Momijidani Park

This guide to Momijidani Park in Hiroshima follows Iwakuniya Sobee, a modest tea house owner who began pressing maple saplings into a ravine that wasn't his in 1854, with no obvious reason to keep going. It traces how his private obsession became one of Japan's most photographed autumn views, drawing members of the imperial family, and how his descendants turned the tea house into the ryokan Iwaso that still stands today. The guide also reaches into September 1945, when a typhoon tore through the valley he had spent decades planting. Stand on the bridge now, roughly where Sobee first knelt in the mud.