A 10-day Japan itinerary

It is not just Shibuya and Asakusa. Tokyo is the stone base of Edo Castle, once the largest in the world, sitting in a free public garden; it is Toyosu, the biggest fish market on earth, with glazed walkways above the tuna auction and sushi counters serving from first light; it is kabuki at the Kabukiza with single-act tickets sold same-day at the side window, no booking; and it is the whole forest wrapped around Meiji Jingu, minutes from Harajuku.

Half the dishes in a modern Japanese cafe were invented here: spaghetti napolitan, doria and iekei ramen all came out of places still open today. That is what a port opened to foreigners leaves behind: a Chinatown that is not a restaurant strip but a neighbourhood with its own schools and working temples, seven Western houses on the Yamate bluff that cost nothing to visit, and a cruise terminal without a single step whose timber deck is a public park.

The city where you watch Japan being manufactured: the Toyota museum traces the jump from the loom to the car with the machines running, and an hour away you can look down from a walkway onto a real assembly line, kanban cards moving along it. The castle has rebuilt its residential palace in cypress with traditional joinery — you go in barefoot — and you eat hitsumabushi, grilled eel served three different ways in the one bowl.

The old capital holds a density no other Japanese city matches: the garden at Tenryu-ji is the only one in Kyoto that keeps the layout Muso Soseki gave it in the fourteenth century, To-ji's Kodo holds twenty-one sculptures arranged as a mandala in three dimensions, and the Imperial Palace is now simply walked into, no application and no ticket, while Katsura Rikyu has to be applied for months ahead. Then there is the torii forest of Fushimi Inari, the gold leaf of Kinkaku-ji and the sand sea of Ginkaku-ji.

Day trip to Nara

Fukuroda Falls, 120m spread across four tiers (nicknamed the 'waterfall of the four seasons' for how radically it changes look through the year), together with the smaller Namase and Tsukimachi falls, linked by a full-day hiking trail of about 5 hours; the town also has three distinct types of hot spring (Daigo, Fukuroda, and Tsukiore) and, nearby but reached from a different station (bus ~40min from Hitachiota), the Ryujin Suspension Bridge, home to Japan's highest bungee jump.

Saitama's mountain basin, ninety minutes from Ikebukuro and still almost untouched by foreign tourism: a valley closed in by peaks, with terraced rice paddies, a 34-temple Kannon pilgrimage threading through the hamlets, the Nagatoro gorge, and December's Yomatsuri - one of Japan's three great float festivals and the only one that sets off fireworks in midwinter.

The best-preserved of the Kiso valley's eleven post towns: a kilometre of two-storey timber houses with deep eaves, lattice screens and running water channels, and Kiso lacquer workshops still in business. It was the richest of the Nakasendo's sixty-nine post towns — 'Narai of the thousand houses' — and the case for sleeping here is simple: the street empties at dusk and at dawn. Six kilometres of original paved road drop in from the Torii-toge pass.

Whole streets of Edo-period wooden houses with century-old sake breweries open for tasting, and a morning market along the Miyagawa where the growers set up their own stalls. Hida's carpenters were already working for the imperial court in the eighth century, and the town is still the centre of Japanese furniture-making. The float festival happens twice a year, spring and autumn; in winter hoba miso is grilled on a dried magnolia leaf.

One of Japan's great hidden Buddhas: a seated bronze statue 17 metres tall, the largest indoor Buddha in the country, inside Seidai-ji Temple, with a five-story pagoda reached by elevator and a stone garden recreating the Nine-Dragon Wall.

Hakone is not a spa town but a forty-square-kilometre caldera with a dome in the middle: seven historic springs, each with its own chemistry and temperature, which is why the afternoon in the ryokan's rotenburo is the plan and not the trimming. You come up on Japan's oldest adhesion mountain railway, with three switchbacks, and cross Lake Ashi by boat. June brings hydrangeas along the embankment; October, the golden susuki of Sengokuhara.

The Fuji Five Lakes area, with the mountain's most iconic views: Lake Kawaguchiko, Chureito Pagoda rising above Mt. Fuji, the pond village of Oshino Hakkai, and ryokan with hot springs facing the mountain directly.

A 1,200-year-old hot spring village that also happens to be a ski resort: thirteen public bathhouses run by the residents themselves, water surfacing at 90°C in the middle of the lanes, 1,085 metres of powder-covered vertical above the rooftops, and, every 15 January, one of Japan's three great fire festivals.

Day trip to Jigokudani / Shibu Onsen

The best-preserved samurai quarter in northern Japan: wide earth streets between black wooden fences, with warrior-family houses you can go inside. Four hundred weeping cherries bloom over them in late April, and in winter those same fences under snow are the other reason to come. Fifteen minutes by train from the deepest lake in Japan and from the seven hot-spring inns hidden in the forest of Nyuto.