Japan itinerary: 3 weeks from Tokyo to Kyoto

It is an almost unreal white, and the coating is not paint: it's a lime plaster applied even over the roof tiles, designed to resist fire.

Himeji is the largest and best-preserved castle in Japan, and the only one of its size never to have been destroyed — not by the civil wars, not by the bombing of 1945, not by the Kobe earthquake of 1995. Its six-storey keep dates from 1609. It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993, in Japan's first batch, and its silhouette earns it the nickname Shirasagi-jo, the white heron castle.

The visit is physical and remarkably intact: you climb the six floors on steep wooden staircases, under original timbers, past the ishi-otoshi stone-drop chutes and the arrow slits. Allow 1.5-2 hours, admission ¥1,000.

It's the only site on this itinerary where you tour an authentic feudal interior: the keeps at Osaka and Nagoya are concrete reconstructions housing museums.

It appears rarely and always all at once: one second the sky is empty, the next the cone fills a quarter of the horizon, far higher than you had pictured.

An active volcano topping out at 3,776 metres, the highest point in Japan, it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2013 — not as a natural site but as a sacred place and source of artistic inspiration, a distinction that says everything about its standing in Japanese culture.

From the Golden Route you don't climb it: the ascent is open only from early July to early September and takes two days. You come to see it, from Hakone, Lake Ashi or the Fuji Five Lakes — and that's a matter of weather luck, the mountain staying hidden behind cloud roughly one day in two in summer.

It's the one site on this itinerary that defies planning entirely, which is why it earns two days in Hakone rather than one.

The park is oddly quiet for the centre of a city of 1.2 million — a quiet visitors adopt without being asked.

The Genbaku Dome is the former Chamber of Commerce building, left exactly as the explosion of 6 August 1945 left it: 600 metres below the hypocentre, the steel frame of its cupola held where everything around it vanished. It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996.

The visit falls into three parts: the museum, whose permanent exhibition retraces the day through objects and survivor testimony; the cenotaph, whose arch deliberately frames the dome in its opening; then the dome itself. The museum costs ¥200 and opens as early as 7:30 AM from March to November.

It's the only site on this itinerary you don't leave the way you arrived: plan time afterwards, not another activity.

You hear the gravel before you see anything: footsteps funnelling under the gates, then the light turning orange because it's passing through lacquered wood.

The head shrine of the cult of Inari, deity of rice and prosperity, it climbs the flank of Mount Inari, 233 metres, beneath roughly 10,000 torii donated by Japanese companies — the black characters carved into the uprights are the donors' names and the dates of their gifts.

You climb in a loop up uneven stairways to the Yotsutsuji junction, which opens onto a panorama over Kyoto after about an hour, and beyond that the path empties almost completely. Access is free and open 24 hours, which is rare for a site of this importance.

It's the only major Kyoto site you can visit at dawn with no opening hours to work around — which makes it the logical first stop on a day in the south of the city.

The first view is head-on and slightly unreal: the pavilion set at the edge of its pond, doubled by its reflection, an image you've seen a thousand times turning out to be accurate.

Once the retirement villa of shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu and converted into a Zen temple on his death in 1408, it owes its glow to the pure gold leaf covering its two upper floors. The current building is a 1955 reconstruction, the original having been burned down by a monk in 1950 — an episode Mishima turned into a novel. It is part of the Historic Monuments of Ancient Kyoto, UNESCO-listed in 1994.

The visit is a one-way circuit of about 40 minutes, with no entry into the pavilion itself: you follow the pond, climb to the upper garden, and exit past the tea house. It's short, and that's deliberate.

Unlike Ginkaku-ji or Ryoan-ji, which ask you to sit and look for a long time, Kinkaku-ji gives itself up entirely in a single glance — which is why it pairs well with the dry garden at Ryoan-ji, 20 minutes away by bus.

The smell reaches you before the temple does: incense in front of the main hall, sesame doughnuts and grilled senbei crackers along the 250 metres of stalls leading up to it.

Founded in 645, Senso-ji is the oldest Buddhist temple in Tokyo. Legend has it that two fishermen pulled a statuette of the goddess Kannon from their nets, and she is still venerated here. The current buildings are post-war reconstructions, the whole complex having been flattened by the bombing of 1945.

You enter through the Kaminarimon gate and its 3.9-metre red lantern, walk up Nakamise-dori — one of Japan's oldest shopping streets — draw an omikuji fortune for ¥100, and pass through the smoke of the incense burner, brushing it over your head for health. Access is free.

It's the exact counterpoint to Shibuya: in the same city, 25 metro minutes apart, the Tokyo of before and the Tokyo of after.

The terrace juts into empty air and the timber works underfoot: thirteen metres above the hillside, without a single nail in the entire frame.

