Initially a stopgap measure in the absence of local shops, the monthly morning market in Minamisanriku has become a cherished institution.

Once, after the wet, green month of June — which every year waters the newly planted rice, turns the landscape lush, and makes us long for sunlight and clear skies — my boyfriend and I drove all night just to swim in the ...

I was thinking about Narai today. It sprang to mind, unbidden, while I was driving somewhere else, and all day visions of the little streets and old buildings haunted me. Memories double-exposed over the place I was really in. Like so many other ...

Cathy Hirano says it was "so painful to feel powerless in the face of such a huge disaster," recalling the day a year ago that the Pacific coast of Tohoku was hit by the huge earthquake and tsunami. The feeling of helplessness is something that ...

Emerging from the 1.3-km darkness of the Kama Tunnel, our footsteps echoing eerily, we step into the white silence of Kamikochi's upland basin at the heart of the Chubusangaku National Park, which itself marks the center of the Hida Mountains, long ago dubbed the ...

On a bright, warm late November day, an open-air market hums with activity. Children dart among strolling tourists, vendors cry out their wares to visitors and locals alike, who are looking to stock up on produce, cheap clothes and handicrafts from around the country. There's ...

In the north of Nagano Prefecture, mid-January is the dead of winter. White mountains rise up into cloud. Fields are blanketed in snow, woods are bare and villages are hushed by cold. All along the roadsides, snowbanks rise as high as car windows, their ...

Sometimes in the Japanese autumn, when the days are still warm and the air is beginning to smell of persimmons and fallen leaves, my mind stumbles across a day nearly 20 years ago now, and I turn the memory over and over as I ...

The old volcanic peaks of the Yatsugatake Mountains describe a narrow crescent across the forested plains and hills in this corner of Honshu where Yamanashi and Nagano prefectures meet. The southern slope of the range is a near-perfect sweep, a quadratic equation graphing the ...

When I first went to Kamakura I was 16 and full of wonder and anger and curiosity; a coiled hope poised at the edge of experience. I stood then for the first time in the crowded clearing at the foot of the great bronze Buddha, ...