Japan tourist attractions

The cone that stands in for the whole country rises on Honshu, between Shizuoka and Yamanashi. It is an active stratovolcano and the highest mountain in Japan, and it last erupted in 1707. Pilgrims have climbed it for centuries and printmakers fixed it in the national imagination, which is why UNESCO listed it as a sacred place and a source of artistic inspiration rather than a landform. Most travellers never go up. They photograph it from the Fuji Five Lakes, or from the pagoda terrace above Fujiyoshida.

Height: 3,776 metres · Heritage: Fujisan, UNESCO listed in 2013

Location: Between Shizuoka and Yamanashi prefectures, on Honshu

Access: Seen year round from the lakes, with the climbing trails open in summer only, from 1 July on the Yoshida route and 10 July on the rest

Inari shrines are the ones Japanese people know best, and this is the head shrine that all the others are affiliated with, some thirty thousand of them by the shrine's own count. Worshippers have come since 711 to ask for good harvests, safe households and prosperous businesses, and the last of those explains the architecture: the vermilion gates that tunnel up the hillside are donated one by one by firms and individuals whose names are painted on the uprights. The trails climb 233 metre Mount Inari past hundreds of small altars.

Founded: 711 · Style: Shinto, with the Senbon Torii gate tunnels

Location: Fushimi ward, in the south of Kyoto

Access: Open to worshippers and visitors, and the full loop of the mountain runs four kilometres, about two hours on foot

Tokyo's oldest temple is also the most visited religious site in the world, with 30 million people a year through its gates by its own count. The story it tells about itself is precise: on the morning of 18 March 628 two brothers fishing the Sumida river pulled up a statue of Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion, and the temple grew around it. Priest Shokai founded it and Ennin restored it in the ninth century. Visitors reach the main hall along Nakamise, one of the oldest shopping streets in the country.

Dedicated to: Kannon, bodhisattva of compassion · Founded: After the statue was found in 628

Location: Asakusa, in the Taito ward of Tokyo

Access: A working temple with a five-storey pagoda and gates that stay open to the street, so the grounds fill from early morning

The formal name is Rokuon-ji and nobody uses it. Gold leaf half a micrometre thick covers the upper two floors of the pavilion, and the pond it stands over doubles the effect. The shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu bought the estate in 1397, out in what was then countryside northwest of the capital, and his son turned it into a Zen temple after he died. What visitors see is not the medieval building: a novice burned the pavilion down in 1950 and it was rebuilt in 1955, an episode Yukio Mishima turned into a novel.

Style: Zen, Rinzai school · Rebuilt: 1955 after an arson attack · Heritage: One of the Historic Monuments of Ancient Kyoto, UNESCO listed in 1994

Location: Kita ward, northwest Kyoto

Access: Ticketed, with the grounds open from nine in the morning to five

The full name is Otowa-san Kiyomizu-dera, the pure water monastery, after the spring below it. The temple's own account puts its beginning more than 1,250 years back, older than the capital that grew around it. What people come for is the veranda, a stage braced on tall timber pillars over the Higashiyama slope with the city beyond. The Japanese phrase for taking the plunge is to jump off the stage at Kiyomizu, from an Edo period belief that surviving the 13 metre drop granted a wish.

Style: Kita-Hosso school, with a hillside stage on timber pillars · Heritage: One of the Historic Monuments of Ancient Kyoto, UNESCO listed in 1994

Location: Higashiyama, on the eastern hills of Kyoto

Access: Ticketed, and reached on foot up the lanes of the Higashiyama hillside

The shrine is built out over the tideline on the island of Itsukushima, so at high water the corridors and the great torii appear to float and at low water people walk out to the gate across wet sand. The island itself is treated as sacred, and the taboos protecting that purity ran strict enough that a warlord who fought a battle here in 1555 was said to have defiled the ground. Several of the buildings and the objects they hold are National Treasures. Ferries run over from Miyajimaguchi on the mainland.

Style: Shinto, built on piles over the tideline · Heritage: Itsukushima Shinto Shrine, UNESCO listed in 1996

Location: Miyajima, in the city of Hatsukaichi, Hiroshima prefecture

Access: Ticketed for the shrine corridors, and reached only by ferry

The park occupies the ground under which the atomic bomb detonated on 6 August 1945, and it exists for the people killed then and afterwards. Kenzo Tange designed the layout, which lines the museum, the cenotaph and the skeletal Genbaku Dome on one axis so that the arch of the cenotaph frames the ruin. The dome is the shell of the Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, left as the blast left it. The museum sets out what happened through objects and testimony, and more than a million people come each year.

Architect: Kenzo Tange · Heritage: Hiroshima Peace Memorial, the Genbaku Dome, UNESCO listed in 1996

Location: Naka ward, central Hiroshima

Access: A memorial rather than an attraction, with the grounds open and the Peace Memorial Museum inside it ticketed

Nara was the capital before Kyoto, and the temple it built to prove the point still holds the largest bronze Buddha in the country. Todai-ji was founded in 738 and opened in 752, and the Great Buddha Hall in front of the statue has been rebuilt more than once. It stands inside Nara Park, laid out in 1880 as one of the first public parks in Japan, where more than 1,200 wild sika deer wander between the lanterns and are protected as a natural treasure. Kofuku-ji and Kasuga Grand Shrine share the grounds.

Founded: Todai-ji in 738, opened 752 · Heritage: Historic Monuments of Ancient Nara, UNESCO listed in 1998

Location: Nara city, Nara prefecture, at the foot of Mount Wakakusa

Access: The park is open ground; the Great Buddha Hall is ticketed and opens in the morning

Most Japanese castles standing today are concrete rebuilds. Himeji is not: its keep came through the wars and the demolition orders intact, which is why it is treated as the finest surviving example of the type. The complex runs to 83 structures, with spiralling baileys, gun ports and dead-end passages designed to break up an attack, and the white plaster that covers the walls gives it the nickname of the white heron. It was one of the first sites in Japan that UNESCO listed, in 1993.

Style: Japanese hilltop castle, 83 structures · Heritage: Himeji-jo, UNESCO listed in 1993

Location: Himeji, Hyogo prefecture, west of Kobe

Access: Ticketed, with the gates open from nine and last entry to the main keep in the late afternoon

Nothing else says modern Japan quite as economically as this intersection outside Shibuya Station, where traffic stops in every direction at once and as many as 3,000 people step off the kerbs together. It opened in 1973 and has since turned into shorthand for Tokyo in films and photographs, which is why the walkways and cafe windows above it are as crowded as the asphalt. The Hachiko statue outside the station, raised for the Akita that went on returning to meet an owner who had died in 1925, is the meeting point everyone uses.

Opened: 1973 · Scale: Up to 3,000 people on one green light

Location: Shibuya ward, Tokyo

Access: A public street crossing, busiest after dark and at the end of the working day