Japan | The Art of Paying Attention

Japan rewards a particular kind of traveller — one who understands that the most significant experiences here are often the quietest ones, and that the country reveals itself not through its famous landmarks but through accumulated small details. This fourteen-night journey for a family with two teenage children was built around that premise: enough structure to give shape to the trip, enough space to let Japan do what it does best. Tokyo provided the opening three nights, based at Aman Tokyo — forty floors above the city, the Imperial Palace Gardens directly below — where mornings began in the onsen before a private guide led the family through Yanaka, the neighbourhood that survived the 1923 earthquake and the Second World War and has barely changed since, its narrow lanes lined with tofu shops, temples and cats. The Shinkansen carried them south to Hakone and Gora Kadan, a ryokan set within a former imperial villa, where a private kaiseki dinner — twelve courses built around the season, served course by course in the tatami room — became the meal the children spoke about for the rest of the trip. Kyoto spent four nights revealing itself in layers: Fushimi Inari at five in the morning before the crowds arrived, a private tea ceremony in a seventeenth-century machiya townhouse, an afternoon in the lacquerware workshops of Nijo-jo with an eighth-generation craftsman who had never taken a group larger than four. The side trip to Naoshima — the art island in the Seto Inland Sea, where Tadao Ando's concrete buildings rise from the hillside and a Yayoi Kusama pumpkin sits at the end of a jetty — was the unexpected highlight of the journey. Two nights at Benesse House, the only hotel on the island, where the building is itself part of the collection. Osaka closed the trip over two nights of extraordinary eating. Fourteen nights, and the universal verdict on returning: not nearly long enough.