残したい日本の音風景100選
The 100 Soundscapes of Japan are 100 sounds, and the places you hear them, that Japan's Environment Agency chose in 1996 as worth keeping for the future. Some belong to nature, from drift ice groaning on the Okhotsk coast in February to the cicadas of Yamadera that Basho put into one of his best-known haiku. Others keep time: Kawagoe's wooden bell tower rings four times a day, and a drum on the roof of Dogo Onsen opens the bathhouse at 6 am. The rest are festivals, crafts, harbours and temple bells, spread from Hokkaido to Iriomote. As of September 2026 three have gone quiet for now: the Oigawa Railway's steam whistle at Senzu, cut off by a typhoon in 2022; Tarumi's pre-dawn sand lance fleet, whose Osaka Bay season has been called off every year since 2024; and Kanzeon-ji's 7th-century bell in Dazaifu, now in the care of the Kyushu National Museum. Several more have thinned out or changed since 1996, among them Sendai's wild bell crickets and the Yagiri ferry, which no longer goes by oar. And the Cape Muroto sea cave, which many lists still call closed, has been open again since 2019.
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The best story on the list: Basho climbed to this mountain temple in July 1689 and wrote his cicada haiku here, and in 1927 the publisher Iwanami Shigeo booked a restaurant in Kanda so that Tokyo's writers could argue over which cicada he had heard.
Half a day from Yamagata or Sendai
Kawagoe is 26 min from Ikebukuro on the fastest Tobu trains, and its 16 m wooden bell tower rings at noon and again at 15:00, which leaves you the hours in between for the old warehouse street.
Half a day from Tokyo
Five chances a day to hear a bell that has kept Hikone's hours without a break since the Edo period, hanging just below one of Japan's 12 original castle keeps, so one visit covers two lists.
Half a day from Kyoto
Set an alarm: the 6 am drum from the bathhouse roof means Dogo Onsen Honkan is open, and you can be in the water minutes later.
An early morning in Matsuyama
No other entry starts at 4:59 am, when a beat of the big drum at Kushida Shrine sends the first float running on July 15 and the teams' 'oissa, oissa' carries through Hakata in the half-light.
One pre-dawn morning in Fukuoka (July 15)
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Stand on an Okhotsk beach on a calm day between late January and mid-March and you can hear the pack ice grinding floe against floe in long squeals and groans, kyuu, guu, kuuu to Japanese ears. Two of the best places to listen are Kitahama in Abashiri, where the little JR station sits right by the shore, and the Senjoiwa rocks at Usutaibe in Esashi.
Best: Late January to mid-March.
The Howard clock that Sapporo Agricultural College ordered from New York began striking the hours here on August 12, 1881, and it still does, through the night as well: one stroke for each hour, 156 a day, driven by weights the staff wind by hand twice a week. Its ring once reached 4 km across Meiji-era Sapporo, but office blocks now box the wooden tower in, so listen from the pavement outside.
Getting there: 5 min walk from Odori Station (City Hall exit), or 10 min from the south exit of JR Sapporo Station. Our Sapporo guide
Hakodate calls this white 1916 church Gangan-dera, the clang-clang temple, for bells rung by rope in a rhythm that is almost a tune, at the start and end of prayers rather than on the hour. The six in the tower now were given in 1983, after fire and a wartime metal drive had taken earlier sets.
Best: Saturdays from 5 pm and Sundays from 10 am, as services begin and end. Our Hakodate guide
Spring mornings in the forest around Asahidake Onsen, at the foot of Hokkaido's highest peak (2,291 m), bring the songs of Japanese robins, red-flanked bluetails and brown-headed thrushes, and on the longer Miharashidai loop, with luck, the sharp call of a pika, an Ice Age survivor living in the rocks. The Ainu called these mountains the garden where the gods play.
Getting there: 1 hr 50 min by Ideyu-go bus from JR Asahikawa Station to the Asahidake terminus (four a day). Best: April to late June, early morning. Our Asahikawa guide
Around New Year as many as 200 red-crowned cranes come in off the snowfields to the winter feeding at the Tsurui-Ito Tancho Sanctuary. Pairs call in unison with their bills pointed at the sky, a loud, bugling duet that carries across the fields, and the whole flock sounds the alarm when a fox slips in among them.
Getting there: 1 hr by Akan Bus from JR Kushiro Station to Tsurui-mura Yakuba-mae, then a 10 min walk. Best: December to February, at the 9 am and 2 pm feeds.
Some 30,000 black-tailed gulls return to this small island at Hachinohe harbour from late February, nest even in the grounds of the shrine on its summit and leave in August, mewing so like cats that the Japanese call them umineko, sea cats. When the shrine was rebuilt after a 2015 fire, the builders downed tools every April to August to leave the nests in peace.
Getting there: 15 min walk from JR Same Station (Hachinohe Line). Best: March to July.
Hotokenuma, by Lake Ogawara, was drained for rice paddies from 1964, never farmed, and grew back as 222 hectares of reeds that are now the world's largest breeding ground for the endangered marsh grassbird. From late May the grassbirds sing from the reeds alongside ochre-rumped buntings and black-browed reed warblers, with the Hakkoda range on the skyline behind.
Getting there: Realistically a car trip: 30 min from Misawa Airport on prefectural road 170 toward Rokkasho; there is a car park but no visitor centre. Best: Late May to late July.
The Oirase falls only 1 m in every 70 on its 14 km run from Lake Towada to Yakeyama, so for most of the way it murmurs over mossy rocks; listen above Mamonbashi bridge, at the Ashura rapids, and near the lake for the roar of the 7 m Choshi Otaki. A sluice at the lake lets the full flow through by day and almost closes at night and in winter, when the stream runs on its tributaries alone.
Best: May to October, in daytime. Our Aomori guide
Aomori's Nebuta (August 2–7) and Hirosaki's Neputa (August 1–7) haul giant lit paper floats through the streets to taiko and flutes. In Aomori the costumed haneto dancers leap alongside chanting 'Rasserah, rasserah', while in Hirosaki the rope-pullers call out a long 'Yaa-yado!'.
Best: August 1–7. Our Aomori guide
Waves driven into a sea cave at the foot of these cliffs squeeze the air inside and let it out in a rumbling 'goro, goro, doon', which is how Kaminari-iwa, Thunder Rock, got its name. It sounds on all but the calmest days, loudest from the viewing deck over Ranbodani gorge, 3 min on foot from the Goishi Kaigan information centre.
Getting there: 20 min by JR Ofunato Line BRT from Sakari to Goishi Kaigan-guchi, then 10 min by taxi or a 40 min walk.
Every summer since 1963, Mizusawa has hung cast-iron wind chimes from its own Nanbu ironware foundries along the JR Tohoku Line platforms: temple bells, pine cones and lanterns, joined over the years by fruit, vegetables and flowers, each ringing at its own pitch in the breeze.
Best: June to August.
On the second Saturday of June (June 13 in 2026) some 70 farm horses in bright costumes hung with bells walk 14 km from Onikoshi Sozen Shrine in Takizawa to Morioka Hachimangu, setting off at 9:30 and arriving just before 2 pm. The 'chagu chagu' of the bells at every step gives the parade its name, and many of the riders are primary-school children.
Best: Second Saturday of June. Our Morioka guide
Classical poets sang of the bell crickets of the Miyagino plain, east of central Sendai, and an old local saying gives them seven rings to a phrase. Wild ones have become hard to find, so since 1990 a residents' committee has bred them at the Iwakiri community centre, handed them out to schools and homes, and released them in the hope that they will breed on their own again.
