Imperial Kyoto was the thrilling heart and soul of our holiday

Japan's Kansai region contains six of the country's top seven prefectures in terms of national treasures. Any fan of history, art and architecture is likely to be happier if they spend the bulk of their trip in this region forming a belt across Japan's main island of Honshu, about 2/3ds of the way down its length. Osaka, Nara and Kyoto form a tight little triangle in the broad plains and valleys here, with less than an hour between each by train. You could easily tour all the major sites from any one, and most people choose either Osaka or Kyoto as a base. We split our time between Osaka (four nights) and Kyoto (six nights), and were glad we had time to get to know both.

If I had to choose one, however, Kyoto's sheer density of historic sites would tip the scale. (And just about anything in Kansai would beat Tokyo, in my book, but the rugby logistics of our trip mandated 11 nights in the capital.)

My experience simply validated what anyone who knew both me and Japan predicted, though Kyoto's ample charms are not obvious at first glance. Given what I knew ... it was the ancient imperial capital, home to the emperor and his surrounding ceremony but abandoned by functioning government from about 1600 AD ... I was expecting a place like Venice or Bruges; a backwater, now consigned to history and tourism, preserved in aspic at the point of it fell out of the centre of action. How wrong I was!

I've now learned that Japan's propensity for earthquake and fires ... the latter a constant threat in a country where, until modern times, all buildings were made of wood and paper ... makes any building to have survived from earlier times a miracle. Like the rest of Japan, the bulk of Kyoto's buildings have moved on. More importantly, Kyoto is dynamic, vibrant and lives very much in the present, complete with businesses, a thriving university and plenty of government offices. The impressive history is here, sometimes cheek-by-jowl with modernity and sometimes hidden in back lanes behind the glass, steel and concrete office blocks and stores lining most of the main avenues. The grid pattern of wide, straight streets may date back to 1000-year-old ceremonial and processional needs, but today it gives much of Kyoto the feel of a bustling, mid-sized American city.

Embracing the sometimes-jarring contradictions between ancient and modern is key to appreciating Japan; a realisation we first made in Kyoto. We based ourselves near, and ate most of our meals in, the enormous train station. Opened in 1992, drawing inspiration from futurism and cubism, it's one of the country's largest buildings. It houses six railway lines, the city's subway system, the main bus station, an enormous branch of Isetan department store with two interior "streets" of individual restaurants on its top floors, a shopping mall, a luxury hotel, a movie theatre, several local government departments and a roof garden. Parts of the complex, most notably the long line of escalators that proceed in a straight diagonal up seven stories to the garden, with a monumental staircase on the top few floors and a plaza at the mid point with "gateways" looking over the city in either direction, are as arresting a sight as any of Kyoto's famous temples.

The roof garden makes an excellent starting point for an exploration of the city, as it offers views over the whole city and is free. In London, it would have a ridiculously expensive cocktail bar and crowds of young professionals. Here, it's just a quiet place for contemplation on an industrial roof. As a whole, especially from the outside, the station is horrifically ugly, and the surrounding streets would stand in for the dystopian future film set of your choice. But it's magnificently convenient, both for getting to and from everything you want to see and for sourcing food and drink at the end of exhausting days of sightseeing. Even if you somehow managed to avoid travelling through it, I'd still put it on the "must see" list and plan on a couple of hours to wander around.

NIJO
Our primary sightseeing objectives, of course, were firmly-rooted in the Imperial past. Kyoto is strong on temples and gardens, both of which I'll cover in other stories. Despite the glories I'll describe in those articles, if I had just one day in Kyoto I'd head for Nijo Castle. There are a lot of temples and gardens across the country, but very few palatial residences that still have much of their interior decoration.

Nijo was the Kyoto residence of the Tokugawa clan throughout the two and a half centuries they were shoguns. Though they effectively ran Japan from Edo (today's Tokyo) they needed to keep up the pretence of imperial authority, so regularly visited the emperor in Kyoto. Naturally, though they were one step down from the imperial family, they wanted the world to see that it was a very small step. When Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first shogun of his clan and the great unifier of Japan, started building the place, he demanded "contributions" from all the great families. Officially, Ieyasu was allowing them to add to the honour and glory of the newly-unified state. Cleverly, he was also reducing the resources of any families who might challenge him. The result was even grander than the imperial palace, and became the home of the restored Emperor Meiji when he and his family returned to power in the 19th century, before they moved up to Tokyo. The flurry of renovations done at that time is one of the reasons the interiors are in such good shape now. In short: the place has form. It's a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is the rough equivalent of Windsor Castle or Versailles, though in a very Japanese way.

