Country guide · JP
113 destinos y fiestas · 6 normas y tabúes
Before you go
It is seen as very rude.
Verificado el 19 oct 2026Fuente: JNTO: Japanese etiquette
Not illegal, but you will get looks and a reminder from the conductor.
Verificado el 19 oct 2026Fuente: JNTO: Japanese etiquette
Most onsen do not allow guests with tattoos to bathe, but rules vary by facility and are often more relaxed for foreign visitors.
Verificado el 19 oct 2026Fuente: JNTO: tattoo rules and etiquette at onsen
Not illegal, but other guests and the staff will see it as very rude. Most onsen require you to be fully naked in the bathing area.
Verificado el 19 oct 2026Fuente: JNTO: a beginner's guide to onsen
Japan is a no-tipping country and bills usually include service; if you press a tip on staff, some will politely refuse.
Verificado el 19 oct 2026Fuente: JNTO: Japanese table manners
There is no penalty: before you order at an izakaya, a small dish of otoshi always arrives. It doubles as the cover charge and cannot be chosen or swapped.
Verificado el 19 oct 2026Fuente: JNTO: drinking in Japan
Festivals
Japan's oldest fireworks festival, with about 300 years of history on the river in old Edo: about 20,000 shells light up…
One of Japan's three great fireworks displays, themed on remembrance, recovery and peace: the giant 'shōsanjakudama' and…
First among Japan's three great fireworks competitions, where the country's top fireworks makers compete side by side — …
Kansai's most popular water-city fireworks, reflected in the Yodo River; in recent years it has moved to autumn.
Famous seaside fireworks held more than ten times a year: the 'bowl-shaped' bay, surrounded by mountains on three sides,…
A dreamlike display where hemispherical 'underwater fireworks' rise from the sea against the Great Torii of Itsukushima …
The only one of Japan's three great fireworks competitions held in one of the three big metropolitan areas — an autumn c…
Held on 15 August, the main day of Obon: about 40,000 shells rise from the lake, and the natural acoustics of the surrou…
The climax of Tenjin Matsuri, one of Japan's three great festivals: about 100 boats parade on the Ōkawa while about 3,00…
Japan's only competitive fireworks display offered to Ise Jingū, with about 50 selected fireworks makers from across the…
Eastern Japan's greatest night festival: giant warrior lanterns about 5 m tall and 9 m wide parade through the city cent…
A balancing feat at one of Tōhoku's three great festivals: 'kantō' poles about 12 m long, weighing 50 kg and hung with 4…
Japan's largest Tanabata festival: giant washi Tanabata decorations hang in the arcaded shopping streets stretching for …
First among Japan's three great festivals: Yasaka Shrine's festival, going back more than 1,150 years, sees 33 yamahoko …
One of Japan's three great festivals, the thousand-year-old festival of Osaka Tenmangū: the 'rikutogyo' land procession …
A 400-year-old 'fools' dance' — 'the dancers are fools and the watchers are fools; if we're all fools, we might as well …
The 'youngest national festival', born in 1954: dancers hold naruko clappers, with music and costumes completely free, a…
A 'men's festival' with more than 780 years of history: at 4:59 a.m. on 15 July, kakiyama floats weighing about a tonne …
One of Japan's three great Bon dances and on UNESCO's intangible heritage list: 'step into the circle and you're a dance…
The 'tallest' of Aomori's three great Nebuta festivals: giant three-dimensional lanterns about 23 m tall and weighing ab…
One of Edo's three great festivals: a day-long procession of the hōren and mikoshi through Kanda, Nihonbashi and Akihaba…
Places & local life
Beneath the great lantern of the Kaminarimon: where Edo charm meets Tokyo's everyday bustle
Under the neon of the Glico Running Man: the ultimate food battlefield for 'eating yourself bankrupt in Osaka'
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An ancient capital where 1,200 sacred deer roam: the thousand-year Heijō-kyō guarded by deer and the Great Buddha
'White Heron Castle', spreading its wings: Japan's first castle to become a World Cultural Heritage Site
Japan's sacred 3,776-m peak, the 'once in a lifetime' place to greet the sunrise
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Lavender fields and the Patchwork Road: a purple dream of northern summer
A canal at night lit by gas lamps: a romantic dusk in a northern port town
The vermilion palace of the Ryukyu Kingdom: the soul of Okinawa reborn from fire
A great torii that 'floats' on the sea at high tide: a mythical world between the tides
A snow-country fairy tale of thatched gasshō-zukuri roofs: a farming poem within a World Heritage Site
'A museum without a map': light flowing, merging and being reborn in a borderless space
Three thousand people cross on a single green light: urban performance art at the world's busiest crossing
