The hook
The prefecture with the fewest foreign visitors in Japan, on the Sea of Japan coast — holding the shrine where, in the tenth lunar month, every deity in the country is said to leave home and gather.
01Why it's worth it
Izumo Taisha is among the oldest and most important Shinto shrines in Japan, older in the records than Ise. Its shimenawa rope is enormous, several tonnes of rice straw, and the main hall is roofed in cypress bark rather than tile. The month the rest of Japan calls Kannazuki — "the month without gods" — is called Kamiarizuki here, "the month with gods", because this is where they are said to have gone. It is a shrine associated with en-musubi, the tying of bonds, so the crowd is full of people praying about relationships rather than sightseeing.
Matsue, an hour east, has one of only twelve original castle keeps left in Japan — not a concrete reconstruction — sitting above a moat you can tour by boat. Lafcadio Hearn, the Greek-Irish writer who did more than anyone to interpret Japan to the West in the 1890s, lived here; his house and museum are open.
Between them, the Adachi Museum of Art at Yasugi has been ranked Japan's best garden by a specialist journal for over twenty consecutive years — a garden built to be looked at through window frames rather than walked in, which is either brilliant or perverse depending on your mood.
The coast is rocky and grey-green, the sake is good, and the whole San'in region moves slowly.
02How to experience it
Fly to Izumo, or take the Sunrise Izumo — one of the last scheduled sleeper trains in Japan, an experience in itself and bookable only through a Japanese ticket office. Base in Matsue, day-trip to Izumo Taisha and Adachi. Three or four days. October if you want the gods' month.
The honest note
There is very little English, and the reason to come is the reason for that: this is not a place that has organised itself around foreign visitors.
It is genuinely far. The San'in coast is the far side of Honshu from the Tokyo–Kyoto–Osaka corridor, and getting here is the trip's main cost.
Castles are not for everyone, and Matsue's is a real one — dark, steep, wooden, and empty inside. One traveller who had done ten of them was blunt that they remain "consistently my least favourite parts in Japan… for the entrance fees." If castles bore you, this one will too.
The Adachi garden cannot be entered. You view it through glass. People arrive expecting to walk in it.
From the locals
The clearest recommendation comes from a thread asking for less-known places on a second trip to Japan: "Shimane, the 2nd least populated prefecture of Japan, is a very underrated, worthwhile visit. Izumo Taisha and the surrounding area is stunning, regardless of whether you are aware of the cultural or historical significance of the shrine."
And the claim is measurable rather than impressionistic. Answering someone who wanted to get properly away without landing in a random village, one commenter pulled the national tourism statistics: "The least foreigner-visited prefectures last year are Shimane, Fukui, Tottori, Akita, and Kochi (all under 100k foreigner hotel night[s])."
It is also the standard advice for travelling during Japan's worst week. On Golden Week: "It's a bad time to go to Kyoto, Kamakura, theme parks, popular tourist spots, etc. Perfectly good time to get out to places like Tohoku, Shikoku, Shimane, etc."
And the prefecture has the effect on people that this atlas looks for — someone identifying a photograph of a shrine in Tachikuekyō gorge realised they had driven past without knowing: "I passed nearby 2 years ago and didn't know about it… now I have to go back to Shimane."