Nijo is an enormous moated complex in the centre of town, hidden from passing traffic by high walls and corner gatehouses. Inside there are actually two palaces, the Ninomaru and the Honmaru, the latter being a fortress within a fortress with its own moat and screening walls. The Honmaru is closed for renovation right now, with only its gardens open to the public. The Ninomaru, frankly, is so breathtaking that I can't imagine having the brain space to appreciate the smaller palace in the same viewing, even had it been open.

It's the wall paintings that will be stealing your oxygen. Japanese rooms ... even palatial ones ... have little furniture. If you want to show off, you do it with the quality of painting on the sliding screens that form your walls. Various suites of rooms offer differing visions of power and authority: pine trees, birds of prey, tigers. (The last end up oddly sweet rather than menacing, as the artists clearly had never actually seen the animals and give us over-sized, slightly lumpen house cats.) All of the backgrounds are gold leaf, weathered to a mellow glow. In more private areas, the scenes get more casual, with pictures of everyday life and a remarkable series of waterfowl on winter lakes. There's even a hallway of exotic palm trees that shows that England's Prince Regent was on the right track with his Pavilion at Brighton, even though his architects couldn't possibly have seen this room. (Japan was still closed to foreigners at the time.) Besides the tigers, the virtuosity of the artists and the realism with which they present their subjects is astonishing. In what's essentially the throne room, you really do feel that you've wandered into a pine forest in an atmosphere of liquid gold.

Ceiling panels are also lavishly painted, sometimes with naturalistic motifs, others abstract or with family crests. Carvings in the transoms between sliding screens and ceilings are opulent in three dimensional detail, usually carrying on nature themes from the rooms below. In one astonishing example, even though the carving is pierced through in many places to let light flow, the scenes on each side are completely different. If you can tear your eyes away from all that colour and detail, the bronze work providing latches, door handles and nail covers is gorgeous while the simple paper screens, the dark wooden floors and the sleek lines of the long hallways are a design triumph.

The Ninomaru Palace is at the centre of a complex of buildings, all of which have striking roof guardians along their eaves and many of which have ornate carved gables. Elaborate gateways are an important part of Japanese architecture, and the one into the Ninomaru ... called the kara-mon ... is a blockbuster. Its elegant, bow-like roofline, gilded decorations of filigree metal work, brightly-painted carvings of storks and butterflies set against plants, and showy tiles and terra-cotta sculptures along its peak would be the most ornate gate we saw until we got to Ieyasu's tomb in Nikko.

There are three gardens of note within the palace complex, the one outside the Ninomaru being the most classically beautiful with its ponds, pines and carefully-placed black boulders.

GION
Kyoto's Gion district was another unique highlight of this trip: it was the only place in all Japan that I found the combination of distinctive and charming architecture, fascinating crafts and atmospheric bars and cafes that add up to my perfect idea of a local shopping district. One of my greatest regrets of the trip is not having more time (and energy) to spend several hours wandering aimlessly here.

Most guidebooks will recommend a start at the Gion-Shijo subway station, with a quick stop to pay tribute to the riverside statue of Izumo-no-Okuni, the woman who's credited with founding the theatrical style called Kabuki. Then you'll head east up the broad avenue of Shijo-Dori, walking by the city's main Kabuki theatre before strolling beneath covered arcades of shops on either side of the street. Most of these seem to be selling luxury food: either the sweets made from various bean pastes or pickled vegetables, both of which Kyoto is famous for.

So celebrated are these pickled vegetables that there's an exclusive restaurant on this street that builds the whole menu around them. We stumbled into Nashiri by mistake: tired, hungry and mistaking the sample plates displayed out front as sushi. It was only after we'd settled in to an elegant dining room, ordered and started working our way through a visually exquisite meal that we realised all of the pieces we assumed would be fish were different vegetables. Though we both left feeling a bit unfulfilled, this has to be the most beautiful vegetarian meal ever created.

