Fushimi Inari’s torii gates
Why this is the first thing I do every time I land in Japan.
Read MoreShibuya Crossing
A closer look at one of Japan's most rewarding experiences.
Read MoreArashiyama bamboo grove
Where to go next once you have seen the headline sights of Japan.
Read MoreJapan runs on a kind of care I haven’t encountered elsewhere — in the way a train arrives to the second, a bowl of noodles is composed, a garden rock is placed. I’ve travelled it in every season and never once found it repetitive, because the country contains multitudes it rarely advertises at once: Tokyo’s controlled sensory overload, Kyoto’s temple silence, the northern snow country’s onsen steam rising against white mountains. What draws me back isn’t novelty so much as craft — the sense that whoever made the thing in front of me, whether a sushi counter or a shrine gate, considered it worth doing properly. Japan asks a small amount of attentiveness from its visitors in return, and pays it back many times over.
Chapter One
Kyoto’s quiet architecture
I got to Fushimi Inari before seven, while the thousands of vermillion torii gates were still empty enough to hear my own footsteps echo up the mountain path. Kyoto rewards that kind of early discipline — Kinkaku-ji’s gold pavilion mirrored in still water, Ryoan-ji’s rock garden meant to be contemplated in silence rather than photographed on the move. In Gion, in the low evening light, I once watched a geiko hurry between appointments, wooden geta clicking on stone, gone before most people noticed. Arashiyama’s bamboo grove is worth the crowds if you arrive at dawn; by mid-morning the light through the stalks gives way to a queue for photographs, and something of the point is lost.
“Japan is the only place I’ve been where perfection feels less like an aesthetic than a form of respect.”
Chapter Two
Tokyo’s layered city
Tokyo works because its extremes sit blocks apart without conflict — Shibuya’s scramble crossing, a genuine flood of humanity timed to the second by traffic lights, is a ten-minute walk from Meiji Shrine’s forested hush. I ate the best meal of my life at a seven-seat counter in a Shinjuku alley I’d never find again without the address written down, and the cheapest, equally memorable one standing at a conveyor belt sushi bar near Tsukiji’s outer market. Take the train out to Nikko or Kamakura for a day if the city starts to feel relentless; both offer temples, forest, and the kind of quiet that resets the whole trip.
The Short List
Do not miss in Japan
At a glance
Japan in numbers
- Capital
- Tokyo
- Language
- Japanese
- Currency
- Japanese yen
- Best time
- March to May and October to November, for cherry blossom or autumn colour
Did you know
Japan’s bullet trains, the Shinkansen, have carried billions of passengers since 1964 with an average delay measured in seconds.