Best: Mid-August until the first frost, at night. Our Sendai guide
Kajika frogs belong in mountain streams, yet their fluting 'fi-fi-fi' carries off the riffles of the Hirose right through Sendai. They vanished from the city stretch when the river was at its dirtiest around 1965 and came back as it was cleaned up; wagtails and kingfishers work the riverbed all year between Ohashi bridge and Hyojogawara.
Getting there: 10 min walk from International Center Station (Tozai Line) to Ohashi bridge. Best: Late May to August, early morning and evening. Our Sendai guide
Reeds line the lower Kitakami for 15 km above its mouth in Ishinomaki, and from early summer into winter the wind off the river sets them hissing and rustling in long waves. The 2011 tsunami wiped out two-fifths of the beds; by 2026 they had grown back to 115 of their original 156 hectares, and each December the local primary school still cuts reeds to make the paper for its graduation certificates.
Best: Early summer to early winter.
Tens of thousands of white-fronted geese spend winter nights on these two shallow lakes, 80 cm deep on average, and at first light they lift off together in a roar of wingbeats and calling, bound for the harvested rice fields around them. At dusk they come back in long V-lines and drop over the water in a sideslipping tumble the Japanese call rakugan, 'falling geese'.
Best: Mid-October to late February, at sunrise and sunset.
A shipping merchant and a village headman began planting black pines here in 1711 to stop the sand burying Noshiro, and the forest has grown to some 7 million trees, 14 km long and 1 km deep. Wind off the Sea of Japan draws a sound like surf from the needles, called shoto, deepest on the town side where the oldest pines stand and clearest early in the morning before the traffic starts.
Basho climbed to Risshaku-ji on July 13, 1689 and wrote 'such stillness: the cicadas' cry sinks into the rocks'; the poet Saito Mokichi insisted Basho had heard the big abura-zemi until fieldwork in 1932 convinced him it was the smaller niinii-zemi. The cedars around the 1,015 stone steps still ring with cicadas, best heard by the Semizuka mound and higher up beyond the Godaido hall, out of earshot of the road.
Getting there: JR Senzan Line to Yamadera Station, then a 10 min walk to the foot of the steps. Best: Late July to mid-August. Our Yamagata guide
Mount Haguro's two senior yamabushi, the matsuhijiri, spend 100 days in retreat before the New Year's Eve Shoreisai fire festival, and to pay for it they and their fellow mountain priests go door to door across the Shonai plain, blowing conch shells, praying for each household and leaving a talisman. In Tsuruoka the round starts at the city's Hie Shrine.
Best: December 1–10 in central Tsuruoka; mid-November to December 30 elsewhere in Shonai.
Seven swans turned up at the mouth of the Mogami in 1966; today more than 5,000 whooper swans winter here every year alongside tundra swans, and the river off the Swan Park in Sakata rings with their calls, loudest in courtship and as groups take off. Sakata asks people not to feed wild birds, the swans included.
Best: Early October to early April.
In early summer the paradise flycatchers in these woods sing 'tsuki-hi-hoshi, hoi-hoi-hoi', moon, sun, stars, which is how they got their Japanese name, sankocho, the three-lights bird. Fukushima opened the 52-hectare forest in 1983 as the first forest sanctuary in Japan set up by a local council, and the rangers at its nature centre (closed Mondays) will help you pick out the narcissus flycatchers, great tits and Japanese green woodpeckers too.
Getting there: 15 min by Fukushima Kotsu bus from the east exit of JR Fukushima Station to Okabe, then a 1.5 km walk (30 min) to the nature centre. Best: April to June. Our Fukushima guide
Mountain water chatters down open channels on both sides of Ouchi-juku's 450 m street of thatched houses, 'chobo, jobo, gobo' past every doorstep. When this was a post town on the Edo-period road from Aizu-Wakamatsu to Imaichi, near Nikko, a single channel ran down the middle of the street; in 1886 it was split in two and moved to the sides, where it still serves the houses.
Getting there: Aizu Railway to Yunokami-Onsen Station, then 20 min on the Saruyu-go bus (six a day). Our Aizuwakamatsu guide
Showa, deep in Oku-Aizu, is the only village on Honshu that grows karamushi (ramie), the fibre behind Echigo's fine summer cloth, and its weavers still work the thread by hand on low jibata looms, 'kara-kara, ton-ton'. The Karamushi-ori no Sato roadside station has a museum of the craft, and on Fridays, weekends and holidays you can sit at a loom yourself and weave a coaster in 20 minutes.
Best: Winter, when snow muffles every other sound.
Okakura Tenshin built his red, six-sided Rokkakudo on a rock over the Pacific in 1905 and named it Kanrantei, the pavilion for watching the great waves, and the swell still booms against the cliffs below it and in the five coves that give Izura its name. The 2011 tsunami swept the building away, and it was rebuilt in April 2012.
Getting there: 10 min by taxi from JR Otsuko Station (Joban Line); the Rokkakudo grounds are open 9:30 to 16:30, closed Mondays (¥400). Best: Winter, when the sea is rough.
Some 2,500 hydrangeas, first planted in 1974, line both sides of the thousand stone steps up to Ohirasan Shrine above Tochigi, and in the rainy season the tree frogs among them call over the drip of the leaves, loudest halfway up. The steps are built from the mountain's own stone and turn black and glossy in the rain.
Getting there: 15 min by Kanto Bus from Tochigi Station (JR and Tobu) to the Kokugakuin-mae terminus, then a 5 min walk. Best: Late June to early July, on rainy days.
A suikinkutsu is a jar buried upside down beside a stone basin, so that the water you rinse your hands with drips into the hollow and rings back up as faint notes, like a koto played underground. This one lies in Suikintei, a 1.3-hectare Rinpa-style stroll garden with two tea houses at Yoshii, finished in 1991.
The garden was built for a college that later closed, and its successor university was dissolved in March 2013. Since January 2018 the site has been the Grand Hills Takasaki nursing-care complex, whose care home still describes the water chime ringing in its grounds, but we could not confirm public visiting hours as of September 2026, so contact the facility before going.
A fire burned a third of Kawagoe in 1893, and its merchants put this three-storey wooden bell tower back up the next year, before they had rebuilt their own shops. It stands 16 m over the warehouse street, and a machine now strikes the bell four times a day, at 6:00, 12:00, 15:00 and 18:00.
Getting there: 15 min walk from Hon-Kawagoe Station (Seibu Shinjuku Line), or a bus from Kawagoe Station to the Ichibangai stop, then 2 min on foot. Our Saitama guide
Kumagaya counts 29 kinds of singing insects in the grassland on the Arakawa floodplain at Oshikiri. As dusk falls they start up almost together, the 'chin-chirorin' of pine crickets and the 'riin-riin' of bell crickets over a bed of field crickets and katydids.
Best: Late August to early October, from dusk.
For nearly 300 years a flume here carried Sawara's irrigation water across the Ono River to the paddies on the far bank, and even after a concrete bridge replaced it before the war, the overflow splashed into the river so loudly that people called it the jaa-jaa bridge. Today's bridge, in front of the mapmaker Ino Tadataka's old house, was built for visitors and sends the water splashing down every half hour.
Getting there: 15 min walk from JR Sawara Station. Best: Daytime, 9:00 to 17:00.
The himeharuzemi takes its scientific name, chibensis, from Chiba, and on the Mabara plateau, 340 m up in the Boso hills, a few of these small cicadas start up, the whole slope joins in a buzzing 'jaa-jaa', and then they cut off all at once. The plateau is also known for the 20,000 hydrangeas at Myohosho-ji temple, which flower into July, and for mountain leeches, so bring repellent.