Continue up the street to Ichiriki Chaya, a striking terra-cotta coloured tea house that you're unlikely to be entering. It's been here for 300 years and is still an exclusive place where Geisha entertain the rich and prominent. Samurai film fans will thrill to the fact that it's where one of the leaders of the real 47 Ronin assumed the role of a dissolute wastrel until the time came to spring an elaborate revenge plot. The tea house marks the start of Hanamikoji Dori, one of the most famous streets in Gion. It's lined with picturesque wooden houses now used as shops, restaurants and small cultural spaces. If you want to buy in to a Geisha experience, it's probably going to be here.

I preferred the streets around the Yasaka-no-tou temple, a five-story wooden pagoda that's become the quintessential picture of Gion. Though the streets up here ... you're hiking uphill from the river ... are still packed with tourists, there are fewer big groups and more interesting shops. The most beautiful street is called Nineizaka, really just a pedestrianised lane that runs north-south, curving down and back up a little valley just above the pagoda. (The Park Hyatt Kyoto fronts onto the lane's northeastern edge, making a great landmark to find it.)

You're more likely to be peering into the studio of a working craftsperson here; pottery, paper making, and fabric painting, dying and embroidery are all common.  There's even a caricature artist who will draw you manga-style. There are also plenty of kimono shops where you can buy your own, or hire one with all the proper accessories to wear for the day.

All the tourist literature encourages you to keep an eye out for a real Geisha, or more likely for their trainees ... maiko ... going about their business. Though we're fairly sure we saw two groups of maiko, differentiated from lesser humans by their matching kimono, highly-styled hair, traditional shoes and handbags, and escorting older chaperone, most of the women we spotted in kimono were probably tourists. Sightseeing in costume is increasingly popular for both women and men, and listening to their conversation tells me that the overwhelming majority of Oriental people in traditional dress in Gion are actually Chinese. That's ironic on multiple fronts, particularly in that traditional Japanese dress was basically a straight knock-off of Tang Dynasty court costume in the 9th century. Early medieval Japanese had an enormous cultural inferiority complex and copied China for everything considered worthy. China moved on in costume, artistic styles and the use of chairs. Japan didn't. I wonder how many Chinese tourists adopting kimono realise they're actually tapping in to their own medieval past?

SAMURAI JUKU
If you're more martially minded, you might prefer a samurai experience over shopping the lanes of Gion. My husband certainly did.

This took a lot of research. Like the cooking experiences mentioned in my last story, TripAdvisor lists a bewildering number of "samurai schools", both in Tokyo and Kyoto. All of them involve dressing up for Instagram-worthy shots, but there seems to be a wide variety in quality of instructor, what you actually get to do and your access to real blades. Given that the husband was vice-captain of his school fencing team, is a military veteran and well-versed in samurai film and history, this needed to be more than playing dress-up.

Samurai Juku delivered the quality we were looking for, though at a premium price point. For just under £80, you'll dress in black martial arts clothing, get a lecture from a sword expert who's descended from a samurai family, watch him do a few showy moves, learn how to unsheath and sheath a real blade, then head out to the back garden to swing your sword a few times to cut through a tatami mat. You can also just watch and photograph; for £40. It's a lot of money if you're not passionate about this stuff. If you are, it's a small price to get close to something you've only studied from afar.

The training ground shares its site with an armourer who makes full sets of highly-accurate kit for films, historical re-enactments and ceremonies. Come early to have a snoop around the gorgeous variety of armour on display. (Sadly, nobody was at work in the armoury when we were there.) This collection is as impressive as what you'll see in the National Museum in Tokyo. It just happens to be new.

Sword master Kawata-sensei is a small, venerably matured, grave-faced, bespectacled Japanese man who bears a distinct resemblance to Yoda when he's teaching 6-foot plus Europeans who tower above him. It's an even more pronounced comparison when he demonstrates some moves, springing from complete stillness into an arcing, swirling dance of menacing blades.

Kawata-sensei's accompanying "padawan" at our session was a young Japanese man who grew up outside of Detroit, and could thus translate the teacher's instruction and students' questions in detail. While I'm not sure that either my husband or I learned huge amounts about Samurai or their swords, because we started from a well-informed place, the session still had merit in being illustrated with real blades and the master's demonstrations of various moves. After about 30 minutes of discussion, it was time for the students to get on their feet with swords in their hands.

