Can speak Japanese, 2 wk solo backpack trip

Hello, I can speak and read Japanese fine. I am 29 and want to plan a 2 week trip to just wander around in October or November and stay in hostels.

What are some good areas to take advantage of being able to speak Japanese? Maybe areas popular with Japanese backpackers themselves? Open to pretty much anywhere.

I enjoy natural beauty a lot, hiking, biking, beach, new food, onsen, cooking, ect. Big city stuff is also cool but not for the whole trip.

You can practise Japanese everywhere, touristy place or not.
I would look through the destinations page on this website and see where you like the look of, also look at the Japan-guide YouTube channel.
Then come back with more detailed questions.

If you can read Japanese then shouldn't you be looking up Japanese websites which offer more and varied information on your interest rather than this English Language website. Maybe the Japanese speaking contributors to this forum and help out.

Get a rental car if you don’t want to see international tourists. The further away from the station the less international tourists.

But honestly, your question comes across a bit weird. You’re in Japan, everybody will speak Japanese.

I am looking atJapanese resources as well.

The speaking Japanese thing got a lot of focus but it was mostly provided to show that I am open to places that are more rural and have less tourist infrastructure as well. Renting a car is a fun idea but I would still like some destination recommendations as well. :)

Perhaps you can start doing some research on the bottom ranking few prefectures for rural settings https://www.statista.com/statistics/1140184/japan-number-domestic-trav...

The entire country is wide open to you. But you could at that time see some nice autumn colors, starting in the Tohoku region in October.
https://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2014_where.html

October is also a good time to see the cosmos flowers. Plus if you can drive there, the Sera Kogen Farm in Hiroshima has stunning dahlia fields.
https://sera.ne.jp/sk/dahlia/

I did a tour of Japan in 2017 for 2 months practically exclusively of rural areas / regions with little international tourists. The one place with a shocking amount of tourists was Takayama (and I didn’t like it). Uji also had a lot of tourists but I had expected that and did my tourism in the early morning.

Find here description of the entire tour:
http://bicycletraveljapan.blogspot.com/search/label/TdJ2017?m=1

There are hundreds of places you could go… Three that I enjoyed that were essentially devoid of foreign tourists were along the JR Iida Line (a two night trip that included Komagane and the Tenryukyo Gorge), coastal Mie prefecture (outstanding, except it always seems to rain when I go there), and Minobusan in Yamanashi (a day trip from Tokyo). But I could think of many more. Just don’t go to the tourist meccas such as Takayama, Miyajima, and Nikko. A very small percentage of the locations in Japan suck up a very large percentage of the foreign tourists, and if you stay away from those places you will find that you can put your Japanese to good use. Many Japanese people seem to generally love it when tourists start to converse with them in Japanese, and are competent enough at it to have a meaningful conversation. My own experience over the years is that they will be so glad that they don’t have to try to communicate in English that they will be very patient even if your Japanese is not fluent.

If you can increase your budget just a little, you can find wonderful places to stay that might be more enjoyable than hostels, if you want to avoid international tourists. Avoid chain hotels like the plague, but look for small, proprietor-operated hotels, ryokans (not the fancy kind), pensions, and minshukus, ideally ones that are only bookable direct with the property or else through the Japanese sites of Rakuten or Jalan. These are often surprisingly inexpensive and serve wonderful meals. (Read the Japanese reviews on Rakuten and Jalan.) I have stayed at a number of memorable places like this over the years, where the hotels themselves, rather than any particular activity or sightseeing venue, were a major highlight of my trip and remain as some of my happiest memories. What they all had in common were that they were locally run and generally not listed on sites like booking.com.

@PH
Do you realise you have to pay $80 a month to access those statistics?

My apology I didn't realise was a subscription link. I Googled "least visited prefectures in Japan" for curiosity and it was one of the search results. It showed full list when you clicked from Google search

I just tried again and it worked (from Google search results). Anyway the bottom 3 prefectures were Shimane, Tokushima and Kochi.

You really do not need to limit yourself to the least-visited prefectures. What I would suggest instead is to limit the use of English-language web sites and do online trip research mostly using Japanese web sites. This will not only bring up ideas for places with fewer foreign tourists, it will bring up ideas for more enjoyable places to visit, sleep, recreate, and dine/drink in places that do have a lot of foreign tourists, like Kyoto and Tokyo. My own Japanese proficiency is fairly low and I sometimes have to discipline myself to search for information in Japanese, but the nature and quality of the results generally make it worth the effort.

Well, as an exception to my pronouncement in my preceding post, I would say that LikeBike’s blog is a treasure trove of nicely illustrated suggestions. There are also many other good traveler blogs and travel reports (including the ones on this site) in English. But even more if you look at Japanese blogs.

i went 21 straight years to Hokkaido, then Covid came so just went back this June. There are very few foreigners in Hokkaido. Sapporo is a great city. Many national parks, hiking, great food and the people are most helpful. the Onsens are top shelf too

I, being a Japanese-speaking Japanese traveler, love to just walk around and use buses, which can both be tricky if you can't ask questions in Japanese, and hop into cafes and bars where English menus aren't available. I also love to stay at minshuku, and I love to visit small islands. These are all tricky things to do if you don't speak the language. And the local library is one of my favorite place to visit while traveling.

One of my main themes is to visit 古民家 (ko-minka). There are 古民家街 throughout Japan, and there are also 古民家カフェ. I find it easier to talk to people at those places.