From hidden temples to lively festivals, old tales to everyday scenes - stories, photos, and videos of the Japan that lives between the headlines and the guidebooks.
The fourth day of the ride to Fukui was the longest one yet, about 130 kilometers from Hakuba down to Toyama City. It st...
Day Three of the ride to Fukui went from Komoro to Hakuba, and it came in two very different halves. The first was a laz...
The second day of my ride to Fukui was only 62 kilometers long, but a good chunk of it went straight up into the mountai...
The first day of riding from Tokyo to Fukui was 125 kilometers of almost perfectly flat ground, most of it beside a cana...
A wooden gate almost fourteen meters tall, shaped like a Noh drum, stands in front of a glass umbrella big enough to she...
Six alleys, something like 280 bars, all of it squeezed into a patch of Shinjuku about the size of a football field. Gol...
There is a red-brick tunnel on the old Tokaido, lit end to end, swept clean, and open to walk through, above a village t...
Before there was a road over the mountain, travelers got past it by running between waves. The stretch was called “paren...
The guardian shrine of eight villages in Ohara, set apart from them all, out on a forest pass north of Kyoto. Its gods w...
South of Kyoto, on the Kizu River, there’s a wooden footbridge that looks a hundred years out of date. It’s one of the l...
Tanukidani-san Fudō-in is a quiet temple in the hills above Kyoto, guarded by a wrathful deity and some three hundred ra...
The man who built this town was dead within ten years, ordered to cut his own belly open by the uncle who gave him the l...