Getting there: Realistically a car trip: only ordinary cars may drive the last 2.3 km to the temple, and the narrow access roads run one-way from June 20 to July 20 (2026). Best: Mid-July to early August.
The old shop-lined approach to Shibamata Taishakuten hums with shoppers and pilgrims, but climb the Edogawa embankment beyond and it goes quiet, with skylarks over the grass in spring, black-headed gulls in winter, and the Yagiri ferry, the last river ferry left in Tokyo, putting across to Matsudo. These days the boat crosses under motor rather than oar, from 10:00 to 16:00 (¥300).
Getting there: Keisei Kanamachi Line to Shibamata Station, then a 1.2 km walk past the temple to the ferry landing. Best: Ferry daily from mid-March to November (not Mondays or Tuesdays in July and August); December to early March, weekends, holidays and January 1–7 only. Our Tokyo guide
Kan'ei-ji has rung a time bell on the hill by the Ueno Daibutsu since 1666, and the bell hanging there now, recast in 1787, is still struck three times a day, at 6:00, noon and 18:00. Basho heard its predecessor through the cherry blossom and wrote 'a cloud of blossoms; the bell, is it Ueno's or Asakusa's?'
Getting there: 5 min walk from the Park Exit of JR Ueno Station. Visitor guide · Our Tokyo guide
Sanpoji Pond in Shakujii Park was one of the three great spring-fed ponds of Musashino, but its springs dried up as the city grew around it, and wells now pump in groundwater to keep it full. Walk the path around it for the whirr of ducks lifting off, water lapping at the edge and wind in the old trees: pintails, teal and tufted ducks in winter, grebes and moorhens all year, and now and then a kingfisher.
Getting there: Seibu Ikebukuro Line to Shakujii-koen Station, then a 1.4 km walk through the park past the boating pond. Our Tokyo guide
More than 100 zelkovas, planted when the Seikei school moved out from Ikebukuro in 1924 and now a city natural monument, line the avenue into its campus near Kichijoji. Their sound turns with the seasons, from new leaves rustling in spring and a green hush in summer to dry leaves skittering in autumn and bare branches knocking in the winter wind; walk in to the middle of the avenue, away from the traffic on Itsukaichi-kaido.
Getting there: 20 min walk or 10 min by bus from Kichijoji Station. Best: Year-round, early in the morning. Our Tokyo guide
At the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve the ships in Yokohama's harbour, from sightseeing boats to cruise liners, sound their horns together, each on its own note. Crowds gather along the waterfront at Yamashita Park, where the 1930 liner Hikawa Maru has been moored since 1961.
Best: Midnight, December 31 to January 1. Our Yokohama guide
Candy makers on the Nakamise lane to Kawasaki Daishi chop ropes of white sarashi-ame on their cutting boards, 'tontoko, tontoko', and each cut is meant to chop away bad luck too, at a temple famous for warding it off. Three old shops make the candy in front of you, one with a mechanical doll that does the chopping by itself, and the rhythm is loudest in the New Year crowds.
Getting there: 2 min walk from Kawasaki-Daishi Station (Keikyu Daishi Line) to the start of the approach. Best: January to February.
Spring water wells up at the head of the Doho, a small tributary of the Sagami River, and runs as a clear, chattering brook through this 7.7-hectare wooded park. Bush warblers, red-flanked bluetails, white-eyes, great tits and kingfishers come down to it to drink, and in early June fireflies rise over the same stream.
As of September 18, 2026, part of the park's paths were closed because of unsafe trees.
Getting there: 20 min walk from Kamimizo Station (JR Sagami Line).
More than 5,000 taiga bean geese, a national natural monument, winter on this lagoon on the edge of Niigata, more than anywhere else in Japan, and the deep honking of the flocks carries a long way over the flat rice country around it. Up to 8,000 swans winter here as well, and more than 220 bird species have been recorded.
Getting there: 30 min walk or 5 min by car from JR Toyosaka Station (Hakushin Line) to the View Fukushimagata centre. Best: October to March, best on early mornings from November to February. Our Niigata guide
Oyama, the wooded hill behind Nou Hakusan Shrine, is thick with evergreen akagashi oaks, and its himeharuzemi colony, near the northern edge of the cicada's range, has been a national natural monument since 1942. The male that starts each chorus is called the ondotori, the song leader: the rest take his cue, sing as one and fall silent together, from early morning until after sunset.
Getting there: 20 min walk from Nou Station (Echigo Tokimeki Railway). Best: Mid-July to early August.
The Wild Bird Forest Park sits on Lake Saiko's west shore, ringed by the Aokigahara forest, with Mount Fuji rising beyond its lawn. Varied tits and willow tits call in the park, and along the forest trails you hear lesser cuckoos, the loud trill of wrens and the juichi, a hawk-cuckoo named for its 'juu-ichi' cry.
Getting there: 43 min by the Saiko Green Line bus from Kawaguchiko Station to the Saiko Yacho-no-Mori Park stop. Best: April to May.
Zenko-ji's bell, recast in 1667 after a fire destroyed the first one, strikes every hour on the hour from 10:00 to 16:00, and in 1998 it rang to open the Nagano Winter Olympics. It once carried 20 km south to the apricot villages of Sarashina, where people said the trees that heard it fruited best, but today you hear it around the temple and in Joyama Park next door.
Getting there: 15 min by bus from stand 1 at the Zenko-ji exit of JR Nagano Station to Zenkoji Daimon (¥190), then 5 min on foot; or a 2 km walk. Best: Every day on the hour, 10:00 to 16:00; anyone may strike it on January 7. Visitor guide · Our Nagano guide
On the wooded Enrei pass between Okaya and Shiojiri, a prefectural bird forest where more than 120 species have been recorded, cuckoos, narcissus flycatchers and brown-headed thrushes sing in early summer over views of Lake Suwa, Yatsugatake and the Southern Alps. Since 1954 Okaya's Kotori Bus, the little-bird bus, has carried people up to hear the dawn chorus on Sunday mornings in May.
Getting there: The Kotori Bus leaves Okaya Station at 5:25 and reaches the woods at 5:50 (40 seats, booked ahead; in 2026 it ran on May 3, 10, 17 and 24); at other times by car to the Enreikaku car park at the pass. Best: May and June, at dawn.
By the start of May the Schlegel's green tree frogs in Yashimagaike, the pond on the edge of this 12,000-year-old raised bog on Kirigamine, are calling a rolling 'kararara', pitched well above a common tree frog, and by mid-May they are calling from the Onigasenzui and Kamagaike ponds too. A trail and boardwalk circle the 43-hectare marsh, the southernmost raised bog in Japan, 1,630 m up.
Getting there: 45 min by Alpico bus from Kami-Suwa Station to the Yashima Shitsugen stop (weekends and holidays from May to October, daily in August, 2026 timetable). Best: May to early June.
Japan's tallest waterfall drops 350 m in four stages off the Midagahara plateau into a gorge walled by Akushiro no Kabe, a cliff 500 m high, and its name comes from the story that the priest Honen heard the nembutsu chant in its roar. While the spring snowmelt lasts, the seasonal Hannoki Falls pours down beside it.
From June 1 to October 31, 2026, the Takimidai viewing area, and the path to it from partway across Shomyo Bridge, are closed for erosion-control works on the Shomyo River; the falls can still be seen and heard close up from the bridge.