Founded in 778, before Kyoto even became the capital, the temple owes its name — "temple of pure water" — to the Otowa waterfall running beneath the terrace. Its main hall is a designated National Treasure and the complex is among the Historic Monuments of Ancient Kyoto, UNESCO-listed in 1994. The major restoration of the frame and roof, begun in 2008, finished in 2020: the scaffolding that used to ruin photographs is gone.

You climb the steep Sannenzaka lane, come out onto the terrace and its panorama over Kyoto, then descend to drink at the Otowa waterfall, whose three streams promise longevity, academic success and love — custom says pick one, as drinking from all three marks you as greedy.

It's the only major Kyoto temple you reach along a pedestrian street of wooden houses: the approach is part of the visit, which isn't true of Kinkaku-ji, ringed by coach parks.

You lose your sense of scale walking through the gate: the hall looks normal until you notice the figures at its base are adults.

The Daibutsuden houses the Daibutsu, the largest bronze Buddha statue in the world — 15 metres, cast in 752 in a campaign that consumed a considerable share of the copper available in the country. The current hall, rebuilt in 1709, is only two-thirds the size of the original and remains one of the largest wooden structures on the planet. The complex became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1998 among the Historic Monuments of Ancient Nara.

The visit is an interior loop of about forty minutes: the Buddha, its guardians, a model of the original hall, and a pillar pierced with a hole the size of the statue's nostril — children squeeze through it, custom promising enlightenment to anyone who does. Admission is ¥800.

The temple is never visited alone: it sits inside Nara Park and its 1,000 free-roaming deer, which makes it the best family day out on the whole itinerary.

At high tide the gate seems to sit on the water with nothing holding it — a perfect illusion, since nothing does: its pillars rest on the seabed under their own weight alone.

A Shinto shrine founded in the 6th century and remodelled in the 12th by Taira no Kiyomori, it is built on stilts above the sea because the entire island was considered sacred: you could not set a temple on the ground without desecrating it. It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996.

The whole visit hinges on one variable: the tide. At high tide the torii floats and the shrine reflects in the water; at low tide you walk out to the foot of the gate and touch its barnacle-covered pillars. Both are good, but they are two different visits.

The island throws in free-roaming deer and Mount Misen, reachable by ropeway — enough to fill a day where many people allow only two hours.

The lights go red in all five directions at once, the city's noise pauses for a second, then the entire intersection fills in a single movement.

The Shibuya Scramble is the busiest pedestrian crossing in the world: estimates put up to 3,000 people crossing on each light cycle at peak times, and more than 2 million a day passing through the station as a whole. The scramble principle — every vehicle light red simultaneously — was imported from the United States in the 1970s and pushed here to its extreme.

There is nothing to visit and everything to watch: you cross once for the sensation, then get above it — the free walkway at the Magnet mall, the second-floor café at Tsutaya, or the paid Shibuya Sky observatory. Round it off with the statue of Hachiko the dog, at the station exit that bears his name.

It's the best place in Tokyo to physically grasp the scale of the city, which no observation deck conveys.

This is a place you listen to as much as look at: the wind in the canes produces a low, continuous creaking that Japan's Environment Ministry has listed among the hundred soundscapes of Japan to be preserved.

The Sagano bamboo grove occupies north-west Kyoto, on the slopes of Arashiyama, an aristocratic resort district as far back as the 9th-century Heian period. The main path runs about 500 metres between moso canes that can reach 20 metres, held back by traditional woven fencing.

Walking it takes 15-20 minutes — it's brief, and knowing that in advance saves disappointment. So you fold it into a half-day in Arashiyama: the villa and gardens of Tenryu-ji, a UNESCO temple at the head of the path, the Togetsukyo bridge, and the Okochi Sanso garden. Hand-pulled rickshaws work the lane, touristy but photogenic.

Unlike the temples in the centre, all of it is outdoors and free: it's the Kyoto outing that still works under grey skies.

The paving sounds different here: the lanes are too narrow for cars, and you hear wooden geta sandals before you see who's wearing them.

Gion grew up in the 17th century around Yasaka Shrine to house pilgrims, before becoming Kyoto's principal hanamachi, or geisha district. The latticed wooden facades are machiya, merchant houses narrow at the front and dozens of metres deep. Hanamikoji and Shirakawa streets hold the finest surviving rows.

You walk it in the evening, as the lanterns come on, following the Shirakawa canal lined with cherry trees then cutting across to the Yasaka pagoda. Crossing paths with a geiko or an apprentice maiko heading to an appointment is a matter of chance, between 5:30 and 7 PM.

It's the only district on this itinerary you don't visit so much as pass through — which is why it belongs at the end of a day, after Kiyomizu-dera, rather than as a stop in its own right.