About
I live here, and I stop wherever there is a bath
My name is Ichiro Murase (村瀬 一郎). I am Japanese, I live in Japan, and I have been travelling this country since my twenties — by motorcycle, by car and by train. In a normal year I cover more than 30,000 kilometres, in every season, mostly on roads that do not appear in guidebooks.
What I write about here is what I found by going there: the places even Japanese travellers do not know about, and the food that never leaves the town it comes from. Alongside that there is a second kind of article — researched rather than visited, and labelled as such — because a visitor planning next month cannot wait for me to ride every line first.
Why a Japanese person writing in English
Most English-language writing about Japan is by people passing through. That is not a criticism — a visitor notices things a resident stops seeing. But a visitor cannot go back next weekend to check whether the fare changed, and cannot read the notice taped to the door of a bathhouse.
I can. That is the entire premise of this site. When a price here has a date on it, the date is real. When a guide says the transfer is eight minutes and tight with luggage, it is because I made it with luggage.
How I travel
By motorcycle and by car for the distance, by train for everything else. Thirty thousand kilometres a year adds up to a lot of small roads, and the reason I take them is what sits along them: hot springs, the inn with six rooms, the counter with no English menu and one dish worth crossing a prefecture for.
I have slept in campsites and in ryokan that cost more than a flight home, and eaten at both roadside stands and Michelin-starred kitchens. I am a Level 8 Google Local Guide, which mostly means I have been writing down what I find for a long time.
On this site the travel is by train, because that is what visitors to Japan can actually use. The driving still shows up in the writing — I know which valley the road follows, and which bath is worth the detour, because I got there on my own wheels first.
How I work
Two kinds of article, and each one says which
Some guides here are places I went to, photographed and paid for myself; those carry the month I was there. Others are researched from published sources, because useful information should not wait for me to get on a train. Every article states which kind it is, at the top. The sourced ones list what they were built from.
Every price carries a date, or is marked as a guide
Prices change and guides rot. Each figure here either states the month it was checked, or is labelled as an indicative price. I cannot revisit every place often enough to promise more than that, and I would rather tell you which kind of number you are looking at.
Yen first, conversions second
You will pay in yen, so yen is what I show — with an approximate euro and dollar figure beside it, updated daily from European Central Bank rates.
Mostly my own photographs
Most of what you see here I photographed myself, and I avoid stock imagery. Where a photograph is not mine, it is used with permission or proper credit, and said to be so.
Where I know Japan
Two decades of driving leaves an uneven map. These are the regions I can write about from memory rather than research, strongest first. Everywhere on this list I have been more than once.
- 1KantoTokyo and everything within a weekend of it
- 2TohokuThe north, in all four seasons
- 3Tokai, Chubu and HokurikuEast to Gifu, over the mountains and out to the Japan Sea
- 4KansaiBeyond the three big cities
- 5ChugokuThe inland sea coast and the mountains behind it
- 6ShikokuThe island, and the bridges to it
- 7KyushuThe north, mostly
The site does not follow that order, and that is deliberate. Kanto is where I am strongest and where I live, but it is also the part of Japan that is already written about in every language. What is missing in English is the rest — the regions where a week still fits together on one pass and nobody has written the guide. So the site leads with those, and draws on Kanto where it helps rather than making it the subject.
Corrections welcome
If a fare has changed, a bath has closed or a rule has moved, tell me and I will fix it and credit you. That is the fastest way this site stays worth reading.
Publisher
- Site
- Wayside Japan
- Published by
- Financial and Marketing M16
- Representative
- Ichiro Murase（村瀬 一郎）
- Address
- Aoyama Marutake Building, 3-1-36 Minami-Aoyama, Minato-ku, Tokyo, Japan
〒107-0062 東京都港区南青山3丁目1-36 青山丸竹ビル - Contact
- Contact form
Financial and Marketing M16 is a web marketing studio with a background in finance. This site is a personal publication run under it, not a corporate product.