Getting there: 15 min by the seasonal Shomyo-daki bus from Tateyama Station (mid-May to mid-November), then a 30 min walk from the Shomyo-daira car park. Best: Late April to mid-November; loudest in the spring snowmelt. Our Toyama guide
Water channels called enaka run beside the sloping lanes of Yatsuo, and on an ordinary day you can hear them gurgling as you climb. For three nights from September 1 the water is lost under the Owara Kaze no Bon, when silent dancers, shamisen, kokyu fiddles and the plaintive Owara song move slowly through the lanes of the town's 11 districts.
Getting there: 25–30 min on the JR Takayama Line from Toyama to Etchu-Yatsuo Station, then a 30 min walk up to the old town. Best: The water all year; Owara September 1–3 (2026: 17:00–23:00 on the 1st and 2nd, 19:00–23:00 on the 3rd). Our Toyama guide
The 'ton-ton, kotsu-kotsu' of mallet on chisel comes from workshops all over Inami, thickest on Yokamachi-dori, the stone-paved approach to Zuisen-ji, where you can watch through the windows as apprentices carve at the front and the master at the back. The craft began after a fire in 1762, when Higashi Honganji sent its Kyoto carver Maekawa Sanshiro to decorate the rebuilt temple and four Inami temple carpenters became his pupils.
The Honda family, senior retainers of the Kaga lords, had their mansions on this slope south of Kenroku-en, and a wood of old evergreen tabu and chinquapin survives on it. On summer mornings and evenings the higurashi cicadas pour their falling 'kana-kana-kana' out of those trees, most thickly in the woods between Hirosaka and Yomezaka.
Getting there: 6 min walk from the Hirosaka / 21st Century Museum bus stop. Best: Early July to August, mornings and evenings. Our Kanazawa guide
Nearly 70 temples crowd Teramachi, south of the Sai River, among them Myoryu-ji, the 'Ninja Temple', and on Saturday evenings temple bells ring out over a quarter that has been a national preservation district since 2012. It is also known as Shizune no Komichi, the path of quiet sounds, and away from the traffic on the main road its back lanes are where the bells carry best.
Getting there: 3 min walk from the Hirokoji bus stop (Kanazawa loop bus and Hokutetsu buses). Best: Saturday evenings. Our Kanazawa guide
Halfway up Mount Ohira a cold spring in the limestone surges 8 to 25 times a day, at no fixed interval: the trickle from the rock swells to full flow in eight minutes, rushes down the little fall below the outlet, and dies back within half an hour. People working on the mountain used to say it was noon once they had heard it run three times, which is how it came to be called time water.
The former Imai house, the oldest of Mino's merchant houses with udatsu firewalls on the roof, belonged to a village headman who traded in washi paper and is now the Mino Historical Museum. In its courtyard garden, water from the stone basin drips into a jar buried upside down and rings back like a koto string.
Getting there: 15 min walk from Minoshi Station (Nagaragawa Railway); the museum is open 9:00 to 16:30 (to 16:00 from October to March) and closed on Tuesdays from December to February (¥300).
Gujo Hachiman's children learn the Yoshida River rock by rock, jumping first from low boulders, then from the school bridge, and finally from Shinbashi, 12 m above the swirling current in the middle of town; the shouts and splashes around Shinbashi and Miyagase bridge, over the rush of clear water, are what summer sounds like here. The tourism association asks visitors to watch from the railing rather than jump.
Best: July to August.
Gifu's six cormorant masters, imperial household officials by title, fish the Nagara by firelight on every night of the season except the night of the harvest moon and nights when the river runs high. The boatmen drum on the gunwales to rouse the birds, the masters call 'hoh, hoh' to steady them, and split pine blazes in the iron fire baskets over the bows.
Getting there: 20 min by Gifu Bus from JR or Meitetsu Gifu Station to Nagarabashi-minami / Kawaramachi (¥250), then 1 min to the viewing-boat office. Best: May 11 to October 15. Our Gifu guide
When the weather is about to turn, the sea off Enshu-nada's long dunes sets up a sudden roar, 'goh', 'zaa', 'bashin', and then stops as suddenly as it started. People along this coast, from the Nakatajima dunes in Hamamatsu to Bentenjima on Lake Hamana, call it Namikozo, the wave boy, and say that when it comes from the east the weather will break and from the west it will clear.
Best: Year-round, when the weather is changing.
The Oigawa Railway has kept steam engines running up the Oi River since 1976, and at Senzu, the head of the main line in Kawanehon, their whistles echoed off the forested foothills of the Southern Alps. The place to hear them was Chisha-no-oka Park on the hill above the station, where the birdsong of spring and early summer joined in.
A typhoon in September 2022 cut the main line between Kawane-Onsen-Sasamado and Senzu, and no train has run through to Senzu since. Repairs began in the Sasama Tunnel in August 2026, and the railway aims to reopen the first 3 km by autumn 2027 and the whole line by spring 2029. Until then, as of September 2026, you can hear the whistle only further down the valley in Shimada, between Shin-Kanaya and Kawane-Onsen-Sasamado, from the Thomas and Percy trains that run on set days through December: the railway's black locomotive, C10 8, has been out of service for conversion since January 2026, and its express trains are now hauled by an electric locomotive.
Nagoya opened its botanical garden in 1937 on wooded hills east of the city, and most of it is still oak woodland, where great tits, white-eyes and long-tailed tits call along the Man'yo path and through the Tokai forest. Come when the gates open at 9:00 (closed Mondays), as the early morning brings the most species.
Getting there: 7 min walk from exit 6 of Hoshigaoka Station (Higashiyama subway line), the station nearest the botanical side. Best: Spring and autumn, when migrants pass through. Our Nagoya guide
Koigahama is a kilometre of white sand at the tip of the Atsumi Peninsula, and its shiosai, the sound of the surf, runs heavy in spring and summer and softer in autumn and winter. Shiosai is also the Japanese title of Mishima Yukio's The Sound of Waves, set on Kamishima, the island you see offshore; and a coconut the folklorist Yanagita Kunio saw washed up on this beach in 1898 became Shimazaki Toson's poem 'Yashi no Mi'.
An ama diver coming up for air lets her held breath go in a thin, rather mournful whistle, 'pyuu, pyuu', the isobue, a way of steadying her breathing before the next dive. To hear many at once, go to Sugashima's Shirongo festival, when a conch sends the island's ama into the sea off a beach closed to fishing the rest of the year, and the first to bring up a male and female pair of abalone is honoured as head diver for the year.
Best: Shirongo festival, the Saturday nearest July 11 (in 2026, July 11, 9:00 to 11:30). Our Tsu guide
The 'evening bell of Mii' is one of the Eight Views of Omi and is counted among Japan's three great bells for its voice, which sounds a quarter-tone below A. It was cast in 1602 with 108 bosses, one for each of the 108 earthly desires, to replace the Nara-period 'Benkei's bell', now in a hall nearby: the story goes that the warrior monk Benkei dragged it up Mount Hiei, and when it rang out 'inoo, inoo', I want to go home, he threw it into a ravine.
Getting there: 900 m walk from Miidera Station (Keihan Ishiyama-Sakamoto Line) to the belfry; the grounds are open 9:00 to 16:30 (¥800). Best: New Year's Eve for the joya no kane. Our Otsu guide
Hikone people call the castle's time bell Oyama no kane, the bell on the hill, and from its rise by the Taikomon gate, just below the keep, it has rung over the town five times a day, at 6:00, 9:00, 12:00, 15:00 and 18:00, without a break since the Edo period. Higurashi cicadas fill the castle hill on summer evenings, and in autumn bell crickets and pine crickets sing in the Genkyu-en garden below.
