Wakayama, Gateway to the Kii Peninsula

Most travellers know Wakayama only as a name on the map between Osaka and the Pacific, which is precisely why it stays uncrowded. The city is arranged around Wakayama Castle, a white keep on a hilltop raised in 1585 for Toyotomi Hideyoshi's brother and later held by one of the three senior branches of the Tokugawa family. The tower was rebuilt after wartime bombing, but the massive original stonework survives, along with the roofed Ohashi corridor bridge that crosses the moat to the lord's garden. Lunch below it is famously specific: Wakayama ramen, a dark soy and pork-bone broth eaten with pressed mackerel sushi and a boiled egg you take from a bowl on the counter and pay for on trust.

The bay is the other half of the story. At Kuroshio Market in Marina City, fishmongers break down a whole bluefin with a metre-long blade several times a day and the counters behind sell it minutes later. The tidal flats of Wakaura have been a subject for poets since the eighth century; the 231 steps of Kimiidera deliver Kansai's earliest cherry blossom and a view along the whole coast; and boats run out to Tomogashima, four small islands strewn with the ivy-swallowed brick batteries of a Meiji-era fortress.

Then the prefecture opens southward. Yuasa, an hour down the coast, is where soy sauce was first brewed in Japan and still keeps its wooden merchant streets and working breweries. Arida's terraced slopes grow the country's best-loved mikan oranges; Minabe's orchards supply the ume plums for umeboshi. Beyond them wait Mount Koya, the Kumano pilgrim roads and the onsen towns of the Pacific shore. Wakayama is the doorway to all of it, and a very good reason to give Japan more than its greatest hits.