Hotel New Otani has run G7 summit-level receptions three times.

At dusk the mist of the Tokyo Sea of Clouds rises across 66,000 square meters of garden.

Kabukiza has stood at the center of Ginza since 1889, and it is where Kabuki is judged.

Akasaka Palace is the only modern building in Japan designated a National Treasure.

Ninnaji is a monzeki temple, a rank historically headed by a prince of the imperial house.

Ninomaru Palace at Nijo Castle is a UNESCO World Heritage property and a National Treasure.

Maruyama-Shijo is the line that taught Japanese painting to draw from life.

In most cultures a broken bowl means the end.

In Japan a sword was never only a weapon; it is the furthest reach of beauty in use.

Kirikane cuts gold leaf into lines finer than a hair, then lays them down one strand at a time.

Hanasho's cut glass was chosen as a gift of state at two summits, in 2008 and 2023.

Kodo, the way of incense, stands with tea and flowers among Japan's three great arts.

At the end of the approach to Ginkakuji, one white wall separates the crowd from a painter's own garden.

Before dawn, in a Tokyo sumo stable, the first round of salt has already been thrown.

Noh has been performed without a break for some 650 years, since the Muromachi period.

The door of Sogetsu Kaikan opens onto everything Ikebana is not expected to be.

Gold and silver ground to dust, scattered grain by grain onto wet lacquer: that is maki-e.

Monko, the listening to incense, is the least seen of Japan's three great arts.

Most luxury hotels in Tokyo compete on room count and height.

In Kyoto there is one threshold that has nothing to do with price.

Most guests only ever meet Kyoto tea at one of two extremes.

In Arashiyama, past the sound of the Hozu River, a garden encloses its own stillness.

Kikunoi has kept the same gate on a Higashiyama slope since 1912, and Yoshihiro Murata runs it.

Seiji Yamamoto does not reproduce kaiseki.

In Tokyo some restaurants cannot be booked at all.

In Kyoto, tea and flowers are known everywhere; incense is not.

Kenninji is the oldest Zen temple in Japan, founded in 1202 by Eisai on his return from Song China.

In Ohara, indigo vats sunk into an earthen floor are fed on ash, bran and sake, and ferment daily.

Most visitors see a hojo of this rank from behind a rope; here it is cleared for one party's zazen.

In Kyoto, wagashi have never been simply sweets.

One Kyoto experience no hotel can supply: not staying in the city but keeping a house in it.

Kyoto has no shortage of kintsugi classes; this one is held inside a resort residence, and that is the point.

For 450 years one house in Kyoto has gone on firing the same tea bowl.

There is no audience seating; the Sakurama family receives its guests on its own stage.

Kyoto's famous inns stand by the Kamo River or deep in the machiya of Gion.

On the most expensive ground in Tokyo, someone has left the most valuable part of the space empty.

CHISO was founded in 1555 and is described as one of the oldest kimono houses in the world.

Happo-en is an Edo-period garden of 33,000 square meters, and it can be taken whole for one evening.

Two ryokan face each other across one narrow Kyoto lane.

HOSHINOYA Tokyo stands the whole practice of the ryokan upright inside one tower in the business district.

The last stretch to HOSHINOYA Kyoto has no road, only water.

Hyotei has been cooking the same gruel for 450 years.

This is the first Janu anywhere in the world, and it opened in Azabudai Hills.

Kanda has no sign on the street and no public line on which to book.

Meiji Kinenkan was the first state guest house in modern Japan, and it is where Tokyo holds a formal gala.

Murin-an is a garden made of a stream, grass and moss, with the Higashiyama hills borrowed into the view.

A private museum sits entirely apart from the noise on the most expensive ground in Omotesando.

Only a handful of restaurants in Tokyo have held three MICHELIN Stars for more than a decade.

In Tokyo, being able to book a table is itself a kind of proof of standing.