Getting there: 15 min walk from JR Hikone Station to the castle, then uphill to the bell below the keep. Best: Cicadas late July to late August; crickets September to October. Visitor guide · Our Otsu guide
When the wind gets into the bamboo of western Kyoto, the stems knock together and the leaves hiss in rolling waves, on the Sagano path that runs past the north side of Tenryu-ji from Nonomiya Shrine to Jojakko-ji, and in Rakusai around Saiho-ji, Jizo-in and the Rakusai Bamboo Park. The Sagano path is packed from mid-morning to late afternoon; before 7:00 on a weekday you can hear it.
Best: Year-round; May and June for the freshest green. Visitor guide · Our Kyoto guide
Several of the falls and pools in this 4 km gorge on a 500 m plateau are named for their sound: Meibaku, the 'sounding fall', booms off a hollow in the rock behind it, and upstream come Dankinsen, the 'koto-playing spring', where the water breaks over a scatter of stones, and the Tenkotan rapids, 'the heavenly drum'. The streamside path ends under the dam of Tsutenko lake, where water pours down the 12.5 m wall in a curtain.
Getting there: Keihan Kyoto Kotsu bus from JR Sonobe Station to Hatta, then Nantan's Gururin community bus to Rurikei, only a few runs a day; by car, 25 min from the Sonobe exit of the Kyoto Jukan Expressway.
Scuff this quartz sand and it squeaks 'kyu-kyu', a note once likened to a koto, which gave Kotohiki ('koto-playing') beach its name; thump it with your fist at Taikohama, the 'drum beach', and it booms. It sings only while clean and dry, so in 2001 the town banned smoking, fireworks and camping on the sand.
Best: Early spring to early summer, on dry days.
On autumn nights pine crickets sing in the long grass along the Yodo as it runs through Osaka, a clear 'chin-chirorin' that Osakans hear as 'tetchiri, tetchiri'. For now, go to the wild grass of the Toyosato riverbank, upstream in Higashiyodogawa, to hear them.
The Oyodo wild-grass area of Yodogawa Riverside Park, the classic listening spot between the lights of Umeda and Juso, has been closed since October 16, 2019 for the works on the Yodogawa Left Bank Line expressway, and the park still lists it as closed long-term (September 2026).
Best: Autumn, from just before sunset into the night. Our Osaka guide
A stone at Jokoji marks it as the birthplace of the oldest Kawachi ondo, and the temple's Jizo-bon dance on August 23 and 24 still opens with it: from 7 to 9 pm a singer on the tower chants nagashi-bushi ballads such as Shuntokumaru, 15 to 25 minutes a story, over nothing but a drum. At 9 the livelier modern Kawachi ondo takes over and the dancing goes on until 11.
Getting there: 6 min walk from the west exit of Kintetsu Yao Station, through the shopping arcade. Best: August 23–24, 7–11 pm.
When the ikanago (sand lance) season opens in early spring, Tarumi's boats put out together before dawn, winches whine as the nets come up full of leaping silver fry, and gulls wheel over the fleet. The fry go into kugi-ni, simmered in soy and sugar, which Kobe families make each spring and post to friends.
Not heard since 2023. The sand lance stock has collapsed, and the fishermen of Osaka and Hyogo have called off the Osaka Bay season, which Tarumi's boats fish, three years running (2024, 2025 and 2026). West of the Akashi Strait the Harima-nada season lasted two days in 2026 (March 17–18). The same Tarumi crews still go out for whitebait from Golden Week.
Best: Late February to March, when the season opens. Our Kobe guide
The float drums of seven old villages pound around Matsubara Hachiman Shrine, under shouts of 'yoiyasa!' each time the bearers heave a float overhead. On the second day the din moves on to Otabiyama, whose terraced slopes fill with spectators like a natural grandstand while three portable shrines are rammed together below.
Getting there: 5 min walk south from Sanyo Electric Railway Shirahamanomiya Station, where limited expresses stop during the festival; Otabiyama is 15 min west of the shrine. Best: October 14 (afternoon, at the shrine) and 15 (dawn to dusk). Our Himeji guide
Deer call across the Kasugano meadows at every hour, and on set mornings a keeper blows a natural horn at Tobihino to bring them running, a custom that began with a bugle in 1892. Every night a 180 kg zelkova beam is swung against Todai-ji's 26.3-tonne bell, cast in 752 and known as Nara Taro, and from beside the belfry you can hear its long hum die away.
Getting there: 5 min walk from Kintetsu Nara Station to Nara Park. Best: All year; Todai-ji's bell nightly at 8 pm (7 pm from February 26 to March 14); deer-calling on summer Sundays at 9:00 in 2026. Visitor guide · Our Nara guide
At the top of 635 steps on Fudo-yama, among the boulders of a Shugendo practice ground, one great rock has a hole some 20 cm across. Put your ear to it and you hear what people here call the Kinokawa running far below, or else the sounds of this world and the next.
Getting there: 25 min by car from JR Hashimoto Station to the car park at the foot of the steps.
Japan's tallest single-drop waterfall plunges 133 m and is worshipped as the sacred body of Hiro Shrine at its foot. On the way up to Nachi Taisha you hear it long before you see it, then the lie of the land by the shrine cuts off even the sound, and the roar comes back all at once, with the fall, halfway down the stone steps to its base.
Getting there: Kumano Gobo Nankai bus from JR Kii-Katsuura Station to Nachi-no-Taki-mae, 23 min (¥630). Best: All year; loudest after heavy rain. Our Wakayama guide
The tundra swans wintering on Lake Nakaumi spend the day in the rice fields of Yasugi and Nanbu and fly back at dusk, calling as they come in, to roost on Tsubasa pond, the 17-hectare heart of this sanctuary; at dawn they lift off again. The nature centre's windows look straight onto the pond, and on weekends from November to March it opens at 7:00 for the morning departure.
Getting there: Hinomaru bus (Uchihama line) from JR Yonago Station to Norikoshi, 20 min, then a 1.4 km walk; 10 min by taxi. Closed Tuesdays. Best: Mid-October to late March, at dawn and dusk; November is best, before many swans move to roost in flooded fields nearer their feeding grounds.
The Mitoku River runs between the inns of Misasa Onsen, and at dusk the kajika frogs add their fluting 'fe-rururu, fe-rururu, horohoro' to the rapids; kajika means 'river deer', for a call light enough to be likened to a deer's. Stand on Koidani bridge, where people stroke a frog statue for luck in love.
Getting there: Hinomaru bus from JR Kurayoshi Station to Misasa Onsen Kanko Shoko Center-mae, 20 min, then 6 min on foot to Koidani bridge. Best: June to September, at dusk. Our Tottori guide
Aoya and Saji, now both part of Tottori city, have made Inshu washi for well over a thousand years and still turn out a great deal of calligraphy paper. On papermaking days you hear the makers dipping their screens into vats of mitsumata and other fibres and rocking them again and again, a steady 'chappon, chappon' from morning to evening.
Getting there: Aoya Washi Workshop (hands-on papermaking, booking needed; closed Mondays): 15 min by car from JR Aoya Station, or 17 min by a bus that must be booked and does not run at weekends. Our Tottori guide
Kotogahama squeaks 'kyu-kyu' underfoot in the band of dry sand 4 to 5 m back from the waves. Maji's story is that the beach began to sing after the death of a Heike princess, washed ashore after the Genpei War, who had played the koto every day for the villagers who took her in. It is still the village's own beach, where the Obon dance, 450 years old, circles on the sand late into the night and residents clean it together to keep the sand singing.
Getting there: 5 min walk from JR Maji Station.
Cold water runs out from under the stalactites of Suwado, a 900 m limestone cave with a mouth 3 m by 4.5 m, and chatters down into the Bitchu River opposite Hotaru Park; after rain the cave pours out far more. The park is named for the Genji, Heike and hime fireflies that breed along the river and fly in June.
