My journey to crowd-free Japan — with absolutely no cherry blossom - The Times
For nearly a decade after the briefest of work trips to Osaka I was desperate to return to Japan. And yet every time my finger hovered over the “book now” button, the same images sprang to mind — arriving at a Mount Fuji viewing point only to have to observe it through the back of a French teenager’s camera and elbowing Americans out of the way to grab a glimpse of some cherry blossom then sadly pushing my way back home through the crowds.
All the research I did confirmed for me that Japan is suffering from a terrible degree of overtourism. I scrolled dismally through travel blogs comparing crowds in Kyoto unfavourably with those at Disney World and the Vatican. I just couldn’t bring myself to go and ruin the magical Japan of my imagination. Crucially, in my mind’s eye I wasn’t competing with half the population of Arkansas to see it.
And so my trip of a lifetime remained unbooked. That is, until I came across InsideJapan, a travel company purporting to offer trips specifically designed to take you places that haven’t been ravaged by overtourism. Sure enough, an itinerary soon arrived presenting five destinations, of which I recognised only one, and that was Tokyo. This was the promise made by InsideJapan: I wouldn’t get to see the cherry blossoms of Kyoto, but by the end of it I wouldn’t mind. Deal.
On arrival in Tokyo with my husband, it soon became clear that, even in the one famous location on our trip, we would still be nudged in the direction of unexplored areas. Groggy from our 14-hour flight, we arrived at our hotel in Gotanda.
Gotanda is first and foremost a business neighbourhood of Tokyo, but it is rather more relaxed than, for example, Marunouchi, the main financial district, which is full of determined-looking commuters in dark suits at every hour of the day. It is also home to about a thousand restaurants, giving the whole place a buzz and liveliness that you absolutely do not see in the equivalent parts of British cities. On our second day in Tokyo, recovered from our flights, we took a food tour with one of InsideJapan’s guides, working slowly out from Gotanda and eating cheaply and deliciously at the many tiny restaurants that service the huge number of office workers in the area: sticky yakitori skewers, vast gyoza, crispy pork tonkatsu.
Our hotel, OMO5 Tokyo Gotanda, also offered a guide to accompany us to a restaurant on our first night — the perfect introduction to a city that can be an overwhelming place in which to eat. We ended up in a tiny diner with five seats and no English language on the menu, eating sashimi and yakitori.
Back at our simple, modern hotel room, we had the type of remarkable skyline that many people in the West imagine when they think of Japan. Gotanda is relatively low-rise and OMO5 is on the 14th to 20th floors of one of the tallest buildings in the area. This is not to be underestimated, because friends who have paid premiums to stay in fashionable districts report that the only view from their hotel room was of people in the adjacent tower block staring back at them.
Left to our own devices, on the third day, we took ourselves off to a few big tourist destinations, including the Meiji shrine and the Yasukuni military shrine. I suddenly noticed that, for the first time, there were other westerners in my line of sight. This, quite clearly, was our sign to get out of Tokyo and return to the itinerary set out by InsideJapan.
The next day, engaging in all the necessary kvelling over the efficiency of the bullet trains and muttering and moaning about HS2, we set out on a two-hour journey to Inuyama, a small town in the central prefecture of Aichi. Dusty and filled with buildings of one or two storeys, it has the slightly magical, liminal feel of an old frontier town in the American West. We stayed at Hotel Indigo Inuyama Urakuen Garden, an elegant place with hot spring baths and views of the river and Inuyama Castle from our spacious room.
We met up with a guide for a tour of the castle, one of five designated as National Treasures, chosen for their beauty and historical significance. For me, however, the history lesson paled into insignificance compared with the casual lunch we ate afterwards at a restaurant named Matsunoya, outside the castle entrance: tofu skewers slathered in the local speciality red miso, deeply rich and savoury with an overtone of sweetness and certainly unlike any tofu you may have encountered in Britain (mains from £4; dengaku-matsunoya.com).
After lunch we headed into the hills outside the town to the Daishoji Buddhist temple, where we watched priests conduct a Goma fire ceremony, which consists of chanting, beating of drums and burning of wooden sticks to release worldly attachments and bring about blessings. It was really quite a remarkable experience; meditative and otherworldly. I am always slightly wary of playing tourist with other people’s spirituality — so often these experiences can feel cheap and performed for the benefit of rubbernecking westerners, but the ceremony at Daishoji did not feel like that at all. It is conducted daily, whether or not there are visitors to watch, and this is a genuine place of worship rather than a tourist replica. Watching the monks was one of those experiences that travel is supposed to throw up but so rarely does: a sense of wonder at how many kinds of lives are being lived; how many different ways there are to experience the world.
