The Most Beautiful Places in Tochigi Prefecture
7 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Tochigi Prefecture are Kegon Falls, Nikkō Tōshō-gū and Cedar Avenue of Nikkō. The list covers 7 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Tochigi lies at the northern edge of the Kantō plain, where the flat country around Tokyo meets volcanic mountains. Mount Nantai and its neighbours dammed Lake Chūzenji and feed the gorges and waterfalls of Nikkō, and in the seventeenth century the Tokugawa shoguns chose this sacred mountain district for the mausoleum of the dynasty's founder. Lower down, the soft volcanic tuff around Utsunomiya gave the prefecture a building stone of its own.
Nikkō Tōshō-gū, where Tokugawa Ieyasu is enshrined, is the most richly decorated shrine in Japan, its Yōmeimon gate crowded with carved and lacquered figures and its stable carrying the famous three wise monkeys. It belongs with Futarasan Shrine and Rinnō-ji to the Shrines and Temples of Nikkō, a World Heritage Site, and the Cedar Avenue of Nikkō, planted as an offering in the seventeenth century, lines the old approach roads with thousands of towering trees. Above the town, Kegon Falls drops almost a hundred metres from the outlet of Lake Chūzenji.
The rest of the prefecture is gentler. Ashikaga Flower Park is known for a great wisteria whose branches are propped on trellises into a single purple canopy. The Ōya History Museum opens a vast underground quarry where Ōya stone was cut by hand and then by machine, and Tobu World Square gathers famous buildings from around the world in miniature.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Kegon Falls | Waterfall | |
| 2 | Nikkō Tōshō-gū | Shinto shrine | |
| 3 | Cedar Avenue of Nikkō | Remarkable tree | |
| 4 | Shrines and Temples of Nikkō | Temple | ✓ |
| 5 | Tobu World Square | Miniature park | |
| 6 | Ashikaga Flower Park | Urban park | |
| 7 | Ōya History Museum | Quarry |
01 Kegon Falls
Japan · 39 km from Utsunomiya36.738° N 139.502° E
Orbixx · CC BY-SA 3.0 A single column of water drops 97 metres down a sheer volcanic wall, while a curtain of a dozen thinner streams seeps out of the cliff face around it.
Did you know? At normal flow the main plunge is only about 7 metres wide, making its 97-metre drop look like a narrow white column.
02 Nikkō Tōshō-gū
Japan · 33.6 km from Utsunomiya36.759° N 139.599° E
Jpatokal · CC BY-SA 4.0 Nikkō Tōshō-gū is the opposite of the restraint usually associated with Japanese shrines.
Did you know? Nikkō lies almost due north of Edo Castle, and tradition holds that Ieyasu wished to guard the realm from the position of the Pole Star.
03 Cedar Avenue of Nikkō
Japan · 25 km from Utsunomiya36.723° N 139.691° E
koh-etsu · Public domain For more than 35 kilometres, the old roads into Nikkō run between walls of giant Japanese cedars, their straight red-brown trunks rising like columns on either side.
Did you know? The avenue is steadily shrinking: a 1962 count found 16,479 trees, while by 2025 the number had fallen to about 12,000.
04 Shrines and Temples of Nikkō
Japan · 31.9 km from Utsunomiya36.748° N 139.611° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by ArvidO from Pixabay Nikkō is less a single temple than a sacred mountain landscape: a hillside of tall cedars above the town where Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples have grown into one another for more than a thousand years.
Did you know? From 1636 the vermilion Shinkyō bridge could be crossed only by imperial messengers; ordinary visitors were allowed to cross from 1973.
05 Tobu World Square
Japan · 31.9 km from Utsunomiya36.808° N 139.712° E
Jiang Dong-Qin · Public domain Tobu World Square is a miniature park in the Kinugawa Onsen hot-spring district of Nikkō, and it takes its craft unusually seriously.
Did you know? The collection keeps growing: Taipei 101 joined in 2015, Taiwan's Fuguijiao Lighthouse in 2018 and Bangkok's Wat Arun in 2019.
06 Ashikaga Flower Park
Japan36.315° N 139.522° E
ja:User:京浜にけ · CC BY-SA 3.0 Under a single trellis the size of a small square, a curtain of lilac-purple flowers hangs so thickly that the branches holding it up disappear.
Did you know? The park's first winter illumination, in 2001, used about 60,000 bulbs, compared with roughly five million less than two decades later.
07 Ōya History Museum
Japan · 6.9 km from Utsunomiya36.600° N 139.825° E
Asanagi · CC0 Beneath the hills on the western edge of Utsunomiya, a flight of steps leads down into a man-made cavern so large it seems to have been built rather than dug: an underground quarry of about 20,000 square metres, around 30 metres deep on average, with sheer pale-green walls and square-cut pillars receding into the dim…
Did you know? Freshly cut Ōya stone is bluish with moisture and dries to a brownish white; its brown flecks, called "miso", are softer clay minerals that weather fastest.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Tochigi Prefecture?
- On our list, Kegon Falls ranks first, followed by Nikkō Tōshō-gū and Cedar Avenue of Nikkō.
- Who is buried at Nikkō Tōshō-gū?
- Tokugawa Ieyasu, founder of the Tokugawa shogunate, is enshrined there as a deity; his grandson Iemitsu rebuilt the shrine in its lavish present form in the 1630s.
- How tall is Kegon Falls?
- Kegon Falls drops about 97 metres, carrying the outflow of Lake Chūzenji into a gorge below.
- What is Ōya stone?
- Ōya stone is a soft, greenish volcanic tuff quarried around Utsunomiya. It is easy to carve and resists fire, and Frank Lloyd Wright used it in his Imperial Hotel in Tokyo.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Tochigi Prefecture?
- In our collection, the places in Tochigi Prefecture are most often waterfalls (1), city parks (1), trees (1) and temples (1).
- How many places are on this list in Tochigi Prefecture?
- The list covers 7 places.