Outdoor Japan

There are onsen you visit, and there’s Takaragawa, which you enter into. Set along the Takaragawa River in the mountains of Minakami, Gunma, this is one of Japan’s largest and most famous rotenburo — open-air hot spring baths — a series of enormous stone pools built directly into the riverbank, some of them steaming beside the current itself. In winter, snow gathers on...

Most fly anglers who eventually make it to Japan arrive already carrying a debt they didn’t know about: tenkara, the increasingly popular minimalist fly fishing style — no reel, just a fixed length of line off the rod tip — didn’t come from the American West or a European chalk stream. It came from Japanese mountain villages, developed over generations by professional fisherm...

There’s a specific moment on the Shimanami Kaido — usually somewhere around the third bridge, legs finally settling into rhythm, the Seto Inland Sea spread out flat and silver on both sides — where it becomes obvious why this is the ride people fly to Japan for. Seventy-odd kilometers, six islands, and a chain of bridges engineered specifically to be crossed on two wheels: no...

Ask ten people the best time to visit Japan and you’ll get ten different answers, and all ten will be right — for what they were doing. A skier will tell you January. A hiker chasing autumn foliage will tell you November and mean it. Someone planning a quiet trip to Kyoto’s temples will tell you to avoid both of those months entirely, because that’s exactly when everyone else...

Japan is a cyclist’s country in ways that have nothing to do with mountains or scenery, though it has plenty of both. It’s a country of extraordinarily polite drivers, immaculately maintained rural roads, vending machines and convenience stores spaced perfectly for a mid-ride refuel, and a rail network happy to carry a bagged bike when your legs decide they’re done for the da...