Keino Matsubara Beach

Two and a half kilometres of pale sand on the west coast of Awaji Island, with about 50,000 black pines standing behind it. Some of the trees are centuries old, bent inland by the wind off the Inland Sea. The combination has a name in Japanese, hakusha seisho, white sand and green pine, and this is one of the places the phrase was coined for. A Manyoshu poem mentions the beach, which puts it in writing more than 1,200 years ago.

It faces due west across the Harima Sea toward the Ieshima islands, and that is the whole point. The sunsets here made the national hundred-best list, and on a clear evening between October and March the sun goes down between the pine trunks with tankers on the horizon for scale. Bring a jacket; the wind off the water in winter is serious.

The swimming season runs early July to late August, with lifeguards, showers and changing rooms only during those weeks. Outside that window the beach is open and unsupervised and the pine grove has walking paths that stay pleasant year round. There is a campsite, which makes this one of the few beaches in Hyogo where you can legally sleep by the sand in summer, and it books up well ahead for August weekends.

Awaji Island has no railway. You will need a car, or the highway bus from Kobe or Osaka to a stop on the main road and a taxi from there. That inconvenience is why the beach is quiet in June and September while Suma is not.