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Straight out of the 'Slam Dunk' opening: a three-panel manga of train, sea, sky and level crossing
'Little Edo, thirty ri away': a kimono stroll through kura-style streets and the Bell of Time
Back to Edo: a day's 'costume life' as a ninja, oiran or samurai
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A convenience store framed with Mount Fuji: the most magical-realist 'Japanese postcard'
Steps that seem to lead straight to Mount Fuji: a road bridge 'to the sky'
Warm lights in a gasshō village on a snowy night: a fairy tale on just four nights a year
'Japan's most beautiful village': Kyoto by the sea, with boats on the ground floor and homes above
'A dragon soaring to heaven' seen between your legs: the sandbar wonder of one of Japan's three great views
An approach of mossy stone lanterns: one step into the otherworld of 'Hotarubi no Mori e'
'Japan's Uyuni': a sky mirror on the tidal flats at low tide
A 700,000-m² 'urban forest' in the middle of the city, a tranquil sanctuary of Shinto culture
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Snow monkeys in hot springs: the world's only 'monkey spa'
A railway poem of snow country: the postcard view of a train crossing the Tadami River
Cobalt-blue water and dead trees: a dreamscape chosen as a Mac wallpaper
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The heart-shaped rock of the 'Island of Love' and Kouri blue
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Fourteen kilometres of moss and waterfalls: a poem walked upstream through virgin forest
Ranked 'Japan's number-one garden' for twenty-three years running: a living landscape scroll
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An unstaffed little station facing the Iyo Sea: waiting here for a tangerine-coloured dusk
The model for Higashiyama Kaii's 'Green Echo': fresh green reflected in an acidic pond
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'Boats floating in the air': a hidden sea in Shikoku as clear as Okinawa's
One of Japan's three great hidden regions: crossing a swaying vine bridge into the legend of the fleeing Heike
The 333-m 'red tower of Shōwa', an undying romantic beacon for generations of Japanese
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Columnar joints in the land of myth: rowing a boat to gaze up at Manai Falls
The harbour that inspired Hayao Miyazaki: the jōyatō lantern of an Edo-period 'tide-waiting port'
A tour of seven hot springs: milky secret baths under thatched roofs
'You can't get there unless the gods call you': an ancient World Heritage shrine above a sea of clouds
Birthplace of 'Japan Red': a copper-mining town dyed red with bengara
The silver silence of a World Heritage Site: cycling through a street of samurai residences
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In the boatman's song: a river trip through one of Japan's 100 landscapes
Wetlands of skunk cabbage: walking the boardwalks into the birthplace of Japanese nature conservation
The thousand years of the Jōmon Sugi: meeting 'Princess Mononoke' in a moss forest
An 'Electric Town' that 'changed careers' from post-war electrical black market to otaku mecca — the spiritual homeland of anime and manga devot…
The courage of 'jumping off the stage at Kiyomizu', where the ancient capital looks back over a thousand years
With more than 160 years of history, the largest Chinatown in Japan and Asia, where ten gates hold up a 'little China'. Chinese compradors who c…
Bonded warehouses from the end of the Meiji era reborn as Minato Mirai's most romantic cultural and shopping landmark. Two red-brick buildings s…
A giant bronze Buddha that has sat in the open air for more than 700 years — the second-largest Buddha statue in Japan. 11.3 m tall and weighing…
A 'temple of flowers' facing Sagami Bay, enshrining a 9.18-m Eleven-Headed Kannon. In early summer more than 40 varieties of hydrangea cascade d…
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A sacred island in Sagami Bay, born of the legend of 'the heavenly maiden and the five-headed dragon', with shrines, gardens, a lighthouse, cave…
A downtown Tokyo 'bazaar' that grew out of the post-war black market: 400 shops squeezed under the elevated railway make a street-life symphony.…
A 1.5-km 'green carpet' running through the city centre, the grand stage of Sapporo's festivals all year round. Laid out in 1871 as a firebreak,…
Asia's first Disney resort: the classic fairy tales of the 'Land' and the globally unique romance of the 'Sea', with just a wall between them. T…
Asia's first Universal Studios, an adrenaline park where 'movies meet games'. Super Nintendo World (a world first in 2021, expanded with 'Donkey…
The sacred home of Shingon esoteric Buddhism founded by Kōbō Daishi Kūkai: the whole mountain is a temple, and nights in temple lodgings and the…
