Regions & prefectures
JapanRegions & prefectures
Ibaraki
The laboratory city of Tsukuba, a garden of three thousand plum trees and the capital of nattō.
- Capital
- Mito
- Status
- Prefecture
- Region
- Kantō
- Must-see
- Kairaku-en garden and its plum trees
- Local specialty
- Mito nattō, sweet potato, melon
Tokyo’s northern neighbour, Ibaraki holds Tsukuba, a science city built from scratch in the 1960s to relieve the capital, now home to the space agency and some thirty public institutes. Mito, once the seat of a Tokugawa branch, has Kairaku-en, one of Japan’s three great gardens and, unusually for its time, open to commoners from the start.
What to see there
Places, dishes and traditions tied to this territory.