The first location of the eventual video game giant.

This enormous "shamoji" means more to the people of Miyajima than just a way getting rice onto a plate.

This brothel-turned-restaurant features plenty of surprises and elaborate, extravagant architecture.

This whimsical garbage disposal facility receives around 12,000 accidental tourists each year.

Near the mouth of the Yodo River, this museum offers visitors six floors of hands-on learning about Osaka's raw sewage.

This massive wooden building contains a giant Buddha, healing pillars, and tame deer wandering the grounds.

With over 12,000 different species of plants, this botanical garden is Japan's oldest and most diverse.

This neighborhood thoroughfare is haunted by dozens of homemade monsters.

The cutest shrine in Kyoto is dedicated to bunnies.

Extraordinary objects lurk in this quintessential regional museum.

Exact replica of the ancient monument, but much, much lighter.

A cave on the Maryland border where civilians took refuge during the bloodiest battle of the Civil War.

A natural spring situated on the grounds of the Hawthorne estate.

Exploring crime and punishment in feudal and pre-modern Japan.

When this clock strikes a certain time, puppets showcase a story of life in Edo Japan.

A bibliophile's heaven that contains hundreds of bookstores, offering over a third of secondhand books for sale in Tokyo.

Emerging from the sidewalk, this sculpture of a whale commemorates the importance of baleen in traditional Japanese puppetry.

This Japanese Manneken Pis gets new outfits for every occasion.

This tiny museum hidden above a restaurant houses thousands of modern and traditional kites.

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

A taste of the macabre Tokyo's ritzy shopping district.

The Conduit Road Schoolhouse is one of the last one-room schoolhouses remaining in Washington, D.C.

A tiny waterway named after a ghost story.

Over 100 million years ago, beach-bound dinosaurs left permanent marks on San Antonio's landscape.