The hidden waterfalls and shrines in the beautiful forests of eastern Tottori, Japan

Not long ago, I had an image of Japan as a country of big cities and hardly any places to enjoy peace and quiet.

The hard climb to Otayama, on the island of Hokkaido, the most dangerous shrine in Japan
The intrepid path that children took to a now abandoned school in Japan

However, 67% of Japan's land area is forested. If that's not enough, just consider that in Spain it's 37%, in Italy it's 36.7%, in France it's 31.7%, and in the United States it's 8.5%. In Tottori Prefecture, about 500 km west of Tokyo, forests account for 45% of its land area. The coastal city of Tottori, the capital of the prefecture, has a population of 189,000 and boasts a beautiful green landscape surrounded by mountains to the west, south, and east.

On August 22nd, the YouTube channel Watatabi (わた旅), which I highly recommend subscribing to (it has some excellent reports on Japan), published a video touring some of the forests in the eastern part of that prefecture. The video shows some waterfalls and Shinto shrines hidden in these forests. If you want to take a quiet walk through nature without leaving home, this video is an excellent option (the video is in Japanese; you can activate the automatic English subtitles in the bottom bar of the player):

You can see some screenshots from this magnificent video here, which show just a small part of the beautiful places featured. Here we can see the Gongen Falls. As you can see in the video, the path to get there is incredible.

An image of the forests in this area. It looks like an artificial intelligence image made from the stories of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Ejima Shinto Shrine, near Wakasa. The shrine is hidden deep in the forest, on a mountain, far from the madding crowd.

Ejima Shrine. The video shows it in detail. One thing that caught my attention was the complete absence of vandalism. There's no graffiti anywhere. I can't imagine what this place would look like if it had been built in Spain...