Japan Beyond Tokyo and Kyoto

There is nothing wrong with Tokyo and Kyoto. They are two of the finest cities in the world and nobody should skip either. But the standard ten-day itinerary — five nights in one, four in the other, a day trip to Nara — puts you in precisely the places where every other visitor is standing, at precisely the same hours.

Japan's density of interest is unusually high. Go ninety minutes in almost any direction from a major city and you find something as good with a tenth of the people. Four suggestions we make constantly.

Naoshima — the art island

A small island in the Seto Inland Sea that a publishing family turned into a contemporary art project across three decades. Concrete built into hillsides. A Monet room lit entirely by natural light. An installation you enter in complete darkness and sit in for fifteen minutes before your eyes adjust.

Stay the night. The day-trippers leave on the late ferry and the island becomes yours. Two nights is better.

Kanazawa — Kyoto without the queue

On the Sea of Japan coast, two and a half hours from Tokyo by shinkansen. Kenroku-en is one of the three great gardens of Japan. There's an intact samurai district, an intact geisha district, a superb contemporary art museum, and seafood people travel from Tokyo for.

It offers most of what visitors want from Kyoto at perhaps a fifth of the crowding. Two nights slots into a standard itinerary without lengthening it.

Koyasan — sleeping in a monastery

A mountaintop Buddhist settlement south of Osaka, reached by train and then a cable car. You stay in a temple, in a room with tatami and sliding paper doors, eat the vegetarian cuisine the monks eat, and attend the morning fire ceremony at six if you choose to.

The Okunoin cemetery at night — two kilometres of stone lanterns under thousand-year-old cedars — is the most atmospheric hour available in Japan. One night is enough. It will likely be the night you remember.

The Kiso Valley — walking the old road

A preserved stretch of the Nakasendo, the Edo-period highway between Kyoto and Tokyo. You walk eight kilometres between the post towns of Magome and Tsumago through forest and rice terraces, on a road in continuous use for four hundred years.

Your luggage is forwarded ahead for a few hundred yen. You arrive at a family-run inn, bathe, and are fed river fish. It's the most straightforward way to experience rural Japan without a car or the language.

What we'd actually build

Three nights Tokyo. One night Koyasan. Three nights Kyoto. Two nights Kanazawa. Two nights Naoshima. Eleven nights, one rail pass, no backtracking, and roughly half your time somewhere the standard itinerary never goes.

You still see Tokyo and Kyoto properly. You simply stop treating them as the whole country.