Discover the Japan you haven’t seen yet.

Five places in and around Fukuoka, each with a catch worth knowing first: yatai stalls that most often take Sunday off, a festival float that stays up everywhere except in June, a shrine hall that visitors can pray in front of again after about three and a half years, canal boats run by seven companies from different landings, and a town where the bowl said to have started tonkotsu ramen is a lunch and almost every yakitori place a dinner.

Four places around Mount Fuji, each asking something of the visitor: a vermilion pagoda that is the city’s memorial to its war dead, eight spring ponds where you are asked to keep your coins, a lakeside park where the town once hung a black screen in front of a convenience store, and udon shops that mostly close in the early afternoon.

A steaming valley you can walk into only four times a day, a dragon shrine reached by boat on the 13th, a lake made by a falling mountain, and a thatched teahouse on the old stone road that opens at 7:00 every day.

Three places on three different clocks: a market where you buy the fish downstairs and a diner cooks it upstairs, a castle whose paid area costs 400 yen until 21 November 2026 and 1,000 yen from 23 November, and a potter’s house that opens only on Friday-to-Sunday and holiday afternoons.

The A-Bomb Dome and Hiroshima Castle, about 18 minutes apart on foot, and an island shrine where the tide table, not the calendar, decides the day — and, by JR Saijo Station, a sake town whose station street opens at five.

Three places within a walk of each other, where the earliest gate opens at 6:30 and charges nothing, and the park in the middle publishes no hours at all — and, by Kintetsu Koriyama Station, a goldfish shopping street whose sake brewery serves no food.

Three places within minutes of each other, and a morning decided by opening hours rather than distance — and, in Komatsu on the same Shinkansen line, an udon counter under the station tracks that closes at three.

A canal that turns royal blue just after sunset, a red-brick museum you can walk in English from the top floor down, and a hot-spring town where a kappa's hand bath never closes.