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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.

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

Daitokuji Temple: Zen, Hospitality and the Cultural World of Tea Daitokuji’s roofs and gardens spread across 56 acres on Kyoto’s northern edge, most of them still closed to the public. 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 […]

Ginkakuji: The Silver Pavilion and the Aesthetics of Higashiyama Culture

Ginkakuji, seen from across the garden pond in autumn. 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 taste […]

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, which is precisely what has kept scholars, monks and travellers […]

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 it holds a second, upside-down temple within it. Kinkaku-ji […]

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

Mogami River: River Travel and Basho’s Journey through Mountain Japan The Mogami River, whose swift current inspired one of Bashō’s most quoted haiku and once carried Edo-period rice to the coast. 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 […]

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 Aikawa, produced the gold that the Tokugawa shogunate turned into currency, and the […]

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

Long before dawn on the eighth day of Matsuo Bashō’s pilgrimage through Tōhoku, the poet 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

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 marked the edge of the reachable world. Matsuo Bashō never crossed the […]

Chusonji Temple: The Golden Hall and the Northern Fujiwara Legacy

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

Hiraizumi: Buddhist Power, Gardens and the Cultural Landscape of Northern Japan Hiraizumi’s temples and gardens are recognised by UNESCO not for any single building, but for a complete religious landscape built to represent Buddhist paradise on earth. The Northern Fujiwara clan ruled an autonomous state from Hiraizumi for barely a century, yet in that time […]

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

Matsushima Bay, its roughly 260 pine-clad islets long ranked among the traditional Three Views of Japan. 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 […]

Kenrokuen Garden: Landscape Design and Daimyo Culture in Kanazawa

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

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 in the hills south of Shirakawa City in Fukushima […]

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 did not return for the better part of a year. What he wrote about that journey, Oku no Hosomichi, has shaped how Japan reads its own north ever since — not as […]

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 […]

Nijo Castle: Architecture, Ceremony and Tokugawa Rule in Kyoto

Nijo Castle’s low, elegant palace sits behind a moat and gardens rather than stone ramparts — a fortress built to stage authority, not repel one. Nijo Castle does not look, at first glance, like a fortress built to intimidate. There are no towering stone keeps, no dramatic ramparts — just a low, elegant timber palace […]

Bashō’s Tokyo: Fukagawa, Asakusa and the Start of the Narrow Road

Fukagawa’s quiet canal-side streets still open onto the skyline of the modern city just across the river. Long before Matsuo Bashō became the wandering poet of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, he was a Tokyo local — living not in some romantic borrowed lodging but in a modest, banana-tree-shaded cottage in the working […]

Asian Empires throughout History: The Definitive Guide

Bagan Myanmar

The empires of Asia were expansive both in geography and in tenure.  The Mongols had an empire that spanned the entire Asian continent as far as Europe, and the Ottomans ruled for almost 700 years, far wider and longer than any of their European counterparts.

Walking tours for active travellers – tips for seniors

Affordable small group tours with Odyssey Alumni

Walking tours for active travellers – tips for seniors Why walk? Because for the traveler , as a couple or solo traveler , walking tours are a great tour to access sites off the beaten track. Exploring on foot, on a guided walking holiday, as a preferred travel style gives you access to more authentic […]

Astro boy

Astro boy

Astro Boy & Osamu Tezuka   Many older Australians, Americans, New Zealanders & Canadians are  likely  to still remember the rousing introductory theme music for the 1960s animation Astro Boy, with some probably able to recite at least a few of the lyrics. Astro Boy, the Mighty Atom and ‘pure science fiction’ reached our black and white TV screens […]