道の駅 aka Michi No Eki

You’ll want to be learning those kanji, as they mean ‘road station’, and you’ll definitely want to stop in at some if you’re out and about in Japan. 

You can mistakenly say they’re just service areas, but you’d be vastly underselling the experience.

Often in the countryside and specialising in selling local produce or promoting local sights and history as well, they range from the very small, with a simple shop, to quite large. Indeed their car parks range in size from ~10 vehicles up to multi-hundred vehicle ones where there are often meet-ups and events going on.

For more information, there’s the Japanese original website and a nice English one.

This page is not part of some insane idea to visit them all - there are over 1,000 of the places - it’s more for just listing the ones I have stopped at and have some kind of evidence of.