Places in Japan You’ve Got to Visit — 5ch Rates Them ‘Charm 5, Convenience 1’

Background and Key Points

Places in Japan You’ve Got to Visit — 5ch Rates Them ‘Charm 5, Convenience 1’

Several entries in this thread lean on specifics that need unpacking for non-Japanese readers. Takachiho Gorge in Miyazaki is tied to the Amaterasu myth cycle — specifically the “descent of the heavenly grandson” (tenson kōrin), the founding legend in which the sun goddess’s grandson Ninigi comes down to earth, making the site a kind of mythological ground zero for the imperial lineage story, which is why one poster jokingly calls skipping it “treason.” The “atomic energy tour” list (Fukushima Daiichi, the Rokkasho reprocessing plant in Aomori, Ningyo-toge uranium mine, the decommissioned Monju fast-breeder reactor, JAERI, and the Nagasaki/Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Museums) strings together Japan’s entire nuclear-power and nuclear-history footprint, from prewar research to the 2011 Fukushima meltdown, as a single dark-tourism itinerary. The research-institute list (University of Tokyo, Kyoto University, RIKEN, AIST, JAXA’s Sagamihara campus) nods to Japan’s actual scientific establishment rather than tourist infrastructure.

The thread doesn’t really argue over which places are best — it splits over what “convenience” (benri) even means as a rating axis. Posters can’t agree whether it should measure transit access, proximity to a station, or something else entirely, and the joke escalates until people are assigning nonsensical scores like “convenience: 18” to make the point that the metric has broken down.

What’s easy to miss: several of these “curveball” spots — Fukushima Daiichi and the Monju site especially — aren’t open for casual sightseeing; access is restricted or requires special arrangement, so the ratings are more thought experiment than travel advice.