A lane west of the Kyoto Imperial Palace holds one plain wooden door.

Zojoji is the Tokugawa family temple, and the temple itself is six hundred years old.

The concept of Edo NOREN is stated plainly: to connect the food and culture of today to the space of Edo.

Nakakin Glass hands the guest a matcha bowl to cut, not the sake cup other Edo Kiriko studios offer.

Kyo Yuzen is the dyeing that made Kyoto's name a synonym for splendor.

Miyazaki Yasue trained as a wagashi maker in a confectionery shop.

Summer in Kyoto begins with the air moved by a single fan.

A weaver here files the fingernails into saw teeth, then rakes each weft thread into place.

In a Kyoto forge, Nakanishi Yuya folds and strikes tamahagane, the steel smelted for swords.

Ozu Washi has traded paper on the same Nihonbashi ground since 1653, through fire, earthquake and war.

The Kiyomizu slopes of Higashiyama once lay under kiln smoke.

Takano Chikko works in Nagaokakyo, west of Kyoto, in one of Japan's noted bamboo districts.

A circular glass museum with entrances on every side, and a pool guests can walk under.

A machine shipped in from overseas usually has to wait in a warehouse somewhere.

Few samurai sessions in Japan are taught by the man who choreographed Kill Bill.

Koyasan was practicing this meditation twelve hundred years before the West discovered mindfulness.

Kitcho is one of the founding myths of Japanese cooking.

Cross one wall in Higashiyama and the crowds toward Kiyomizudera vanish: 2,500 square meters, taken whole.

A district known as one of Japan's foremost electronics towns.

You have probably heard the phrase Akita bijin, the beauties of Akita.

Satoumian hands the memory of the Shima coast over directly, from the women who carry it.

It is only a short walk from Kinkaku-ji, and yet at some step along the way the sound of Kyoto stops.

Amanemu is Aman's first resort in Japan built around hot-spring water.

The Art House Project replaces the gallery with a village where people still live.

Asaba begins in 1484.

Asakusa Hanayashiki is the oldest amusement park in Japan, and it did not begin with rides.

Benesse House lets guests sleep inside the museum and walk its galleries after everyone has gone.

A soja enshrines every deity of a province in one place; here that means 128 shrines.

Capella's first house in Japan stands in Miyagawacho, the last working geisha district in Kyoto.

A pottery session usually begins with a lump of wet clay.

Chichu Art Museum was built for three artists and buried in a hillside above the Seto Inland Sea.

Twenty minutes from Tokyo, a group of 100 can paint fox masks in a town of Edo storehouses.

Hokoji is not a provincial temple but the seat of an entire Zen school.

Daikyoji was founded in 1629.

For over two centuries of seclusion, Dejima was Japan's only window onto the West.

Dewa Sanzan maps a complete account of life and death onto three mountains.

Nikko is a city of mountain worship.

What Tokyo does best is demolish and start again.

In 1657 the Meireki fire burned away most of Edo.

Ekoin stands at the mouth of the approach to Okunoin, where Koyasan's 1,200 years of prayer lead.

Otsu sits about ten minutes by train east of Kyoto.

Iizaka Onsen carries more than 1,200 years of history and is one of the leading hot spring towns of Tohoku.

The part of this house worth seeing is underground.

Kaga Hyakumangoku — the largest daimyo house of the Edo period.

Some luxury is made to be seen; FUFU Nara shuts the world outside the door.

Aokigahara is a misunderstood forest: it grew back on lava from an eruption of Mt. Fuji.

Fujiya Hotel is where modern Japanese hospitality begins, at Miyanoshita in 1878.

Fukuchiin is the only temple lodging on Koyasan with a natural hot spring of its own.

Dozens of full skeletons stand under a column-free dome in Japan's foremost dinosaur country.

On the west bank of the Kamo River, a five-story timber pavilion has stood over the water since 1927.

A furoshiki is a square of cloth.

