Regional discoveries | Value Village

NaraArt & Crafts

Nara

Nara City Museum of Photography

For a photographer who spent fifty years on Nara alone; Kurokawa buried most of the building to protect the view.

NaraArt & Crafts

Nara

Museum Yamato Bunkakan

Built by a railway company for its jubilee; Isoya Yoshida's low building rings a courtyard, and holds four National Treasures.

NaraArt & Crafts

Nara

Neiraku Art Museum

Reached through a garden that borrows the Todaiji gate and the hills behind it as its own scenery.

NaraArchitecture

Nara

Naramachi District

A quarter grown inside a vanished temple precinct, its townhouses narrow at the street and deep behind.

NaraArchitecture

Nara

Heijo Palace Site

An entire capital lay under farmland; its gate and throne hall have been rebuilt in timber at full size.

NaraArchitecture

Ikaruga

Horyuji

The only 7th-century wooden buildings surviving anywhere; hall and pagoda set asymmetrically inside one cloister.

NaraArchitecture

Ikaruga

Hokiji

The oldest three-storey pagoda standing in Japan, inscribed as World Heritage with Horyuji.

NaraArchitecture

Kashihara

Imai-cho

Eight in ten of its houses date from the Edo period - a moated free town said to have held most of the province's money.

NaraContemporary Art

Asuka

Ishibutai Tomb

The mound is gone and the stone chamber stands bare in a field; how its 77-tonne capstone was raised is still unknown.

NaraArt & Crafts

Asuka

Asukadera

Japan's first true temple; its Buddha, said to date from 606, has survived repeated fires and sits patched together.

NaraArt & Crafts

Asuka

Nara Manyo Museum

A hundred and fifty-four living painters were each given one ancient poem to paint; below lies the workshop that cast Japan's first coins.

NaraArchitecture

Sakurai

Hasedera

A roofed stair of 399 steps precedes the hall; the icon inside is over ten metres tall, and can only be looked up at.

NaraArchitecture

Sakurai

Tanzan Shrine

The only thirteen-storey wooden pagoda in the world, seventeen metres of stacked roofs on a mountainside.

NaraArchitecture

Sakurai

Omiwa Shrine

There is no inner sanctuary: past the worship hall stands the mountain itself, the oldest form of Japanese shrine.

NaraArt & Crafts

Tenri

Isonokami Shrine

A seven-branched iron sword inscribed in gold, given by Baekje in the 4th century - among Japan's earliest written objects.

NaraArchitecture

Uda

Muroji

Its 16-metre pagoda is the smallest outdoor one in Japan; the temple admitted women, and was called the women's Koyasan.

NaraArchitecture

Uda

Uda Matsuyama

A castle town enriched by the medicine trade, its apothecary houses still lining the highway.

NaraArchitecture

Katsuragi

Taimadera

The only temple keeping both its original pagodas, and enshrining a mandala said to be woven from lotus thread.

NaraArchitecture

Yoshino

Kinpusenji Zaodo

Second only to Todaiji among wooden buildings; its columns are barely trimmed tree trunks, no two alike.

NaraArt & Crafts

Yoshino

Yoshino Cedar and Barrel Staves

Five centuries of planted forest, grown dense and slow so the rings stay fine - the timber that lines sake barrels.

NaraArchitecture

Gojō

Gojo Shinmachi

Includes the oldest dated private house in Japan, its ridge tag reading 1607.

NaraArchitecture

Takatori

Takatori Tosa District

Below one of Japan's three great mountain castles, a town enriched by travelling medicine sellers.

NaraMuseums

Tawaramoto

Karako-Kagi Site

A tower drawn on a pot was used to reconstruct the building - architecture recovered from a picture.

NaraArchitecture

Nara

Yagyu Village

Home of the Yagyu swordsmen, with a boulder split clean in two that legend says was cut by a blade.