Where to Stay in Kurashiki, Okayama-ken

What is Kurashiki known for?

Willow-lined canals wind past white-walled storehouses and stone bridges in the Bikan quarter, a merchant town preserved from the days of the shoguns, and one of its old warehouses holds a famous museum of Western art. Boats drift down the willow canals. Canals and storehouses mark the town.

What are the main landmarks in Kurashiki?

The Bikan quarter is the heart of old Kurashiki. Willow-lined canals, white storehouses, and arched stone bridges fill the preserved old town, the emblem of the city, along the water. Museums fill the old kura.

The Ohara Museum of Art holds its European masters, while the Museum of Folkcraft and the old Ohashi House keep the life of the merchant town.

What is the history of Kurashiki?

Kurashiki grew as a rice town of the shoguns. In the days of the samurai the town was a storehouse port, gathering the rice of the region into white-walled warehouses by its canals, and its name itself means the village of storehouses. Boats carried the harvest.

Barges poled the rice down the canals to the sea, and merchants grew rich and built the fine houses and kura that still line the water. A rich family gave the town its art. In the early twentieth century a local mill owner, Ohara, gathered a great collection of European painting and built a museum for it, the first of Western art in the land.

The old quarter was saved from change. While other towns tore down their past, Kurashiki kept its canals and storehouses whole and turned them into a quarter of museums and shops. The willows still shade the water.

Kurashiki guards its canal town in the heart of Okayama.

Where is Kurashiki?

Kurashiki lies on the plain of southern Okayama, near the Seto Inland Sea. The city spreads across a flat delta of old rice land between low hills and the sea, in the mild southwest of Honshu, where canals still thread the old town. Green hills rise around the plain.

The inland sea lies close to the south.

What is the climate of Kurashiki?

Kurashiki has a mild, sunny inland-sea climate. Warm summers and gentle winters cross the sheltered plain, and the Inland Sea keeps the weather dry and clear for much of the year, with a wet spell in early summer. The rains come in June.

Sunshine fills most of the year.

How do you get to Kurashiki?

Kurashiki lies just west of Okayama city in western Japan. Bullet trains stop at nearby Okayama on the line to Hiroshima, and local trains and roads run the short way to the town. Buses run out from Kurashiki to the smaller towns along the coast.

Most arrive by train through Okayama.