manhole covers as functional objects to be ignored; Japan treats them as civic canvases. The practice of decorating sewer covers with local imagery dates to the early 1980s, when officials in Japan's construction ministry proposed commissioning illustrated lids as a way of building public goodwill around infrastructure expansion. Within a decade, hundreds of municipalities had commissioned their own designs, depicting local flowers, festivals, historical landmarks, and — increasingly — beloved manga characters.
Takaoka has been Japan's preeminent centre for copper and bronze casting since 1609, when the Kaga domain lord Maeda Toshinaga invited craftsmen to establish a manufacturing quarter in the new castle town. That tradition — which today accounts for a large share of Japan's total output of Buddhist altar fittings and cast metalwork — gives Takaoka an advantage in manhole artistry that few cities can match: precision die-work, deep relief, and a cultural vocabulary drawn from the city's long relationship with Buddhist art. The city's most recognisable design depicts the Takaoka Daibutsu, one of Japan's celebrated outdoor Buddha statues, set against the carved lacquerware patterns (Takaoka-doki) for which local workshops have been renowned since the Edo period.
The hobby of seeking out these covers has grown into an organised subculture. Enthusiasts who pursue them across Japan call themselves manholer (マンホーラー), and dedicated apps let collectors log, map, and compare discoveries. In 2017, Japan's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism formalised the phenomenon by launching the manhole card (マンホールカード): free, credit-card-sized collectibles distributed at municipal offices across the country, each printed with a photograph of a notable local design, its GPS coordinates, and a short historical note. More than 1,000 cards are now in circulation across all 47 prefectures.
Takaoka City Tourism Information Centre Takaoka City — JR Hokuriku Shinkansen to Shin-Takaoka Station (approx. 2 hours 20 minutes from Tokyo). Manhole cards distributed free of charge at the tourism information counter inside the station building.
Pop Culture
Kasukabe's Most Famous Five-Year-Old — Crayon Shin-chan's Saitama
Kasukabe, a city of around 230,000 in northeastern Saitama Prefecture, is best known outside Japan as the home of Shinnosuke Nohara — the irreverent five-year-old protagonist of Crayon Shin-chan (クレヨンしんちゃん). Created by Usui Yoshito and first serialized in 1990, the series follows Shin-chan, his long-suffering parents Hiroshi and Misae, baby sister Himawari, and the family dog Shiro through the chaos of suburban life in Kasukabe. The comedy was unlike anything in mainstream manga at the time: a child protagonist who consistently undermined adult authority, deployed half-understood language in ways that humiliated his family, and behaved, broadly speaking, exactly like a real small child — self-interested, easily distracted, and entirely immune to reason.
Usui Yoshito died in 2009 in a hiking accident on Mount Arafune in Gunma, aged 51. The series continued under his studio and editorial team and the anime, which began airing in 1992, has run continuously ever since — making it one of the longest-running anime franchises in Japan. Its international reach has been uneven but occasionally remarkable. In Spain, where it began airing on Antena 3 in the early 2000s, Crayon Shin-chan became a genuine cultural phenomenon. The Castilian Spanish dub attracted enormous audiences and kept the series on mainstream television for years. A generation of Spanish viewers grew up with Shin-chan as their primary introduction to Japanese animation — well ahead of titles that have since achieved wider global recognition — and affection for the character in Spain remains unusually deep.
Kasukabe has leaned fully into its fictional fame. Shin-chan murals appear near Kasukabe Station, character statues dot the city centre, and decorative manhole covers featuring the Nohara family line the streets. The Crayon Shin-chan Official Studio at Lalagardens Kasukabe — a large shopping complex north of the station — is the physical centrepiece of that identity: part shop, part interactive exhibition, and the only permanent official Shin-chan installation in the actual setting of the series.
Crayon Shin-chan Official Studio (クレヨンしんちゃんオフィシャルスタジオ) Lalagardens Kasukabe 3F, Kasukabe City — Tobu Skytree Line or Tobu Urban Park Line to Kasukabe Station (approx. 45 minutes from Asakusa), then a 15-minute walk north or 5 minutes by taxi.
Travel Tip
Western Music in Japan — A Secret Playlist at Every Corner
For travellers from Europe or the Americas, finding Western pop music in Japan's everyday soundscape is harder than expected. Department stores, restaurants, and train stations favour J-pop, enka, or ambient compositions produced specifically for each space. Outside dedicated live venues and the occasional foreigner-oriented bar, the chances of hearing something familiar are slim — with two notable exceptions visible from almost any street corner: Mister Donut and Seven-Eleven.
Both chains play BGM that regularly features Western pop from the 1970s and 80s. Regulars report hearing Billy Joel, Bobby Caldwell, Chicago, and other staples of the era. The selections feel carefully curated — closer in spirit to a late-night FM broadcast than to the generic background music found elsewhere. Mister Donut has several hundred branches across Japan; Seven-Eleven operates more than 21,000, meaning this playlist is accessible from Hokkaido to Okinawa.
Seven-Eleven's BGM deserves special mention: many tracks are bespoke arrangements produced exclusively for in-store use and unavailable on any streaming platform or YouTube. If a song catches your attention, it may exist nowhere you can easily find it again. Seven-Eleven publishes a monthly list of its current in-store titles on the company's FAQ page.
For travellers who want more reliable access to Western music, a few other options are worth knowing. Tower Records in Shibuya — one of the last surviving flagship stores of a chain that has almost entirely disappeared from the rest of the world — stocks and often plays Western catalogue across its eight floors. Starbucks Japan tends to follow its global playlists rather than local J-pop programming, making it a consistent alternative. Karaoke chains carry comprehensive Western song libraries and solo sessions are entirely normal at any hour. But for pure ambient discovery — music that simply finds you in the middle of an errand — few moments in Japan match pausing at a convenience store counter and realising you are hearing something you have not encountered in years.
Pop Culture
Detective Conan Country — Hokuei Town's Manga Identity
Gosho Aoyama, creator of the manga series Detective Conan (名探偵コナン, internationally known as Case Closed), was born in 1963 in what is now Hokuei Town (北栄町) in central Tottori Prefecture. His series — in which a brilliant teenage detective is shrunk to child size by a mysterious poison — has been published continuously since 1994. With over 270 million copies sold worldwide and an annual theatrical film that regularly tops Japan's box-office charts, it is one of the longest-running manga franchises in history.
Hokuei Town has built its identity almost entirely around the connection. More than 150 manhole covers across the town feature illustrated characters from the series. Bronze statues of Conan, Ran, Kogoro Mori, and other regulars appear at street corners and along station approaches. The local train station — Yura Station on the JR San'in Main Line — was officially renamed 'Conan Station' (コナン駅) in 1997, one of the few stations in Japan to carry a fictional character's name on its official signage.
The Gosho Aoyama Manga Factory (青山剛昌ふるさと館) in Hokuei Town displays original manuscript pages, character design sketches, and props including an oversized recreation of Conan's signature bow-tie voice changer and detective badge. The annual Conan Festival (コナンまつり) draws tens of thousands of fans to what is, at any other time of year, a quiet rural town — one of Japan's more earnest pop-culture pilgrimages.
Gosho Aoyama Manga Factory (青山剛昌ふるさと館) Hokuei Town — JR San'in Main Line to Yura Station (Conan Station), then a 5-minute walk. From Tottori Station, approx. 30 minutes by limited express.