Escape on a holiday to Japan’s sandy dunes and rocky shores
Explore a side of Japan that you have never seen before
The crotchety-looking camel stamps its feet and kicks up a miniature sandstorm that drifts away across the dunes. Beyond the creature’s shaggy hump, the ocean of sand is marked by footprints and slopes away to a pale green oasis of grass and shrubs. A little further on, another dune rises almost sheer and, from the top, the view is of a completely different type of sea.
In front of me are the blue-grey waters of the Sea of Japan, flecked with the occasional whitecap, while away to the west is the mouth of the Sendai River and a port.
The Tottori Sand Dunes are part of Japan’s Sanin Kaigan National Park and a breathtaking and unique natural formation that is sufficiently expansive to give the visitor the impression that they are tramping through a stretch of North African desert or the American badlands.
The dunes first began to attract interest after novelist Takeo Arishima visited Tottori Prefecture in 1923 and described the dunes’ desolate beauty in a poem, although they had been an attraction for local people for far longer.
Undulating 20km along the coast of southwest Japan, the dunes stretch as far as 2km inland and are in constant shape-shifting motion. They tower in places – up to 50 metres above the sea – and are ringed by pine forests, with local entrepreneurs introducing the camels to give visitors an added sense that they are a long way from the geisha, cherry blossoms and temples that are the common image of Japan.
“This archipelago stretches for 3,000km and has the ice and snow of the far north of Hokkaido at one end and the tropical islands of Okinawa at the other, which gives Japan a unique range of environments and things to see and do,” says Paul Christie, CEO of Walk Japan (walkjapan.com).
“A lot of people – particularly first-time visitors to Japan – take the ‘Golden Route’ of Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka, but I would suggest that does not provide a completely genuine picture of the country,” he says. “You need to get off the beaten path, you need to go where the tourists are few-and-far-between and you need to meet local people.