A 15-day Japan itinerary (or two weeks)

This city eats standing up and out loud: the neon of Dotonbori over the canal, takoyaki, okonomiyaki and kushikatsu, the izakaya alleys of Ura-Namba and, around Tenma station, the densest cluster of stand-up bars in Japan. Kitsune udon was invented here, and Osaka was pressing sushi in wooden boxes before Tokyo got round to nigiri. It is also home to Taro Okamoto's Tower of the Sun, seventy metres of sculpture you walk inside.

Day trip to Nara · Kobe

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tanabe is where you start walking the Kumano Kodo, the network of pilgrimage trails crossing the forested mountains of the Kii peninsula and twinned with the Camino de Santiago: anyone who has walked sections of both registers here as a Dual Pilgrim. Along the way is Yunomine, one of the oldest hot springs in Japan, with a wooden hut for two set in the stream whose water changes colour several times a day.

The longest river in Shikoku and the only major one with no dam anywhere on its main channel, which is why it is called Japan's last clear river: 196 kilometres of green water between low mountains, crossed by more than forty chinkabashi, concrete bridges built deliberately without railings so floodwater washes straight over them; the longest and most visited is Sada. You run it by canoe on a half-day paddle, or on a flat-bottomed covered boat that passes under the bridges.

A narrow volcanic gorge with columnar basalt cliffs and Manai Falls plunging straight into the river, explored by rowboat; next to Amano Iwato Shrine, setting of Japan's founding myth, with sacred yokagura dances performed every night.

Three innkeepers formed an association in the early seventies to block a golf course and the coach-tour hotels, then paid out of their own pockets for a fifty-day study trip across Europe to bring back the idea of a spa town people actually live in. It worked too well: the street from the station to the lake is now a souvenir corridor, and the real Yufuin is in the side lanes, in the seven neighbourhood baths with an honesty box, and in Isozaki's station, with its foot bath on the platform.

A merchant town the Tokugawa shogunate governed directly: the Mameda quarter still has its 18th- and 19th-century merchant houses, sake breweries and storehouses, and in summer cormorants fish by firelight on the Mikuma River. It is also Hajime Isayama's home town, with the Attack on Titan museum and the statues of Eren, Mikasa and Armin below the Oyama dam.

A quiet fishing village on Omura Bay, home to Kaijin Shrine, tucked inside a sea cave only reachable at low tide (facing the ruins of an old torpedo testing site), and Osaki Nature Park, with free-roaming peacocks and hot springs by the sea.

Six linked modes of transport — funicular, highland bus, tunnel electric bus, a ropeway with no pylons, an underground cable car and one more bus — carry you across the Japanese Alps from Toyama to Nagano via Murodo at 2,450 m, with the spring snow corridor at one end and the Kurobe Dam at the other. It only operates from mid-April to the end of November.

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.

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.

Day trip to Fujinomiya

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.

Day trip to Izu Oshima

A one-hour trail through pristine Izu Peninsula nature past seven waterfalls, the largest a 30-meter drop (Odaru); the town of Kawazu is also famous for its early-blooming cherry trees (Kawazu-zakura, mid-to-late February), and nearby is the Amagi mountain pass, setting of a Kawabata classic.