Shirahama, Where Japan Bathes by the Sea

Shirahama means white beach, and the name has been doing its job for well over a thousand years. This stretch of the Wakayama coast appears in the eighth-century chronicles as a place where emperors travelled from the capital to take the waters, which makes **Sakinoyu** — a pair of rough stone tubs set directly into the rocks at the waterline, no roof, no walls — one of the oldest baths in Japan still in use. You lower yourself in, the Pacific breaks a couple of metres away, spray lands on your shoulders, and there is nothing between you and the horizon. Nobody forgets it. The beach itself curves for six hundred metres of genuinely white sand, kept topped up with sand shipped from Western Australia, and it is a proper Japanese summer scene: parasols, shaved ice, families in the shallows. Walk south and the coastline turns dramatic. **Sandanbeki** drops fifty metres straight into the sea, with a cavern at its base once used to hide the boats of the Kumano navy, while **Senjojiki** is a great tilted shelf of soft sandstone that the swell has carved into steps and terraces you can wander barefoot. Just offshore sits **Engetsu Island**, a slab of rock pierced by a natural arch; on the right evenings around the equinox the setting sun drops neatly through the hole, and the whole promenade turns out to watch. The town is unashamedly a resort — hot-spring hotels, footbaths on street corners, the Tore-tore market selling the day's catch, and Adventure World, where Japan has had extraordinary success breeding giant pandas. But it is also a waypoint on the Ohechi coastal branch of the Kumano Kodo, which means Shirahama works as both a beach stop and a soft landing between temples. A very easy place to add a couple of slow days to a trip through Japan.