The hillside lanes of Onomichi that most visitors walk straight past

Most people who stop in Onomichi do it wrong. They step off the Shinkansen at Shin-Onomichi, transfer to the local line, get off at Onomichi station, look at the sea for twenty minutes, buy a lemon cake, and get back on the train. They miss the entire point of the place.

Onomichi is a port city in Hiroshima Prefecture that sits on a steep hillside above the Onomichi Channel. The waterfront looks fine, but the real city is above it, accessible by a ropeway or, better, on foot through a web of stone-paved lanes so narrow two people have to turn sideways to pass each other. These paths were built for a city that expected people to walk, not drive, and they have barely changed since.

The ropeway drops you near the top and you can wander down, which is the sensible direction. What you find up there is not curated or signposted. There are temples, and a lot of them, because Onomichi has 25 packed into a remarkably small area. But between and around them are the lanes themselves: stone walls furry with moss, wooden houses with potted plants crowding the doorways, laundry on lines, a smell of old timber and something frying somewhere. Cats sleep on warm concrete or watch you from window ledges. Onomichi has a serious cat population, and the hillside is where they live.

The Tenmangu Shrine is up here, and the view from its stone steps across the rooftops and out to the islands of the Seto Inland Sea is one of the better views in western Japan. Nobody is selling tickets to it. You just climb the steps.

If you take the Senkoji Ropeway up and walk the Senkoji Park path eastward before descending, the whole loop takes about an hour and a half at a slow pace. Budget more if you stop, which you should. There is a coffee roaster called Onomichi U2 down near the waterfront that was converted from a cycling warehouse, and it is worth passing through at the end. The whole area around the harbor has been quietly, unobtrusively renovated over the last decade without being turned into a theme park about itself, which is rarer than it sounds in Japan.

Getting there is easy from Hiroshima, about 70 minutes by local JR train, which is covered by the JR Pass. From Osaka or Kyoto it is around two and a half hours. Onomichi works well as a stop between Hiroshima and Fukuoka if you are heading west, or as a day trip from Hiroshima if you are not. The city is small enough to understand in an afternoon and interesting enough that you will probably feel like you needed longer.

One practical note: the hillside lanes are uneven and steep in places. Comfortable shoes matter more here than in most Japanese cities. If it rains, the stone paths get slippery, but they also look extraordinary, and most of the temples have covered areas where you can wait it out while listening to the water come off the roof tiles.

The thing about Onomichi is that it does not make a fuss about itself. There is no single attraction to photograph and leave, no admission fee at the center of the experience. It is just a city that still functions like a city, on a hill, with cats, and lanes that most travelers on the Hiroshima day-trip circuit never think to climb.