Only the first 10 m of the cave can be entered (Maniwa Tourism Bureau); the steel walkway further in has broken. The waterwheel beside the entrance, heard with the stream when the list was made, was no longer turning in July 2023.
Getting there: 10 min by car from the Hokubo exit of the Chugoku Expressway; park at Hotaru Park. Best: Spring and summer; June for the fireflies.
Shinjo planted cherry trees every 5.5 m along its stretch of the old Izumo Kaido in 1906 to celebrate victory in the Russo-Japanese War, and these 'gaisen-zakura', victory cherries, still arch over the post town's main street. A small channel runs down each side beneath them, and its trickle follows you the length of the street.
Getting there: 15 min by car from the Hiruzen exit of the Yonago Expressway; the Maniwa-kun community bus stops at Michi-no-Eki Shinjo, 1 min away. Best: Early April for the cherries, and the autumn leaves.
Peace Memorial Park has three bells: the one brought out of the museum for the August 6 ceremony, the chime from the clock tower by Aioi Bridge every morning at 8:15, the minute the bomb exploded in 1945, and the Peace Bell of 1964, with a world map without borders raised on its side, which anyone may strike. Visitors are asked to strike it gently and to let the ringing fade before striking again.
Senko-ji's bell has rung the time over Onomichi and its strait since the first years of the Genroku era, from 1688, and it is still rung every evening from a belfry on the edge of a cliff above the town. Where most Japanese bells carry rows of 108 bosses, this one is covered in Sanskrit script, and the old saying is that it can be heard one ri (4 km) away and echoes for two.
Getting there: Senkoji-yama Ropeway (3 min, every 15 min) and a 5 min walk; the last car is at 17:15, before the bell, and the stone steps down to town take 10 min. Best: Every evening at 6 pm; New Year's Eve. Our Hiroshima guide
Steam left the Yamaguchi Line in 1973 and came back on August 1, 1979, and since then the SL Yamaguchi has worked up the valleys from Shin-Yamaguchi to Tsuwano with its whistle echoing off the hills. In 2026 a D51 hauls every train, though after a fault on August 15 a diesel pulled the coaches the next day.
Getting there: Leaves JR Shin-Yamaguchi at 10:52 and reaches Tsuwano at 13:06; back from Tsuwano at 16:12 (2026 timetable). Best: Weekends and holidays, May to December 20, 2026, with no trains in September. Our Yamaguchi guide
With each tide the sea races through the 1.3 km Naruto Strait, at up to 20 km/h at spring tides, and throws up whirlpools as wide as 20 m that spin, merge and split apart with a roar. The sightseeing boats from Kameura port run right up to them, close enough to feel the spray.
Getting there: Tokushima Bus from JR Naruto Station to Naruto Koen, 19 min; the boats leave from Kameura port in the park. Best: Spring tides in spring and autumn, at the peak times in the boat operators' tide tables. Our Tokushima guide
Shamisen, taiko, bamboo flutes and the kane, a hand gong that keeps time for the whole band, play the two-beat zomeki while the dancers chant 'yattosa, yattosa' down the street. For weeks before the August festival the same rhythm drifts out of practice sessions all over Tokushima city.
Best: August 12–15 (2026); practice sessions through June and July. Our Tokushima guide
On the slopes of Mount Yahazu near the Tokushima border, Okubo-ji is the 88th temple and the last of the Shikoku pilgrimage, so the jingle of the small bells pilgrims carry is the sound of long walks ending, with the temple bell ringing over it. Many leave their walking staffs in a hall beside the Daishi-do, and the temple burns them at its spring fire ritual.
Getting there: 30 min by Sanuki City community bus (Shido-Zoda-Tawa line, few runs) from near Kotoden Nagao Station; the stop is on the temple approach. Best: All year; most pilgrims in spring and autumn.
Every June 15 at 11:00 the keepers of Mannoike, the reservoir whose bank Kukai repaired in 821, turn a giant wheel to pull its plug, the yuru. Up to 5 tonnes of water a second then pours from a Meiji-era tunnel in the rock into the Kanakura River, bound for 3,000 hectares of rice on the Marugame plain, and the roar is loudest from Hotarumi Park below the embankment.
Getting there: By taxi from JR Kotohira Station (Dosan Line). Best: June 15 from 11:00 (every year); the full flow runs until planting is done.
In the Shinrokaku, the red-glass turret on the roof of Dogo Onsen Honkan, a drum is beaten six times at 6 am to open the bathhouse, twelve times at noon and six at 6 pm, as it has been since the building went up in 1894. The Honkan reopened in full in July 2024, and the last of six years of repairs and earthquake-proofing was finished that December.
Getting there: 25 min by Iyotetsu tram from JR Matsuyama-ekimae to Dogo Onsen. Best: All year; clearest in the dry air of autumn and winter. Our Matsuyama guide
Kukai wrote that as a young monk he trained at Cape Muroto, and tradition puts him in Mikurodo, a sea cave the land has since lifted clear of the waves; the story goes that he took his name, 'sky and sea', from the view out of its mouth. Across the coast road the Pacific breaks on the rocks, and inside the cave the surf comes back as a low rumble, loudest when the swell is high.
Rockfalls closed Mikurodo in November 2015 (Shinmeikutsu next door in October 2012). Steel canopies went up over the entrances, and since the end of April 2019 visitors have been let in again from 8:00 to 17:00, except in bad weather, wearing a helmet lent on site.
Getting there: 1 hr by Kochi Tobu Kotsu bus from Nahari Station (Gomen-Nahari Line) to Misaki Hotel-mae, then a 3 min walk. Best: All year; loudest when the waves are high.
From July 10 to 15 teams run their floats through Hakata on their shoulders, chanting 'oissa, oissa' while people along the way throw water over them. The Oiyama race that ends it starts at 4:59 am on July 15 with a beat of the big drum at Kushida Shrine, and the first float stops in the grounds so its team can sing the Hakata Iwai-uta before running the 5 km course.
Getting there: 5 min walk from Gion Station (Fukuoka subway), Exit 2, to Kushida Shrine. Best: July 10–15 (every year): rehearsal race at 15:59 on July 12, Oiyama at 4:59 am on July 15. Visitor guide · Our Fukuoka guide
Kanzeon-ji's bell, a National Treasure, was cast at the end of the 7th century from the same pattern as the bell of Myoshin-ji in Kyoto, which is dated 698, and the two rank among the oldest bells in Japan. Sugawara no Michizane, exiled to Dazaifu and shut away in his lodging, wrote that all he could do was glimpse the roof tiles of the government hall and listen to the voice of this temple's bell.
Not rung at present (checked September 2026). Until recently the bell was rung only on New Year's Eve; the temple has since deposited it with the Kyushu National Museum for safekeeping, and its notices for New Year's Eve 2024 and 2025 said there would be no ringing.
Getting there: 10 min walk from Nishitetsu Gojo Station. Our Fukuoka guide
At Hayatomo-no-seto, the narrowest point between Honshu and Kyushu, the tide can race through at more than 10 knots, and the horns of the 60,000 to 70,000 large ships that pass each year carry over the water. Listen from Mekari Park on the Moji side, or across the strait from Mimosusogawa Park, which looks onto Dan-no-ura, where the Heike fleet went down in 1185.
