Shrines, museums, parks, and the spots in between, with the access details worked out.
A Tendai temple of 860 built up a rock face in Yamagata, its halls reached by a stone stairway, and the place of Basho's poem about cicadas.
YamagataThe forty-fourth temple of the Shikoku pilgrimage and its halfway point, standing among old trees at 579 metres in the mountains of Ehime.
Kumakogen · EhimeTwo rocks off the shore at Futami in Mie, joined by a rope of rice straw, standing as a gateway to a sacred rock out in the sea.
Ise · MieA shrine on the western shore of Lake Biwa with a torii standing in the water, dedicated to Sarutahiko and known as a shrine of long life.
Takashima · ShigaA small island off Shirahama in Wakayama with a round hole worn through its middle, which the setting sun passes into around the equinoxes.
Shirahama · WakayamaA small island in the Inland Sea with about a thousand wild rabbits on it, which was the Japanese army's poison gas works until 1945.
Takehara · HiroshimaThe house and works of a wax-making family in Uchiko, Ehime, kept with its boiling sheds and stores, and now a museum of the trade.
Uchiko · EhimeA beach park on the Iyo Sea in Ehime, laid out for watching the sun go down, with stepped seating along the shore and a headland monument.
Iyo · EhimeA hilltop park on Hakatajima planted with about a thousand cherry trees, looking out over three of the bridges of the Inland Sea.
Imabari · EhimeA lookout on a hill at the south end of Oshima in the Inland Sea, built into the summit, facing the three linked suspension bridges of the Kurushima Strait.
Imabari · EhimeA shrine on Yuge Island in the Inland Sea, founded by a branch of the Mononobe clan to their ancestor, with a pine grove and a shallow beach below it.
Kamijima · EhimeA museum in Uchiko, Ehime, devoted to kites from Japan and around the world, in the town that holds a kite battle every May.
Uchiko · EhimeA castle above the Hiji River at Ozu whose keep was rebuilt in wood in 2004, using the old drawings and photographs, alongside four surviving turrets.
Ozu · EhimeA railway museum beside Iyo-Saijo station holding an original bullet train car and the diesel locomotive that worked the lines of Shikoku.
Saijo · EhimeA street of wax merchants' houses in Uchiko, Ehime, with walls in a yellow plaster made from local earth, preserved since 1982.
Uchiko · EhimeA museum on Oshima in the Inland Sea about the Murakami, the sea lords who controlled the straits around Imabari in the sixteenth century.
Imabari · EhimeA villa above the Hiji River at Ozu, built over ten years by a wax merchant and counted a masterpiece of sukiya building.
Ozu · EhimeA park at Arita in Saga built around a copy of the Zwinger palace of Dresden, marking the porcelain that went from here to Europe.
Arita · Saga