In the West, the summit of classical music is usually an orchestra.

By day the gassho-zukuri village of Shirakawa-go fills with coaches.

The permanent exhibition room is called 'Where a Film is Born'.

Ginza introduces itself as a place where tradition and innovation coexist, and it really is that.

Gora Kadan stands on ground that once belonged to the imperial family.

The gala was held in Tokyo—and that Tokyo is a subtropical island out in the Kuroshio current.

Plenty of people have eaten Hakata ramen; almost no one has made it.

Hakone yosegi marquetry builds its geometric patterns without a drop of dye.

A boat on Lake Ashinoko now carries tatami tea rooms and serves tea with Fuji ahead.

Gold is heavy.

Hama-rikyu was the private garden of the Tokugawa shoguns, and the towers of Shiodome now ring it.

A street that bills itself as a source of pop culture.

Wanko soba is one of Morioka's three great noodle dishes and the loudest meal in Japan.

Hiyoshi Taisha stands at the foot of Mount Hiei.

The only way to keep a whole day of untracked powder in Niseko is to fly above the lifts.

A noh stage is a peculiar kind of space.

Nishijin has woven Japan's court dress and Noh costume for twelve hundred years.

Few places in Kyoto turn the stay itself into a piece of history.

This is a closed school converted into a science experience center.

About 99 percent of Japan's gold leaf is beaten in Kanazawa.

Imayo Tsukasa has brewed in Niigata since 1767, and it makes junmai only.

In Gion, putting up a new building is next to impossible.

Edo Castle, still sitting in the middle of central Tokyo.

A copper refinery that ran for ten years and then lay derelict for a century is now a museum that breathes.

For 2,000 years the Japanese have called Ise Jingu the home of the heart.

Kanazawa calls itself the city where chant falls from the sky, and it is not a figure of speech.

Nambu ironware distills four centuries of artisan culture in Morioka.

Jindaiji was founded in 733.

Frank Lloyd Wright left very few works in Japan, and Myonichikan is one of the few still in daily use.

People have climbed into these mountains for centuries to make one wish.

This is the strangest space in Tokyo, and one of the most useful.

Japan's largest entertainment district, in Shinjuku.

Kaga-Yuzen is best understood through its restraint.

Kagaya has taken first place in Japan's professional ryokan poll some 42 times.

Tokugawa Nariaki laid this garden out himself in 1842 and named it for pleasure shared with the people.

A tea specialist chooses a different Shizuoka tea for each course of the kaiseki.

Kanda Myojin has guarded Edo since 730, and in 2018 it acquired its own event complex.

Shiokatsuo is a whole bonito cured through with salt and then left to the dry winter wind off the sea.

A Noh stage of solid hinoki cypress stands three floors beneath GINZA SIX.

By day Kasuga Taisha belongs to the deer and the crowds.

Kintsugi repairs broken ceramics with lacquer mixed with gold powder.

Back when Niseko was still just “a ski resort,” nobody called it a dining destination.

Kitsuki puts its samurai on two hills and its merchants in the valley between.

Kiyosumi is a model of the Meiji strolling garden.

An inkstick looks the least remarkable of the four treasures of the study: a black bar, nothing more.

Real castle heritage and a real appetite for celebration rarely sit in the same place.

You have certainly heard the name Shorinji.

Kobo Daishi Kukai opened Koyasan for Shingon Esoteric Buddhism at the start of the Heian period.

Koza, in Okinawa City, is the least Japanese-looking place in Japan.

After the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, the industrialist Mankichi Yamaguchi made an unusual decision.

Take a hundred people to "experience Japanese culture," and it usually ends one way.

Delegates meet inside a museum of paintings of the Kurobe Gorge, at the mouth of the gorge itself.

A natural stone faces a sheet of industrial steel, and the space between them is the work.

Olympic medals in BMX and skateboarding were decided on this ground at Ariake.