Getting there: 12 min by Sanden bus from JR Shimonoseki Station to Mimosusogawa; the free 780 m pedestrian tunnel crosses to the Moji side. Best: All year; loudest at the spring tides of spring and autumn. Our Yamaguchi guide
Fourteen floats of lacquer and paper, a red lion, samurai helmets and a sea bream among them, are hauled through Karatsu's old castle town to flutes, gongs and drums, while the pullers chant 'enya, enya' and 'yoisa, yoisa'. The shouting peaks at noon on November 3, when the 2 to 3-tonne floats sink into the sand at Nishinohama and have to be dragged into line one by one.
Best: November 2–4 (every year); practice evenings through October. Our Saga guide
In 1675 the Nabeshima lords moved their porcelain kiln into this valley, closed in by crags on three sides and guarded by a checkpoint, and more than twenty potteries still work here. Step onto the potters' bridge and a sensor sets a big white porcelain chime ringing, a nod to meotoshi, the old way of sorting finished pieces by the note they gave when tapped, while up by the stream a rebuilt water-driven karausu thumps pottery stone.
Getting there: 15 min by Saihi bus from Imari Station (five a day on weekdays, four at weekends; last bus back 16:33). Best: All year; porcelain wind chimes hang along the lanes in summer. Our Saga guide
The atomic bomb burst 800 m from here in 1945 and left these two camphors as blackened trunks; two months later they were in bud, and today they rise more than 20 m over the shrine entrance, their leaves rustling in every breeze. A sacred rope tied between them stands in for the torii the blast brought down, and a little way along the approach the second torii still stands on one leg.
Getting there: 6 min walk from the Daigaku-byoin tram stop. Our Nagasaki guide
Built in 1854 to carry water across a gorge to the dry Shiraito plateau, this stone aqueduct became the first civil-engineering structure named a National Treasure, in 2023. The plateau stands higher than the bridge, so the water crosses in stone pipes as an inverted siphon, and on release days a mallet knocks out the plugs and jets arc from both sides for a quarter of an hour, flushing out the silt.
The July 28, 2026 Kumamoto earthquake cancelled the releases of August 8, 9 and 11. A test flow then showed the bridge could still release water and the calendar resumed, but walking on top of the bridge is suspended for the rest of 2026 while the damage is studied (notice of August 12, 2026).
Getting there: 1 hr 29 min by Kumamoto Bus from Kumamoto Sakuramachi Bus Terminal (platform 1) to Tsujunkyo-mae. Best: 13:00 on release days from April to November, set on a yearly calendar (none from mid-May to mid-July or December to March).
Some 200 wild Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins live all year off Tsujishima, a small fishing island on the north shore of Amakusa's Shimoshima, and the boats from Futae usually find them within ten minutes of leaving. When the pod rolls up beside the boat, listen for the puff of each breath.
Getting there: 33 min by bus from Hondo Bus Center to the Amakusa City Dolphin Centre; boats five times a day (four from November to February), ¥3,000 plus a ¥500 conservation fee. Best: All year.
The stream through this pottery hamlet in the hills above Hita fills the wooden arms of the karausu until they tip and let their pestles fall, 'gii-gotton', pounding the clay for 20 to 30 days before it can be thrown. Nine families, all descended from the three that founded the kilns in the 18th century, still make Onta ware by hand, and when floods wrecked the mills in 2017 and again in 2023 they rebuilt them.
Getting there: 40 min by bus from JR Hita Station. Best: All year.
A bronze statue of Taki Rentaro, who spent his boyhood in Taketa, looks out from these high stone walls, and tradition says they gave him the ruined castle of his song 'Kojo no Tsuki' (The Moon over the Ruined Castle). Up in the main enclosure the wind hisses through the pines, and on a clear day the Sobo, Kuju and Aso ranges line the horizon.
Getting there: A 2.6 km walk or a short taxi ride from JR Bungo-Taketa Station; open 9:00–17:00, ¥300. Best: From the harvest moon to late autumn.
A 1 km path through 11 tunnels, a trolley road for charcoal and timber until the 1950s, follows the Iwase River past the 32 m wall of Byobu-iwa to Yagura-no-todoro, a 7.5 m fall. From the path it sounds like any mountain stream, but lean over the rock basin and the roar trapped inside booms up at you.
Getting there: 15 min by car from JR Kobayashi Station.
Sika deer roam in herds across this 1,200 m volcanic plateau in the Kirishima range, and in autumn the high 'kiin, kiin' of stags calling to the hinds rings out over the grassland after dark. Wait for dusk on the picnic lawn by the visitor centre or at the campground.
Getting there: Realistically a car trip. Best: Autumn, evening to early morning.
More than 10,000 cranes have wintered in the rice fields of the Izumi plain every year since 1997 (13,319 at the peak count of 2025–26), most of them hooded cranes with white-naped cranes among them. Their 'kruu, kruu' fills the sky when they lift off together at dawn, and the observation centre stands right at the edge of the paddies where they roost.
Getting there: 20 min by car from JR Izumi Station; observation centre open November 1 to the second Sunday of March, 9:00–17:00, ¥220. Best: Mid-October to mid-March; most birds in December and January.
The Anbo forest railway, laid in the 1920s to haul cedar out of the mountains, is the last working forest railway in Japan, but it carries no passengers: Yakushima Denko runs the lower line to service the hydro plants that power the island, and above Arakawa the trolleys bring down the waste from the climbers' toilets. Jomon-sugi hikers walk 8 km of those rails beside the rushing streams, so hearing a trolley rattle past takes luck.
Getting there: 40 min by mountain bus from the Yakusugi Museum to the Arakawa trailhead. Our Kagoshima guide
Mangroves line the Shiira River on Iriomote's east coast, and what you hear depends on the hour: Ryukyu scops owls at night, ruddy kingfishers at dawn and dusk from April to September, Yaeyama harpuchi frogs on the same summer nights. From June the day belongs to the big Ryukyu kumazemi cicadas.
Getting there: Ferry from Ishigaki to Ohara on Iriomote, then 8.5 km north by road. Best: April to September. Our Ishigaki guide
At lunar Obon, Okinawa's village youth groups dance eisa for the ancestors, singing to sanshin and drums as they go from house to house, and Uruma keeps two celebrated versions. Yakena's troupe dances in glittering costume, while neighbouring Heshikiya, home to the oldest youth association in Okinawa, dances barefoot in monk-like dress to nothing but small paranku hand drums.
Best: The 15th–16th of the seventh lunar month (August 16–17 in 2027); practice in the two months before.
Be under the Toki no Kane in Ueno Park when it is struck at noon. Then walk down the hill to Keisei-Ueno, take the Keisei Line to Keisei-Takasago and change to the shuttle that runs one stop to Shibamata, where a shop-lined approach leads to Shibamata Taishakuten. The Yagiri ferry landing on the Edogawa is a 1.2 km walk from the station, past the temple. The boat, under motor these days rather than oar, crosses from 10:00 to 16:00, though not on Mondays or Tuesdays in July and August unless it is a holiday, and from December to early March only at weekends, on holidays and on January 1–7. All by train, and it fits between lunch and dusk.
残したい日本の音風景100選 translates as "the 100 Japanese soundscapes we want to keep." In autumn 1995 the Environment Agency, which then ran Japan's environmental policy (it became the Ministry of the Environment in 2001), asked a panel to look at sound the other way round. Noise drew more complaints than any other of Japan's seven classic forms of pollution, and the agency's noise policy had been about cutting it. Since 1993, though, it had also been commissioning four local councils a year to try the "soundscape" approach, which treats sound as part of everyday life rather than as a nuisance. The list was the next step: ask people which everyday sounds they would miss, and protect the conditions that let them be heard.
