Placesexplored

Hey there 👋  Welcome to Places Explored, a personal project where I document and share favorite spots I've explored across the Los Angeles area and Japan.

As a web design & development professional with a decade of experience, I've worked on many projects for a variety of audiences and goals, but this project was something of a first – a labor of love (and fun), built during my gap year to share with friends and family, as well as fellow explorers looking for inspiration.

Why the seemingly random pairing of LA and Japan?
Because where you choose to live and spend your time becomes a part of who you are. Originally from Korea, by way of Chicago and Boston, I moved to the city of LA in 2012. years later, LA is still home base, and the many neighborhoods I've explored in the city and its sprawl have been my life's backdrop for well over a decade. Thanks to pup extraordinaire Rui – fellow LA transplant rescued around the Mexico-California border, family member since 2023, and now leader of our hiking squad – I've also spent a lot of time looking for new trails in LA's surprisingly abundant nature and green spaces, all of which I share here (along with dog photos no one asked for).

Japan, on the other hand, has been one of my favorite travel destinations abroad. Unlike most places I've traveled to and checked off a list, Japan has kept me coming back year after year, each time to explore more of its culture, food, and scenery that change with each region and season. After rounds of short trips and years of learning Japanese to get more out of each visit, in 2025, I went on on a longer cross-country adventure with my partner in crime Alex. You can trace that journey here in this project.

Whether I'm visiting a new place or one of my regular spots, I like to capture the moment in a few photos because places can feel different each time you visit – by time of day, weather, season, and more.

So for most of this project, I sourced images from my own photo albums wherever possible. If I was, however, missing photos of a particular spot altogether or didn't have ones that could do justice to the feeling of the actual place, I used photos from friends or sourced online – either with Creative Commons or licenses I purchased for this project – so all photos display the actual photographer's name or initials to give credit. As such, please do not re-use any photos from this project without permission.

For photos I took myself, please feel free to contact me if you'd like to learn more about a photo or ask about re-use. For quicker load times, I’ve converted photos from JPEG to WebP format and/or compressed their file sizes for the specific dimensions displayed in page, so upon request and approval of re-use, higher-resolution versions can be provided in their original dimensions for better quality.

Los Angeles is geographically complex with 100+ neighborhoods packed into almost 500 square miles of city proper alone, expanded further by the suburban sprawl of LA County spanning over 4,000 square miles, plus four neighboring counties collectively referred to as Greater Los Angeles .

That being the case, deciding on what to cover and how to organize the content took quite some time. For scope, I chose to narrow the focus primarily to the city of LA and LA County – making only a few exceptions for favorite spots outside those boundaries that I just couldn't bring myself to skip.

Even so, how regions and neighborhoods are defined in LA city alone differ in boundaries and granularity across Google, Apple, and city maps, even varying depending on the Angeleno you consult, so for this project's regional map and neighborhood definitions, I relied on a single source that felt most organized, Mapping LA by the Los Angeles Times , which makes its data available for re-use under Creative Commons . Since this project focuses on places I've personally explored, you'll also find some subjective grouping of nearby neighborhoods or cities based on similarity in what I personally go there for or how I tend to visit certain areas together given the travel distance from my area.

The map of Japan showing its 47 prefectures, on the other hand, was sourced from amCharts , also available for use under Creative Commons. The high-level regions used in this project align with the most commonly referenced regional blocs (地域ブロック) of Japan.

Both SVG maps have been stylistically modified for consistency with each other and the visual design of this project. Clickable markers on the maps were manually positioned to the best of my ability to help visualize location, but marker locations and sizes are estimates, not geographically exact.

Given the sheer size of the LA region and, of course, Japan as an entire country, there are also many places I simply haven't had a chance to explore yet, so if any of your favorite spots appear to be missing, please know that this is not a comprehensive, exhaustive list of all areas and/or attractions in LA or Japan, but rather a personal exploration log that I hope to build on over the coming years.