The ceiling of this dining room carries 636 species of alpine plant, painted by hand in 1930.

Manga needs no translation.

Matsumoto Castle keeps the oldest surviving five-tiered, six-story wooden keep in Japan.

The shrine enshrining Emperor Meiji and Empress Shoken.

Mikimoto Pearl Island is where the sea was first persuaded to grow a pearl on purpose.

Mito Tobukan is a working dojo, not a samurai photo corner.

You think you already know what your colleagues are like.

If the sea is Miyakojima's face, this craft village is its daily life.

Shibuya has stacked itself up.

Guests write with dissolved matcha instead of ink, and the green strokes turn brown as they dry.

Mt. Takao is only 599 meters high, and it is the most climbed mountain in the world.

The museum stands on the site of the Nagasaki Magistrate's Office of the Edo period.

In Kagawa, udon is not a staple but an identity.

In 2022 a black cube arrived on the Nakanoshima skyline: the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka.

Nara has the highest density of World Heritage in Japan and long had nowhere to seat a thousand delegates.

A wall of glass rises and rolls like a wave at the center of Roppongi.

Bunraku is the art in which one chanter, one shamisen and three puppeteers make a doll breathe.

The National Museum of Nature and Science is the only national museum of general science in Japan.

Tokyo's zero milestone is set into the deck of this bridge.

Most Tokyo receptions begin and end inside a hotel banquet room.

Miyagikyo makes both malt and grain whisky, the grain on a rare Coffey still.

Iga gave its name to a school of ninjutsu, and it is one of the birthplaces of the ninja.

Nogi Shrine stands behind its own screen of trees in Akasaka, a few minutes' walk from Roppongi.

The largest landowner in Echigo spent eight years building his own house.

The name Odaiba means gun battery, and the islands were built to carry them.

When a museum closes for the day, the lights do not all have to go out.

Most castles in Japan are white.

Hiroshima okonomiyaki is not mixed but layered, and layering takes a practiced hand.

This may be the quietest two kilometers in Japan.

People in Sapporo need only look up to see that white diagonal on the mountain.

OMO7 Yokohama opened in 2026 inside a building that governed the city for 60 years.

Around the 21st year of Showa, street stalls went up on burnt-out ground by Shinjuku Station's west exit.

Kurashiki is known for its Bikan historical quarter.

A Neo-Renaissance hall of red brick and granite has stood on the water at Nakanoshima for a century.

Stand on the lawn of Nishinomaru Garden and the first thing you see is the main keep of Osaka Castle.

Food in Otsu grows out of the space between a lake and a mountain.

The first exhibit is three floors underground, and it is the Sistine Chapel at full size.

The material in the guests' hands comes from the volcano still smoking in front of them.

Ozu was the first castle in Japan where a guest could sleep inside the wooden keep itself.

Guests ski to the door in the morning and walk into a gala in the same building at night.

In the forest at Sengokuhara in Hakone there is a museum you can barely see.

This house was built in 1920.

This house was not built to receive ordinary people.

The draw is Tokyo City View, the observation deck on the 52nd floor of Mori Tower.

The walls of the 100-mat hall carry calligraphy left by the men who once ate here.

Snow remakes a forest of seventy sculptures, and guests walk into it on snowshoes.

Of all the islands in Tokyo Bay, only this one was made by nature.

Seisonkaku is the only residence built for the principal wife of a daimyo still standing in Japan.

Sengan-en takes an active volcano as its garden hill and a bay as its pond.

The temple with the oldest history in Tokyo.

A private Tadao Ando museum, rebuilt as a hotel of seven suites.

If Zaborin is the seclusion of Niseko, setsu niseko is its new face.

If you had to reduce Tokyo to a single picture, it would probably be this one.

You have seen that crossing in photographs many times.

The G7 heads of state stayed here in 2016; the house had been receiving guests since 1951.

One set of grounds holding three gardens of completely different character.