The next day we were back on the train for another couple of hours. This time we were far from the sleek engineering of the bullet trains. Instead, we chugged through valleys and forests alongside rivers in a tiny, one-carriage train, painted in deep burgundy with cream leather seats and a wooden floor, staffed by a lone driver-conductor. Our destination was Gujo Hachiman, a small riverside town in the hills of Gifu prefecture, hardly known internationally and mainly known domestically as the place where the wax models of food seen outside many restaurants in major cities are made (for which I have a new-found respect having incompetently tried to make my own nigiri model at the Iwasaki Sample Village).
In Gujo we stayed at Hotel Sekisuien, a place of quite remarkably odd decor, which was somewhere between an Alpine ski lodge and a 1970s regional conference centre. All this was made up for, though, by the view from our balcony over the tree-covered hills and valleys. Likewise, the almost medically bright lights in the dining room belied a deeply thoughtful multi-course dinner menu full of fresh local fish and pickles.
Full from an equally complex breakfast, we set out on electric bikes with a guide, rolling through the hills and ending up with a quick tour of the town. This was not just my favourite thing I did in Japan but one of my favourite things I have ever done. The scenery was of the type that makes you feel lucky to see it and we quite often did not comes across another person for miles. More than anywhere else during our trip, we experienced a phenomenon in Gujo Hachiman that is basically unheard of among British tourists: the people here were simultaneously surprised and delighted to see us.
The next day brought a shift in pace and direction as we ventured back to a major city. When friends ask about the places we visited, after having encountered a series of blank faces I’ve taken to explaining Nagoya as “the Birmingham of Japan”. The country’s fourth largest city, mainly known as the home of Toyota, this is a place with an inferiority complex. “Nagoya isn’t boring” the fridge magnet that was given to us by our guide reads, which rather felt like protesting too much. But as we wandered around the Osu shopping district in pursuit of miso chicken karaage and Taiwanese soup dumplings and stopping by a neon, flashing, sensory-overload-inducing games arcade and, a few feet away, a temple inside a shopping centre, I started to fall in love with the place — a feeling further compounded by a trip to Nagoya Castle and the Toganji temple, home to a 50ft-high, mint green Buddha statue.
Most countries today have absorbed a fair bit of Anglo-American culture, but Japan remains distinctly unique. It is the most “different” place that I have been. In Nagoya, we saw no end of young people walking the streets dressed in elaborate cosplay and a group of teenage girls performing a dance in the street, cheered on by a crowd of exclusively middle-aged men. You can find these sorts of cultural curiosities in Tokyo too, but in such a big city you have to go looking for them; in a medium-sized city such as Nagoya, everything is more compressed. It’s hard to leave your hotel room without seeing something strange and entrancing.
In our case, that hotel room was in the Soho House-esque Nikko Style, mainly picked for its proximity to the fish market, which you’ll want to visit early in the morning so you can watch the stallholders slice their way through tuna that weigh as much as you do then sit or stand in one of the many tiny restaurants around the sides of the market serving fresh fish to breakfasters and workers coming off their night shifts.
From Nagoya, it was back to the countryside. Izu Kogen is a couple of hours out of Tokyo by train and serves as a sort of Hamptons equivalent for city dwellers wishing to escape the humidity. That comparison, however, does its natural beauty little justice.
On arrival we set out on a coastal walk along great, black volcanic cliffs covered in trees and plants, which feel more tropical than anything else. During a couple of hours’ walking we barely saw more than five other people. With the exception of the Izu Kogen teddy bear museum (everything you’re imagining and more — entry from £7; teddynet.co.jp), there is little to do here apart from walk, laze in the hot springs and eat. With the beauty of the scenery, you won’t want to do much else, and with the quality of the food at the Hanafubuki hotel, you won’t care to explore other options.
Hanafubuki consists of a series of cabins, some of which contain bedrooms and others housing indoor-outdoor hot spring baths. All are surrounded by thick greenery and seem to merge with the landscape. The bedrooms are decorated in traditional style, with dividing walls made of washi paper and floors of tatami mats. To sleep — or enjoy an in-room massage — you lay out futons on the floor as though you’re a merchant back in the Edo period. Each room has a little terrace or balcony with views onto the trees. It made for the most remarkable contrast with the bustle of Tokyo when we returned to the capital the next day for one last sushi dinner before our flight home.
We left elated — thrilled to have seen so many places that we would not have otherwise considered or even imagined visiting. And I minded not one bit that we didn’t see any cherry blossom.
All recommendations within this article are informed by independent expert editorial opinion. This article contains affiliate links that will earn us revenue. Where a “Book now” button appears, it may direct you to our in-house travel agency, Times Holidays, or to one of our affiliate partners
Charlotte Ivers was a guest of InsideJapan, which has 13 nights’ B&B from £4,750pp, including transfers, some private guiding, activities and some extra meals (insidejapantours.com). Fly to Tokyo
You can book Charlotte’s itinerary with Times Holidays. Quote reference THOLGC608
