Japan, explained from the inside

Yorimichi is a travel guide written in Japan, for people who want to go beyond the famous stops. Your guides are Shino and Hinata, two fictional characters who take us through small towns, hot spring streets, shrines, and local food counters across the country — and explain not just what each place is, but how it works: how to get there, when to go, what the words mean, and how the food is eaten. Shino and Hinata are fictional characters, and their conversations are a creation imagined as a chat before a trip.

Hinata: Where do we start?
Shino: With the two places this English edition starts with — a hot spring town in the snow, and a shrine where the gods gather.

Start with the videos

Our English channel, Shino & Hinata's Yorimichi Japan, brings each place to the screen first. These are the launch stories of this English edition:

• Ginzan Onsen, Yamagata — a riverside street of wooden inns lit by gas lamps, built on a silver-mine past. Read the page: /en/ginzan-onsen/
• Izumo, Shimane — the great shrine of connections, the month when the gods gather, and a bowl of dark buckwheat soba. Read the page: /en/izumo/

New English episodes and pages follow in the same order: the places on screen are the places written up here.

Browse by region

• Tohoku — Ginzan Onsen and the snow country of the north.
• Chugoku — Izumo and the shrine culture of Shimane.

More regions — Hokkaido, Kanto, Chubu, Kansai, Shikoku, Kyushu, and overseas trips — open as their English pages are published. The Japanese edition of Yorimichi covers 106 destinations; this English edition is bringing them across, video-led places first.

What every page covers

• Getting there — the station, the transfer, and the last leg, because in rural Japan the last bus matters more than the bullet train.
• When to go, and what to check first — the season that suits the place, and the timetables and seasonal access to confirm before you set out.
• Words and phrases — what ryokan, onsen, and en-musubi actually mean, explained where you meet them.
• Food to look for — the local dishes worth finding, and how the best-known ones are served, from stacked soba bowls to market counters.

Who runs this site

Yorimichi is run from Japan by the operator of the Japanese YouTube channel Yorimichi Soudan and its English edition, Shino & Hinata's Yorimichi Japan. Read more about us — and how advertising works on this site — on the About page: /en/about/. Our Privacy Policy is at /en/privacy/.

Yorimichi uses AI to help run this site.