Nara is one of Japan's oldest capitals, and for a long time it had nowhere to stay that matched it.

There are no instruments; there is only the human voice.

Suiden Terrasse appears to float on the rice fields of the Shonai plain.

Inland from Shuzenji Onsen, up toward the hills, lies a place called Kamiya — paper valley.

The pond at Suizenji Jojuen is fed by spring water off the volcano of Aso.

The guiding idea of the Suntory Museum of Art is beauty in everyday life.

This one has no history to tell you.

Osaka is the merchants' city, and its hospitality does not stand on ceremony.

Echizen-Ono is a castle town ringed by mountains.

'A museum without a map' — the phrase doubles as a description of the experience.

Seeing an exhibition here begins with taking your shoes off.

Shibamata in Katsushika was the first place in Tokyo designated an Important Cultural Landscape.

Teshima Art Museum barely resembles a museum, which is why it is hard to describe.

Japan's first open-air museum opened in the mountains of Hakone in 1969.

In this country the Japanese sword has never been only a weapon.

A museum built around the Matsukata Collection, but the building is as much of a draw as the paintings.

Few Tokyo addresses can give an international dinner the weight of a state occasion on their own.

Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) was born in Ryogoku in Sumida.

The 34th G8 summit was held in Windsor Hall in 2008, some 540 meters above Lake Toya.

Osaka has called itself the nation's kitchen for centuries, and 17 of its kitchens now share one room.

Most visitors join the flow to the Great Buddha, take one photograph, and leave.

Exhibition halls, meeting rooms and a hotel sit in one complex on Bandaijima.

The Tokugawa Art Museum holds the inherited legacy of a single house, the Owari Tokugawa.

Tokyo Aqua Symphony gives an evening on the bay one instant when everyone present catches their breath.

Awa Odori is the king of the Bon dances, and Tokyo has been dancing it since 1957.

Ise Jingu lies some five hundred kilometers west of Tokyo.

This is Tokyo pushing two old things into the present at the same time.

A convention and art center in Marunouchi.

In the middle of Shinjuku's high-rise district, a view over Tokyo from 202 meters up — and free.

Prince and Princess Asaka were studying in France at the height of Art Deco.

There is a building in Ueno Park that stays locked for most of the year.

Drinking sake in Tokyo usually ends with one glass at an izakaya; this program starts there.

'There are views you can only get at this height' — that one line really is the whole of it.

It's the front door of Japan, and the station itself is the sight.

333 meters tall, and a Tokyo landmark for as long as it has stood.

The Toyo Bunko is a research institution for the history and culture of Asia, founded in 1924.

One of the largest seafood markets in the world.

Sustainability is usually a well-turned line on the first page of a proposal.

What comes to the table first is a pot of clear broth.

One thing to be clear about first: you come to Tsukiji for breakfast.

When the wholesale market moved to Toyosu, a lot of people assumed Tsukiji was finished.

In the 6th year of Meiji this became one of the first places in Japan designated as a public park.

The first time people in Japan looked at animals through a railing was here, in 1882.

Ukiyo-e flourished in the Edo period.

This noh theater stands inside a family home.

Urushi is among the oldest coatings in Japan, with traces of use going back some 9,000 years.

A maiko's day starts in the late afternoon.

A single Wajima bowl passes through some 124 stages before anyone decorates it.

At Tennoz, Warehouse TERRADA has pushed one idea as far as it goes.

Few plates of okonomiyaki carry a sauce company's century of ambition behind them.

Push open a door on a central Osaka street and a formal Noh stage stands inside a wooden building.

Kawai-cho in Hida is deep snow country.

Nihonga is a word that invites misunderstanding.

Nine Seto-ware jars are buried beneath the stage to carry its sound.

Zaborin is not a ryokan with a good open-air bath; it is solitude built as architecture.

The middle stretch of a conference is the hardest thing to schedule.