Places AdOYo Wants to Go

This quirky little private museum is home to more than a thousand stones, carved by nature, that resemble human faces.

Disaster prevention apartment blocks in Sumida Ward are designed to save as many as possible in the face of the inevitable.

This mysterious medieval grotto holds a grid of sacred wells of unknown purpose.

Home to the world's oldest wooden building.

This Japanese Manneken Pis gets new outfits for every occasion.

A whimsical museum dedicated to the mischievous kappa, a mythical cucumber-loving water sprite.

A deserted island in southwest Japan that once sheltered persecuted Christians.

Hidden by the roadside in the Iya Valley, this gem brings together folk monsters and the region's unique geography.

You can still find treasures on the pebbly beaches of one of the world's oldest jade-producing areas.

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

These seven moai figures are the world's only sanctioned replicas of the Easter Island originals.

This ancient burial site was once thought to be the home of a race distinctive to Ainu folklore.

The statue's head is one of the few fragments of the original Urakami Cathedral to survive the atomic bomb.

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

A statue of a mischievous raccoon towers over this city park.

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

What's believed to be the country's first shrine is, in Shintō mythology, the annual meeting place of the gods.

When this massive wooden temple ran out of rope, they made one out of devotees' hair.

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

These Japanese ruins have been brought back to life with elaborately recreated buildings.

This temple is steeped in local folklore involving a teakettle and a raccoon dog.

Japan's first automaton went missing, only to be revived by the Osaka Science Museum.

A flight of this "ghost staircase" has 40 steps on the way up, but only 39 steps on the way down.

This “peasant café” in the middle of Tokyo re-creates the atmosphere of the Japanese countryside.