There’s no other place quite like Hakodate in Japan. A truly historic international city on the northern island of Hokkaido, it has a French star-shaped fortress, old British and Russian churches and consulates and at turns is reminiscent of San…
Summertime in Japan’s International City of the North: Hakodate
While I don’t mind some snow or cold, warm days are the best for enjoying historic cities with lots of walking and outdoor sights. Considering how hot and humid it was already getting in subtropical Kyushu, early summer was the…
Meet Me at the Old Clock Tower: Sapporo
We spent our last day and a half in Hokkaido in Sapporo to learn more about the city’s early days. This was the least structured part of our eight-day visit as we came in without hard Sapporo plans but looking…
Hokkaido’s Pioneer Village: Kaitaku no Mura (Historic Village of Hokkaido)
Hidden in the trees just outside Sapporo is a frontier town surrounded by farms and a fishing village. These 52 buildings are not a functioning town but rather an architectural open-air museum that tells the story of Hokkaido’s pioneering past:…
Walking Yokohama’s Foreign Quarter
In 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry sat down with representatives of the Tokugawa Shogunate on a flat stretch of coastal land near a sleepy little fishing village called Yokohama. The Treaty of Peace and Amity agreed on at this meeting…
Red Star over Hokkaido: Sapporo Beer Museum
If there’s one place to grab a beer in Hokkaido, the Sapporo Beer Museum is it. The name “museum” makes it sounds like a place with the beer behind glass with little placards, but that’s pretty far from the truth.…
Hanami in Hiroshima
Sakura, that quintessentially Japanese flower that blooms but for a short time then fades away on the wind, can draw crowds to even the most humble city park or riverside to enjoy their beauty, but when paired with some of…
Where the Rails Met the Sea: Otaru
It had taken nearly seven hours but we made it. The first express train took us from Abashiri on Hokkaido’s far northern coast through five hours of its national park-like interior of forests and plains, or at least that’s what…
Ryukoji – Buddhist History in Fujisawa
If you travel to Katase-Enoshima station, near the beaches in southern Fujisawa, you might see the top of a pagoda peaking above the trees on a nearby hillside. Ryukoji is not a large temple, especially compared to the sprawling…
A visit to the Nogeyama Zoo
In the hills of Yokohama, not terribly far from the skyscrapers, shopping malls, and night life of Sakuraigicho and Kannai, there is a large hilltop park in a quiet neighborhood called Nogeyama. Large parks in Yokohama are not all that…