After a while you tire of the easy destinations — the usual spots with their inevitable touristic clutter. So you decide on somewhere different — somewhere that's far from the madding crowds and far, too, from the yet more madding megaphone-toting tour guides. And so ...

For the most part, visitors to Tochigi Prefecture hit the well-trodden tourist track to the rococo extravaganza of grandiose Toshogu shrine in Nikko. Yet those in search of a more refined showcasing of the Japanese aesthetic would be better directing themselves to a spot ...

After being in Japan for a while, you get to know a place by its festivals. See a gaggle of folk in a TV clip freezing their extremities off while gawping at vast, whimsical sculptures carved from snow and ice, and you recognize immediately they're ...

It dangles down from Nagoya, dividing Ise Bay from Mikawa Bay in the inglorious shape of one of yesterday's socks. While the upper, northern end soaks up the industrial overspill from Japan's fourth-largest city, its southern half works as a calming antidote to the ...

In stark contrast to many of today's passport-toting Japanese, their compatriots of old weren't a well-traveled bunch. During the Edo Period (1603-1867), the feudal government was keen to keep its populace in check, and travel by ordinary citizens was tightly regulated. To this end, the ...

It may be hard to imagine of a Saturday night in the gaijin gulches of Tokyo's seething Roppongi entertainment district, but back in the 16th century, foreigners — especially of a Western ilk — were a complete novelty in Japan. In the years after 1543, ...

The 19th-century Scottish novelist and poet Robert Louis Stevenson got it spot on about traveling when he noted that to do so hopefully was a better thing than arriving. Should you venture forth to Hagi, whatever you may feel about the actual Yamaguchi Prefecture town ...

To the enormous surprise of absolutely no one except the most irrepressible Pollyannas in or closely connected with the construction industry, the 19 years since the opening of the first of the gargantuan civil-engineering white elephants that go by the name of the Honshu-Shikoku ...

Most people are only too aware of the devastating effects of global warming -- the breaking up of polar ice shelves, weather patterns going haywire, glaciers in retreat, that documentary starring Al Gore. But the thermal consequences of all the carbon that humans assiduously ...

At its northern tip, Japan's main island of Honshu sprouts what looks like a massive pair of pincers that reach up into the Tsugaru Strait toward Hokkaido. The point at the southern end of Hokkaido that the twin peninsulas seem to be homing in ...