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Category: Japan

Small group tours for like minded mature travellers learning and exploring about Japan, its History, customs, culture and people.

Senso-ji Temple and Asakusa: Tokyo’s Oldest Temple District

A vermilion five-storey pagoda beside the steep tiled roof of a large temple hall, of the kind found at Senso-ji in Asakusa, Tokyo, in early-morning light.

Senso-ji Temple and Asakusa: Tokyo’s Oldest Temple District Senso-ji Temple is the oldest temple in Tokyo, and the district that grew up around it, Asakusa, is the part of the city where the old town of Edo is easiest to imagine. The temple traces its story to a small statue pulled from the Sumida River […]

Sendai, Japan: Gateway to Tohoku and Basho’s Road

A zelkova-lined central promenade in Sendai, Japan, with the leaves turned gold in autumn.

Sendai, Japan: Gateway to Tohoku and Basho’s Road Sendai, Japan, the largest city in the Tohoku region of the north, is a place most travellers pass through on the way to somewhere else. That is no slight. It was built to be a hinge: a castle town founded by the warlord Date Masamune at the […]

Kanazawa, Japan: Samurai Streets, Tea Houses and Kenrokuen

A stone-paved street of wooden lattice-fronted teahouses at dusk, of the kind in the Higashi Chaya district of Kanazawa, Japan.

Kanazawa, Japan: Samurai Streets, Tea Houses and Kenrokuen Kanazawa, Japan, on the Sea of Japan coast of Ishikawa Prefecture, is the old castle town of the Maeda lords, who ruled the rich Kaga domain here for nearly three centuries. It was not bombed in the Second World War, and its street plan still reads like […]

Nikko, Japan: Waterfalls, Cedar Forest and the Road North

A vermilion arched bridge over a mountain river in Nikko, Japan, of the kind seen at Shinkyo, framed by cedar forest and early autumn maples.

Nikko, Japan: Waterfalls, Cedar Forest and the Road North Nikko, Japan, sits where the plain north of Tokyo runs up against the mountains of Tochigi Prefecture, and almost everything about the place follows from that meeting. Rivers come down fast and cold out of volcanic country, waterfalls drop off old lava cliffs, and centuries-old cedar […]

Arashiyama, Kyoto: The Bamboo Grove and the Hills Beyond

The bamboo path in Arashiyama, Kyoto, lined with tall green bamboo and low brushwood fences in early-morning light.

Arashiyama, Kyoto: The Bamboo Grove and the Hills Beyond Arashiyama, on the western edge of Kyoto, is where the city gives way to wooded hills, a broad river and the old village lanes of Sagano. Emperors and courtiers came here for boating and the autumn leaves, poets came for the quiet, and today almost every […]

Tsukiji Fish Market: What to See, Eat and Know Before You Go

A narrow market lane of the kind found at Tsukiji Outer Market, Tokyo, with small open-fronted fish and dried-food stalls under metal awnings in early-morning light.

Tsukiji Fish Market: What to See, Eat and Know Before You Go For more than eighty years, Tsukiji Fish Market was where Tokyo’s seafood changed hands, and for many travellers its pre-dawn tuna auction was the city’s great early-morning spectacle. That market has moved. In October 2018 the wholesale trade and the auctions left for […]

Daitokuji Temple: Zen, Hospitality and the Cultural World of Tea

Wide elevated view across Daitokuji's temple roofs, pine trees and gardens, with Kyoto's mountain backdrop at golden hour

Daitokuji Temple: Zen, Hospitality and the Cultural World of Tea On the twelfth day of Odyssey’s Walking Japan tour, after a morning among the raked gravel and pine of Ginkakuji, the group crosses Kyoto by taxi to a Zen monastery built not around a single famous pavilion but around dozens of them. Daitokuji is a […]

Ginkakuji: The Silver Pavilion and the Aesthetics of Higashiyama Culture

Ginkakuji's Silver Pavilion in Kyoto surrounded by autumn foliage, moss and a quiet garden pond

Ginkakuji: The Silver Pavilion and the Aesthetics of Higashiyama Culture Ginkakuji has never worn the metal its name promises. Built in the 1480s as a retirement villa for the eighth Ashikaga shogun, Yoshimasa, and converted into a Zen temple after his death, the Silver Pavilion instead became the stage for a quieter revolution in Japanese […]

Ryoanji Temple: Zen Gardens, Stone and the Art of Interpretation

Raked gravel and moss-edged stones of Ryoanji Temple's rock garden in autumn, Kyoto

Ryoanji Temple: Zen Gardens, Stone and the Art of Interpretation At the western edge of Kyoto’s temple district, a walled rectangle of raked white gravel and fifteen weathered stones has become one of the most reproduced images in the study of Japanese design. Ryoanji Temple’s dry-landscape garden gives away almost nothing about what it means, […]

Kinkakuji: The Golden Pavilion and Kitayama Culture in Kyoto

The Golden Pavilion of Kinkakuji reflected in the still surface of Kyoko-chi pond, Kyoto

Kinkakuji: The Golden Pavilion and Kitayama Culture in Kyoto On the second of two full days in Kyoto, the Walking Japan tour leaves the shogun’s audience halls at Nijo Castle for a very different kind of monument: a small three-storey pavilion, its top two floors sheathed in gold leaf, set beside a pond so still […]

