Places hotpants038 Wants to Go

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

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

A strange tribute to all the fallen souls of war.

This battleship of a building was designed by a famed "mad architect."

Sulphuric gases inhabit a beautiful Japanese island.

Nope, not the one in France. The only officially-recognized reproduction of Monet’s garden in Giverny is located in a remote corner of Japan.

Steampunk, humanoid sculptures crawl on all fours in a Tokyo plaza.

This exacting restaurant will charge a fine for every grain of rice you've left behind.

"Bug Bug" Land, a natural park for beetle watching, still hasn't fully recovered from Fukushima's nuclear disaster.

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

Perhaps the world's cheapest vending machines.

The world's longest tunnel with an undersea section.

A hole-in-the-wall antiquities museum in one of Tokyo's most popular megamalls.

One in a pair of subterranean caves created by an ancient eruption of Mount Fuji.

Japan's largest collection of Western-style mansions in the port city of Kobe includes a recreation of Sherlock Holmes' 221B Baker Street quarters.

A sculpture that resurrected the only tree standing following the devastating 2011 tsunami.

A statue erected on an infamous cliff where young boys would hold dangerous "pee offs" to prove their mettle.

Narrow passes cut out of mountains surround the medieval capital of Japan.

Watch out for the two-story Godzilla made out of tires.

The third-tallest statue in the world depicts the "Buddha of Infinite Light," complete with observation deck in his chest.

A dilapidated amusement park with a million-dollar view.

This mountain's identity is stuck somewhere between a nightmare and a scenic tourist attraction.

An eerie reminder to the horrors of World War II.

The world's shortest escalator doesn't seem to have any reason to exist other than to hold a world record.