Chubu region · the offbeat side of Shizuoka.
3 discoveries
A working restaurant in the old Mariko post town that has served the same wild-yam tororo-jiru since 1596 — Shizuoka's oldest surviving eatery, painted by Hiroshige and name-dropped by Bashō.
A perfectly conical, 4,000-year-old volcano on the Izu Peninsula that you ride a chairlift up and walk clean around the crater rim — walking up is banned, but archery at the crater's bottom is not.
A hot-spring bay shaped like a mortar amplifies these fireworks into a stadium-like roar — Atami runs roughly 15 shows a year, several of them landing on late-summer weekends, each ending in a 'Great Sky Niagara' finale reflected on the water.
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