Mogami River: River Travel and Basho’s Journey through Mountain Japan

The Mogami River winding through a forested gorge in Yamagata, Japan

Mogami River: River Travel and Basho’s Journey through Mountain Japan No stretch of Matsuo Bashō’s northern journey unsettled him quite like the Mogami River. By the time he reached its banks in the summer of 1689, the poet had already crossed mountain passes and walked ancient highways through Tohoku, but nothing prepared him for the […]

Sado Gold Mine: Edo Currency, Labour and the Economy of a Shogunal State

Sunset over the rugged west coast of Sado Island near Aikawa, with old gold-mine workings cut into the hillside above the town

Sado Gold Mine: Edo Currency, Labour and the Economy of a Shogunal State Sado Gold Mine sits on an island most visitors to Japan never reach, yet for more than two centuries it helped pay for the government that ran the country. Its tunnels, cut by hand into the hills above the port town of […]

Mount Haguro: Pilgrimage, Prayer and Mountain Practice in Dewa Sanzan

Stone pilgrim path through the cedars of Mount Haguro, Dewa Sanzan, Japan, with a red torii and misty mountains at sunrise

Mount Haguro: Pilgrimage, Prayer and Mountain Practice in Dewa Sanzan In midsummer 1689, Matsuo Bashō climbed through cedar and mist toward a mountain claimed equally by Buddhist and Shintō belief. Mount Haguro, the lowest and most accessible of Japan’s Three Mountains of Dewa, has drawn pilgrims up its stone stairway to a hilltop shrine for […]

Sado Island: Exile, Sea Routes and Cultural Life on Japan’s Western Coast

Sado Island: Exile, Sea Routes and Cultural Life on Japan’s Western Coast

Sado Island: Exile, Sea Routes and Cultural Life on Japan’s Western Coast Aikawa harbour, Sado’s historic mining town and the group’s overnight stop on the island. From the Tohoku coast, Sado Island sits low on the horizon — near enough to see on a clear day, far enough that for most of Japanese history it […]

Chusonji Temple: The Golden Hall and the Northern Fujiwara Legacy

Stone-paved cedar-lined approach path climbing toward Chusonji Temple, Hiraizumi, Japan

Chusonji Temple: The Golden Hall and the Northern Fujiwara Legacy On a forested hilltop above the Kitakami River, a single small hall has survived nearly nine centuries of fire, war and northern winters, entirely sheathed in gold. Chusonji Temple is the surviving centrepiece of Hiraizumi, the northern capital the Fujiwara clan built to rival Kyoto […]

Hiraizumi: Buddhist Power, Gardens and the Cultural Landscape of Northern Japan

A view of Hiraizumi's Buddhist temple and garden landscape in Tohoku, northern Japan

Hiraizumi: Buddhist Power, Gardens and the Cultural Landscape of Northern Japan The Northern Fujiwara clan ruled an autonomous state from Hiraizumi for barely a century, yet in that time they built a Buddhist capital that contemporaries compared to Kyoto itself. Matsuo Bashō stood among its ruins five hundred years later and wept. Today Hiraizumi’s surviving […]

Matsushima Bay: Poetry, Islands and the Coastal Imagination of Tohoku

Wide atmospheric view across Matsushima Bay with pine-clad islets and distant mountains, Japan

Matsushima Bay: Poetry, Islands and the Coastal Imagination of Tohoku When Matsuo Bashō finally crossed by boat into Matsushima Bay in the early summer of 1689, he arrived at a place almost too written-about to see clearly — a scatter of roughly 260 pine-clad islets that Japanese poets had been praising, sight unseen, for centuries […]

Kenrokuen Garden: Landscape Design and Daimyo Culture in Kanazawa

Kenrokuen Garden in Kanazawa at golden hour, with pines, a stone bridge, a stone lantern and yukitsuri ropes beside the pond

Kenrokuen Garden: Landscape Design and Daimyo Culture in Kanazawa Kenrokuen Garden sits on a low plateau above Kanazawa Castle, built not for a single vista but for a sequence of them, revealed and withheld as a visitor moves through eleven hectares of ponds, streams and pine. For nearly two centuries, successive lords of the Maeda […]

Shirakawa Barrier: Borders, Roads and Basho’s Entry into Tohoku

Moss-lined path through tall cedars to a small wooden shrine at the Shirakawa Barrier site in Fukushima, Japan

Shirakawa Barrier: Borders, Roads and Basho’s Entry into Tohoku Long before it appeared in Matsuo Bashō’s Oku no Hosomichi, the Shirakawa Barrier had already spent nearly a thousand years as one of the most written-about thresholds in Japanese poetry. Today the site survives only as a quiet clearing of cedar, moss and a small shrine […]

Walking Japan’s Bashō Trail: Tokyo to Kyoto in 14 Days

Mountain trail descending toward Japan's coast at sunrise

Walking Japan’s Bashō Trail: Tokyo to Kyoto in 14 Days Matsuo Bashō walked out of Edo in the spring of 1689 with a paper coat, a change of clothes and a notebook, and spent roughly the next 150 days on the road. What he wrote about that journey, Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to […]

Nikko Toshogu: Tokugawa Memory, Sacred Forest and the Start of a Northern Journey

Nikko Toshogu: Tokugawa Memory, Sacred Forest and the Start of a Northern Journey

Nikko Toshogu: Tokugawa Memory, Sacred Forest and the Start of a Northern Journey Nikko Toshogu’s gilded halls rise from centuries-old cedar forest, a setting as deliberate as the carvings themselves. On the third day of the Walking Japan small group tour, travellers leave the density of old Edo behind and climb into cedar forest for […]