Tokyo’s only Ainu restaurant serves Indigenous food from northern Japan.

A railway station takeout shop sells boxed meals in containers shaped like trains and snowmen that hold the country’s abundant regional delicacies.

A tiny cafe that recreates the Japanese elementary school lunch experience.

The bartenders at this crime-fighting theme cafe are actual private detectives by day.

This subterranean spot might be the epitome of Japan's baroque, retro coffee houses.

The only thing sweeter than the potatoes is the canine proprietor of this roadside stall.

Japan's largest area of "pink moss" turns the hillside bright pink every spring.

This village is home to the largest existing settlement of the Ainu, the Indigenous people of Japan.

The island where one woman reigned as a "queen" over 30-odd Japanese soldiers who refused to believe that WWII had ended.

This volcanic island in the Pacific just keeps growing and growing.

We heard you like volcanoes so we put a volcano in your volcano so you can die for sure...

This active volcano's siren song to suicide jumpers forced authorities to build a fence.

Every autumn, this hillside is ablaze with red summer cypress.

These tiny pine-covered islands have inspired art and poetry for centuries.

One of the tallest statues in the world, and the tallest statue of a goddess in Japan.

On Japan's Tashirojima Island, cats are king.

Founded over a thousand years ago, this shrine is said to be built on the site of a warlord's harem prison.

A stretch of the Iwai River that features beautiful rocky cliffs, rapids, and flying dango.

A disconnected rotary phone for "calling" lost loved ones offered a unique way of dealing with grief in disaster-stricken Japan.

A sculpture that resurrected the only tree standing following the devastating 2011 tsunami.

A massive cave complex boasts some of the clearest water (and most charming bats) in the world.

Constructed thousands of years ago, these stone circles offer incredible insight into the lives of the people who built them.

Giant art made in Japanese rice fields.

A small Japanese village claims to be the final resting place of the son of God (and God's other son's ear).