01 · The cape
Omaezaki Lighthouse
For 240 years a village kept an oil lamp burning in a paper box on this headland. Then a warship went onto the rocks, and Japan sent for an engineer from Scotland.
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Photo: Alpsdake / CC BY-SA 4.0What Omaezaki is
Omaezaki in 4 stories
Omaezaki is the southernmost point of Shizuoka, a town of about 31,000 on a cape between Suruga Bay and the Enshu coast, half-way between Tokyo and Osaka. Its port handles car carriers and containers; cruise ships have called since 2019, and the town turns out with fishing flags and taiko for each one. Behind the cape lies Makinohara, the largest tea plateau in Japan, and beyond it the Tokaido line towns of Kakegawa and Shizuoka.
02 · The tea
The Makinohara plateau
In 1869 the shogun's bodyguards lost their job. The next year the porters who carried travellers across the Oi River lost theirs. Both groups were sent up the same empty hill to plant tea.
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03 · The castle
Kakegawa Castle
The lord who built the first keep here took his carpenters to Kochi and built another like it. Four centuries later, Kakegawa used the Kochi one as the pattern to rebuild its own.
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04 · The bay
Suruga Bay
The sea floor off this coast drops to 2,500 metres. That depth feeds a shrimp caught commercially nowhere else in Japan, and a fishery that shut itself down in 2018 to save it.
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Read the culture, then plan the clock: the Omaezaki day plans and the Top 10 turn all of this into a day that ends at the gangway with an hour to spare.