Welcome to Okayama

Okayama is the capital of the prefecture of the same name, located in Chugoku on the island of Honshu. It has about 700,000 inhabitants.

The city is home to one of Japan’s three most famous gardens: the Korakuen. Built at the beginning of the 18th century, it uses at the highest level a landscape technique known as shakkei (“lending landscape”) which consists of inserting elements outside the garden in such a way that they appear to be part of it, for example the Okayama castle, the surrounding mountains and other distant elements are framed between the trees, the buildings and the hills inside the garden so that they appear to be part of it or make it a background.

The city is famous as the setting of the Japanese fable “Momotaro”.