Nominations ran from January to late March 1996 and drew 738 entries from local governments, individuals and citizens' groups. A nine-member panel read every one. Its chair was Yamashita Mitsuyasu, head of the Kobayashi Institute of Physical Research, and its members included Torigoe Keiko, then an associate professor at the University of the Sacred Heart in Tokyo, and the music critic Yukawa Reiko. They judged each nomination on how closely people lived with the sound, the state of the sound itself and local efforts to protect it, and kept a regional balance. The result was announced on June 5, 1996. The ministry sorts the 100 into 31 of living things, 19 of rivers, waterfalls and the sea, 37 of human life (festivals, bells, crafts and transport), 12 mixtures, and a single entry filed under "other: silence, or impossible to classify." Yamashita wrote that once the spring below his institute in Kokubunji made the 100 Remarkable Waters list, people stopped throwing rubbish into its stream, and he hoped these 100 sounds would do the same for noise.
The ministry's list still carries all 100 as chosen in 1996, but thirty years on, three of the sounds have stopped for now. A typhoon cut the Oigawa Railway below Senzu in September 2022, so its steam whistles no longer reach the listed spot in Kawanehon; work on the line began in August 2026, and the railway aims to run through to Senzu again by spring 2029. Tarumi's sand lance boats last worked Osaka Bay in a season that ran from March 4 to 8, 2023. The fishermen of Osaka and Hyogo have called the season off every year since, because the stock is too low. And Kanzeon-ji in Dazaifu, which used to ring its 7th-century bell only on New Year's Eve, has deposited it with the Kyushu National Museum for safekeeping; there was no ringing at the end of 2024 or 2025. Some places have come back after disasters. Floods wrecked the clay mills of Onta in 2017 and again in 2023, and the potters rebuilt them. The 2011 tsunami swept away the Rokkakudo pavilion above the Izura coast, and it stood again the next year. And the Mikurodo sea cave at Cape Muroto, closed for rockfall in 2015 and still called closed in many lists, has been open under steel canopies since 2019.
Most of the changes are quieter. Wild bell crickets have become hard to find on Sendai's Miyagino plain, where a residents' committee has bred and released them since 1990 to keep the sound going. The Yagiri ferry still crosses the Edogawa, but under motor rather than oar. Sanpoji Pond in Tokyo, known into the 1950s as the pond that never froze, has lost its springs to the city around it and is kept full from wells, and Osaka's classic pine-cricket meadow on the Yodo has been closed for expressway works since October 2019. The calendar has shifted too. The Yashima marsh frogs now start calling in early May, a month before the ministry's dates, Tsurui feeds its cranes only from December to February, and Yatsuo has suspended the late-August evenings of dancing that used to lead up to the Owara. We check each entry against the operator's or town's own announcements, and the rows below say what has changed.
In Japanorama, season 19 of Jet Lag: The Game, the players race for seven days from Nishi-Oyama, JR's southernmost station, to Wakkanai, the northernmost in Japan, and they have to clear a challenge to get out of each prefecture. One of the cards that can turn up on the shared board is Record an Iconic Sound: track down any one of these 100 and get it on your phone. To play along on your own trip, start with the time bells, which keep to the clock (Sapporo's strikes every hour, day and night, and Zenko-ji's every hour from 10:00 to 16:00), and save the cranes, frogs and festivals for when the calendar lines up.
A list of 100 sounds, each tied to a place, chosen in 1996 by Japan's Environment Agency as worth preserving. In Japanese it is 残したい日本の音風景100選. It covers nature (drift ice, cranes, cicadas, waterfalls), bells and drums (Kawagoe's Toki no Kane, Dogo Onsen's time drum), festivals (Nebuta, Awa Odori, Eisa) and working sounds such as Onta's clay mills and Inami's woodcarvers.
The Environment Agency (now the Ministry of the Environment) took public nominations from January to late March 1996 and received 738. A nine-member panel chaired by Yamashita Mitsuyasu of the Kobayashi Institute of Physical Research picked 100, weighing how closely people live with each sound and what is being done to protect it, and keeping a regional balance. The list was announced on June 5, 1996.
Nearly all, but as of September 2026 three are silent for now. No train has run through to Senzu, the Oigawa Railway's listed spot in Kawanehon, since a typhoon cut the line in September 2022; the railway aims to reopen it by spring 2029, and until then its steam whistles can be heard only lower down the valley in Shimada, from the Thomas and Percy trains that run on set days through December 2026. Tarumi's sand lance fishing has been on hold since 2023, the Osaka Bay season called off in 2024, 2025 and 2026. Kanzeon-ji's bell has gone to the Kyushu National Museum for safekeeping, and the temple did not ring it on New Year's Eve in 2024 or 2025. Several others have changed: the Yagiri ferry crosses under motor rather than oar, wild bell crickets are hard to find at Miyagino, Sanpoji Pond's springs have dried up, the Yodo's classic pine-cricket meadow has been closed since 2019 (the crickets still sing upstream at Toyosato), Suwado's waterwheel had stopped turning by 2023, and the Suikintei water chime is in the grounds of a care home whose visiting hours we could not confirm. The Mikurodo cave at Cape Muroto, which some lists still call closed, has been open again since April 2019.
Inside Tokyo: the Toki no Kane bell in Ueno Park (6:00, 12:00 and 18:00), Shibamata Taishakuten and the Yagiri ferry, Sanpoji Pond in Shakujii Park and the Seikei zelkova avenue in Kichijoji. Day trips: Kawagoe's bell tower, the candy makers on the Kawasaki Daishi approach, Yokohama's ships' horns at midnight on New Year's Eve, and Sawara's Toyohashi bridge, which spills water every 30 minutes.
The festivals: Chagu Chagu Umakko (second Saturday of June), Hakata Gion Yamakasa (the floats run July 10–15, the Oiyama race at 4:59 am on the 15th), Nebuta and Neputa (early August), Awa Odori (August 12–15), Jokoji's Kawachi Ondo (August 23–24), Owara Kaze no Bon (September 1–3), the Nada fighting festival (October 14–15), Karatsu Kunchi (November 2–4) and the Yakena and Heshikiya eisa at lunar Obon (August 16–17 in 2027). Then the fixed dates: the Mannoike sluice on June 15, the Sugashima ama festival on the Saturday nearest July 11, the Matsu no Kanjin conch round in central Tsuruoka on December 1–10, and Yokohama's ships' horns at midnight on New Year's Eve. Tsujun Bridge spouts at 13:00 on the days in its yearly calendar, April to November (walking on the bridge is off for the rest of 2026), Hakodate's church bells ring for the Saturday-evening and Sunday-morning services, and Kanazawa's Teramachi bells on Saturday evenings. The SL Yamaguchi runs at weekends and on holidays from May to December 20 in 2026, with no trains in September.
At the forest and mountain ones, yes. Brown bears live in Hokkaido and Asian black bears in the forests of Honshu, while the Environment Ministry has no recent sightings on record for Kyushu or Okinawa. Bears hurt 238 people in Japan from April 2025 to March 2026, 13 fatally and two-thirds of them between September and November, and 60 more from April to August 2026, with six deaths, all in Tohoku. In September 2026 the Asahidake visitor centre was logging young bears on the road below the onsen village and tracks on the marsh boardwalk, and Fukushima Prefecture has a bear advisory out until November 30. After a bear hurt someone on the Shomyo Falls path in May, the town put up repellers along it that give off a whine it likens to fingernails on a blackboard. The awkward part for listeners is that bears are busiest around dawn and dusk, when so much birdsong is at its best, and a bear bell goes quiet the moment you stop to listen. Check the town's sighting reports first and stay away if bears have been seen, don't go alone, keep a bell or radio sounding, and leave quietly if you find droppings, tracks or claw marks.