A three-storey pavilion clad in gold leaf, a Pure Land reflected in the Mirror Pond
A site of primal faith where the waterfall itself is the divine body: Japan's highest single-drop waterfall at 133 m, framed with a vermilion th…
One of Japan's three great castles, built by Katō Kiyomasa: the sharp curve of its 'musha-gaeshi' stone walls, and a keep reborn after the earth…
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The 'pinnacle of early-modern castles', ordered built by Tokugawa Ieyasu in 1610: golden shachihoko gleam against the sky, and the painted panel…
A stone-paved geisha district where geiko and maiko brush past, the 'miyabi' (refined elegance) in the glow of machiya lanterns asks every trave…
Four hundred years as 'Kyoto's Kitchen': 390 m of arcade packed with Kyoto vegetables, tamagoyaki and the calls of old shops — a living museum o…
Where Sugawara no Michizane, god of learning, rests in peace: the legend of the flying plum and 6,000 plum trees weave a thousand years of cultu…
The former home of the Scottish merchant Glover looks down over Nagasaki harbour, its group of exotic Western houses telling stories of Japan's …
An island living alongside an active volcano, just 15 minutes by ferry, where volcanic ash nourishes giant Sakurajima daikon weighing up to 45 k…
A rural hot-spring village at the foot of Mount Yufu, with morning mist on Lake Kinrin and the shops of Yunotsubo Kaidō — the number-one place t…
A vermilion tunnel woven from ten thousand torii: the god of commerce, guarded by fox messengers
A 'tunnel of light' with sun filtering through the bamboo, its rustling chosen among the '100 Soundscapes of Japan'
Toyotomi Hideyoshi's 'castle of the realm': Sengoku drama beneath roofs with golden shachi
Layers of batter, cabbage, pork and noodles — after the atomic bomb, it was what kept Hiroshima fed.
Milky pork-bone broth, very thin noodles, and kaedama — a refill of noodles.
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Invented by an Osaka street vendor in 1935, it became synonymous with the 'city of flour foods'.
From the simple meal of the tea ceremony to the pinnacle of Japanese cuisine, devoted to the seasons and to tableware.
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Today's nigiri sushi began as Edo's street 'fast food'.
Edo Castle, built by Ōta Dōkan in 1457, later became the residence of the Tokugawa shoguns; today the Honmaru area is open free as a garden.
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Edo's geisha district across the Asano River: latticed teahouses, stone paving and a thin layer of gold leaf.
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The last stronghold of Japan's yatai culture: ramen, oden and toasts with strangers by the river at dusk.
11:02 a.m., 9 August 1945: an atomic bomb exploded 500 m above this ground.
For two centuries of national seclusion, Japan's only window on the West: a small fan-shaped artificial island.
The mausoleum of Date Masamune, the 'One-Eyed Dragon': colourful Momoyama-style buildings deep in a cedar forest.
The Tokugawa shogunate's base in Kyoto: the Edo shogunate began here, and ended here.
The Great Buddha cast with the resources of a whole nation by Emperor Shōmu: the world's largest bronze Vairocana, seated in a huge wooden hall.
An art island in the Seto Inland Sea: Tadao Andō's architecture, Monet's water lilies at the Chichu Art Museum, and light on the sea.
The shrine of Ōkuninushi, god of good relationships: a giant shimenawa rope and the myth of 'handing over the land'.
Japan's foremost shrine, dedicated to Amaterasu: cross the Uji Bridge into two thousand years of forest and prayer.
A Western-style star fort: stage of the last battle of the Boshin War, filled with cherry blossom in spring.
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The machiya streets of 'Little Kyoto' and the only surviving Edo-period intendant's office, hidden among the mountains of Hida.
A black-walled National Treasure keep, one of only 12 original castle keeps left in Japan, backed by the Northern Alps.
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A natural barrier on the Tōkaidō: the torii in Lake Ashi, the Edo checkpoint, and Mount Fuji when the sky is clear.
After 6 August 1945, the only building left standing near the hypocentre: a ruin that reminds the world of peace.
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The daimyō garden of the million-koku Kaga domain: the Kotoji lantern and snow-roped pines, with a different face in every season.
Where Tokugawa Ieyasu rests: the dazzling Yōmeimon gate, the Sleeping Cat and the Three Wise Monkeys, hidden in a forest of towering cedars.
Japan after work: a draught beer, a few small dishes and a 'kanpai' across the counter with friends.
