Culture

A cultural trip to Japan that consists only of temples will be a good trip that misses most of the subject. Temples and shrines are the visible layer, and they are extraordinary, but the culture that produced them is also a craft culture, a garden culture, a theatre and tea culture, and a food culture in which the technique is the inheritance. The itineraries that work best move between those registers rather than staying in one, and the practical effect is that you see fewer things and understand considerably more of them.

Kyoto is unavoidable and is best approached with a decision made in advance about what you are not going to see. The city holds well over a thousand religious sites, and attempting a representative sample produces exhaustion rather than insight. Four in a day is a reasonable ceiling. Fushimi Inari is a hillside of vermilion gates and is a walk more than a visit, best done very early. Kiyomizu-dera sits on its wooden stage over the eastern hills. Ginkaku-ji anchors the northern end of the Philosopher's Path, a canal walk that is one of the best hours in the city. Ryoan-ji is a dry rock garden that rewards sitting still rather than photographing. Nijo Castle is shogunal rather than religious and its nightingale floors are the point. Sanjusangen-do holds over a thousand gilded statues in a single long hall and is unlike anything else in the country. In the evening, Gion and the lantern-lit lane of Pontocho are the historic quarters, and they are living neighbourhoods rather than exhibits.

Nara is older, and going there clarifies Kyoto. It was the capital before Kyoto was, and Todai-ji, Kofuku-ji and Kasuga-taisha with its avenues of stone lanterns belong to that earlier period. Naramachi, the old merchant district, shows how ordinary people lived alongside it, and Isuien is a small garden that borrows the hills behind it as part of the composition. Nara Park surrounds all of it, deer included.

Kamakura does the same job for the samurai centuries and is an easy trip from Tokyo. It was the seat of the shogunate from the late twelfth century, and its Zen temples are the physical evidence of that: Kencho-ji and Engaku-ji are among the great ones. The Great Buddha at Kotoku-in has sat in the open air since its hall was destroyed centuries ago. Hokoku-ji is a bamboo grove attached to a temple, quieter than its Kyoto equivalent, and Tsurugaoka Hachimangu is the shrine the whole town is arranged around.

Kanazawa is the strongest argument against the temples-only version of this trip. It was the seat of the Maeda lords, it was not bombed, and its craft traditions survived as working trades rather than as demonstrations. Kenrokuen is one of the country's most celebrated gardens. Higashi Chaya is a preserved teahouse district and Nagamachi is where the samurai lived. The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art sits in the middle of all this and is not a contradiction but a continuation. Omicho Market has fed the city for centuries. Kaga cuisine at Tsubajin, a ryotei founded in 1752, is the same culture expressed on a plate.

Takayama and Shirakawa-go extend that into the mountains. Takayama's old town is preserved merchant housing, its morning markets still operate, Takayama Jinya is a rare surviving government house from the shogunal period, and the Hida Folk Village collects the steep-roofed farmhouses of the region. Shirakawa-go is where those gassho-zukuri houses still stand in their valley, thatched and enormous, built that way because of the snow.

Hiroshima insists on the twentieth century as part of the same subject, and a cultural itinerary that skips it is incomplete. The Peace Memorial Park and the Atomic Bomb Dome are difficult and necessary, and it is worth giving them a whole morning rather than an hour. Across the water, the torii of Itsukushima Shrine stands in the sea at Miyajima, which makes for a strange and useful pairing in a single day. Himeji, on the way, is the finest surviving castle in Japan and survived precisely because it was not destroyed.

For the arts themselves, Uji is the tea town, with Byodo-in beside the river, and a tea ceremony or a kimono experience in Kyoto turns an abstraction into something you have done with your hands. Kurashiki's Bikan quarter preserves the white-walled warehouses of a canal town, and its Ohara Museum of Art holds a Western and modern collection that is unexpected in a town that size. In Tokyo, the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno is the single best survey of Japanese art anywhere, and the Mori Art Museum handles the contemporary end.

Modern culture belongs in this itinerary rather than beside it. teamLab's digital installations, the Ghibli Museum, Akihabara and the design and fashion of Harajuku are as much an expression of the same country as a fifteenth-century garden, and treating them as a separate frivolous category tends to produce a stiffer and less accurate picture.

On practicalities: many temple halls prohibit photography and some prohibit it entirely inside, shoes come off more often than you expect, and quiet is the norm in a way that is easy to breach unintentionally. Most sites close by late afternoon, often four or five o'clock, which front-loads the day. Gardens are the exception worth planning for in autumn, when several open in the evening with lighting. Spring and autumn are the strongest seasons both for the gardens themselves and for the festival calendar, and they are correspondingly busy.

We can help you decide what to leave out, which is most of the work: choosing the four things a day that build on each other, adding the craft towns that turn a temple itinerary into a cultural one, and timing the famous sites so you see them at the hour they are worth seeing. Talk to us about what you actually want to understand and we will plan around that.