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.

A moss-covered statue of a Japanese Buddhist deity stands at a quiet temple in downtown Osaka.

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

A Japanese train station built around a 700-year-old camphor tree.

This ancient shrine has been rebuilt every 20 years since the eighth century.

A mysterious set of tunnels carved in the hills of rural northern Kyushu.

The small candy-colored ride is the last rooftop Ferris wheel in Tokyo.

This adorable birdlike police box is designed based on a play on words.

A small Japanese village claims to be the final resting place of the son of God (and God's other son's ear).

The giant figure on the back of this turtle-shaped temple actually hides a memorial pendulum.

A sobering scientific reminder of the human damage caused by the advent of the nuclear age.

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