Matsue

Matsue is a city blessed with such overwhelming beauty, and good food that you will be stuck on what to look at and what to do first. It's where the lake named Shinji-ko empties into the lagoon called Nakaumi-ko, which connects directly with the Sea of Japan. This makes Matsue a seafood lover's paradise, bursting with fresh fish and specializing in both kinds of eel, all kinds of shrimp, shellfish, carp, sea bass, smelt, whitebait, and famous black shijimi clams from Shinji-ko. The water also provides the city with a lovely network of canals.

Matsue also attracts and holds onto some of the country's most welcoming and interesting people, both foreign and native. This remote realm is a traveler's favorite, and once you've come here you'll surely be back—it's that kind of place. In the 1890s the famed journalist-novelist Lafcadio Hearn came here and promptly fell in love—with the place, and then a local woman—and let the entire world know about it.