Japan,
Your Way.

Tokyo's scale is the first thing that arrives — and then the realisation that its variety is what makes it navigable. Four nights gives you the space to move through the city at a pace that allows each neighbourhood to reveal itself properly. Asakusa — where the Senso-ji temple, the Nakamise shopping street, and the old residential streets of Yanaka preserve the Tokyo that existed before the postwar reconstruction — is best in the early morning before the visitors arrive. Shibuya's crossing, best experienced from the Starbucks window above it at rush hour. Harajuku's Takeshita Street and the extraordinary quiet of the Meiji Shrine behind it. Shinjuku at night — the neon, the izakayas of the Golden Gai alley complex, the ramen counter at midnight. The fish breakfast at Tsukiji market. Akihabara's electronics and anime culture. The teamLab Planets or Borderless digital art installations, which sit in a category of immersive experience that nothing in Europe or North America quite matches. Four nights is enough to do all of this and still leave Tokyo wanting more, which is the right state of mind for the journey west.

Hakone arrives as a complete change of register from Tokyo — the volcanic highlands of the Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park, the hot spring towns, and the possibility of Japan's most iconic mountain visible above Lake Ashi on clear mornings. The essential Hakone experience is the ryokan — a traditional Japanese inn where the accommodation, the dinner, and the bathing are all part of a single, carefully designed experience. Tatami rooms with futon bedding. A yukata robe. A kaiseki dinner served course by course over two hours at a low table. The communal onsen at dawn with the mountains above and the volcanic steam below. The Hakone Open Air Museum — one of the finest outdoor sculpture collections in Asia, with works by Rodin, Picasso, and Henry Moore set against the mountain landscape — is an afternoon well spent. The Hakone Ropeway across the volcanic Owakudani valley, where the sulphur vents still hiss below the cable cars and Mt Fuji is visible beyond on clear days, gives the landscape dimension that distinguishes Hakone from any other ryokan destination in Japan. Two nights allows the first day to be the experience of arriving and absorbing, and the second to be fully inhabited.

Kyoto requires the same approach as Tokyo — one thing at a time, and preferably early. The thousands of vermillion torii gates of Fushimi Inari Taisha ascending the mountain behind the shrine are best walked at dawn, when the gates glow in the early light and the crowds have not yet arrived — by 10am the main paths are full. The Kinkaku-ji Golden Pavilion, reflected in the pond in front of it, is genuinely as beautiful as every photograph suggests, but it is surrounded by visitors throughout the day. The Arashiyama bamboo grove is extraordinary for the first thirty seconds and then becomes a corridor of cameras — go at dawn or dusk. Gion, the geisha district, rewards patient evening walking along Hanamikoji Street when the tea houses open and the maiko and geiko move between appointments. The Philosopher's Path canal walk in cherry blossom season is a specific category of extraordinary — the blossoms over the canal, the small temples along the path, and the relative quiet of the northern Higashiyama district combine in a way that is difficult to describe adequately. Four nights gives you all of this without any of it feeling rushed, and with time to simply sit in the stone garden of Ryoan-ji for as long as it takes to understand what the space is doing.

Nara is a short journey from Kyoto and a thousand years further back in time. Japan's first permanent capital — established in 710 AD — Nara preserves a concentration of Buddhist and Shinto architecture in a setting of extraordinary natural beauty: Nara Park, a wide expanse of ancient parkland, contains the Todai-ji temple complex, the Kasuga Taisha shrine, and over a thousand wild sika deer that have been designated sacred and roam freely through the park, the temple grounds, and the surrounding streets with complete unconcern for the humans around them. The Todai-ji's Daibutsu-den hall — the world's largest wooden structure — contains the Daibutsu, a bronze Buddha of astonishing scale and serenity that was cast in 752 AD and has been gazed at by visitors ever since with essentially the same response: silence, and then awe. The moss-covered stone lanterns lining the paths of Kasuga Taisha, lit twice a year during the lantern festivals, are beautiful even unlit. A full day in Nara — arriving before the tour groups at 9am and leaving in the late afternoon — is one of the most consistently rewarding days on this itinerary.

Osaka arrives after Kyoto's cultural intensity as a relief and a pleasure — louder, more direct, more food-obsessed, and more cheerfully commercial than anywhere else on this itinerary. The Osakan philosophy — kuidaore, eat until you drop — is not a metaphor. The Dotonbori canal area, with its giant mechanical crab, its takoyaki stalls, its ramen shops, its street food vendors, and its neon reflections in the water at night, is the most exuberant eating experience in Japan. The Kuromon Ichiba market — Osaka's kitchen — has been feeding the city's restaurants and the city itself for two centuries and offers the best single-morning food experience on the itinerary: fresh uni on rice, grilled wagyu skewers, live scallops, tamagoyaki, and the best dashi-flavoured snacks available anywhere. Osaka Castle, surrounded by one of Japan's finest castle parks, and the Osaka Museum of History in the building next to it give the mornings a cultural anchor that the evenings emphatically do not need. The Shinsekai neighbourhood — the old Osaka that was built to resemble Paris and New York in 1903 and has since evolved into its own vivid character — is worth an afternoon before its kushikatsu (deep-fried skewers) restaurants take over the evening. Three nights in Osaka rounds the trip out properly — ending on the food city rather than the cultural city is the right order, and most people find they need all three nights to eat everything they intended to.