Shodoshima

The olives are more than a century old. Shōdoshima, in Japan's Kagawa Prefecture, is where Japan's first olive plantation took root in the early 1900s, and the groves have spread across the hills ever since. An island in the Seto Inland Sea that makes olive oil, soy sauce and hand-stretched noodles should not work as a travel destination. It works precisely because it should not.

Shōdoshima is the second-largest island in the Inland Sea and, in Japan's creation myth, one of the first born to the gods. Soy sauce has been brewed here for centuries in wooden warehouses, and the soy-sauce village keeps a museum and working breweries where the smell of the mash hangs in the lanes. Olive Park occupies the ground of that first plantation, with the original trees and a Greek windmill, and the island's Mediterranean air is not entirely an illusion. Angel Road, a sandbar to a cluster of islets, appears and vanishes with the tide, and inland the Kankakei gorge's ropeway swings over rock pinnacles that blaze with maple in November.