The length of a samurai sword, or katana, is between 60 and 80 cm. The average human arm length is about 76 cm. So getting one of these blades in and out of a scabbard hanging at your hip is challenging. Kawata-sensei and his assistant are patient with students of all abilities, praising those whose prior experience lets them get the hang of things more quickly while giving extra assistance to those who need it. By the time the lesson transfers to the garden and the tatami cutting, the students have the feel of things. With Kawata-sensei to direct the angle, everyone is a success (the razor-sharp blades and gravity do much of the work) and everyone gets a photo opportunity. They may be teaching an ancient art, but they're also plugged in to the digital age. The assistant not only translates and coaches on sword technique; he'll grab your phone and take plenty of Instagrammable photos if you don't have an attending friend to do it for you.

These experiences all seemed distinctly "Kyoto" to us. But there's another thing that may be even more characteristic of this city. Temples. There are at least 1,600 of them. Where to even start? That's the subject of my next story.

Eat Osaka's cooking school offers some basics for enjoyment in Japan and re-creation back home

With the steady rise of food tourism has come a boom in one-off cooking classes that complement your sightseeing agenda. A decade ago it was rare to find such things outside of a handful of culinary capitals or luxury hotels; now the challenge is wading through online reviews to figure out which of the copious options is best suited for the serious cook.

Fortunately, an in-depth feature story on Eat Osaka guided my choice. The founding team of a Scottish husband and Japanese wife suggested and adept ability to cross cultures and teach in English, while a partnership with Tower Knives testified to high quality. Our experience matched the laudatory write-up.

The class takes place in a small house in a tiny backstreet behind the showy facades of Shinsekai. Most of this kind of older urban housing has been swept away by tower blocks, so it was a treat to experience one. It seemed similar to the Victorian two-up, two-downs so typical in Britain’s industrial towns, before renovation and expansion turned their cramped spaces into our staple urban housing. We didn’t see upstairs, but down was a tiny space comprising two rooms and a galley kitchen. Later, in Tokyo, we'd see a model of almost the exact same floorplan in the Edo Museum's section on post-war housing.

We entered into the standard area to take off and leave shoes (perhaps five feet long and two wide)just inside a sliding door. Once you change into slippers you can step up to room level. We left all our things in the first room before stepping into the second, as it's almost entirely filled by a high table/cooking area that comfortably accommodates eight students. Comfortable when concentrating on the space in front of you, but don’t swing your arm too far back or you risk putting your hand through a sliding screen. And tall people must mind their heads between every room; a lesson anyone over 6 feet learns quickly in Japan.

Most of the cooking took place on plug-in grills or hobs brought out as needed, since the kitchen was too small for much more than hand washing and noodle boiling.

Our instructor, Yasuko, was a bundle of energy and kept us going through the preparation of three dishes despite the heat rising. (Cold beer helped, as well.) Osakans promote the casual, constantly-partying nature of their town, including a rich legacy of street food. That's what we were concentrating on. Takoyaki, crispy balls of octopus and dough, are the most famous local treats, but the rapid flipping required to turn a layer of batter into individual balls is far too advanced for a basic class. We started with simpler fare, though some skill was definitely still required.

Our menu: kitsune udon, chicken yakitori and chopstick okonomiyaki. The second was the easiest and most likely to make it into the home cooking rotation, the third the tastiest though most challenging. And it was the first that showed me I can still learn things about my husband.

Miso soup is as ubiquitous to Japanese cuisine as bread is to start European meals. This often gets dropped in the West; if you order sushi or tempura, you'll just get those things. But in Japan, a bowl or cup of miso seems to come out as a side to pretty much every order. Sometimes it's a work of art, studded with interesting ingredients and served in an extravagant lidded bowl. Sometimes it's as basic as a slurp of broth with a few tofu cubes and a piece of seaweed. It's consumed at all three meals, and 75% of Japanese people drink miso at least once a day. It's the basis for udon, ramen and all the other noodle dishes that form the backbone of simple, everyday Japanese food. And my husband ... who, before this trip was confident he loved Japanese food ... hates it. Turns out he dislikes clear broths of any sort. Something I never knew, but now explains why he's never interested in any of the chicken soups I make. He's fine with stock as a base ingredient to make something else, but as a finished dish he doesn't like soups unless they are creamy, either literally or in texture.

Thus the kitsune udon was our only shared noodle experience in three weeks in Japan. I went on to slurp other variations, but we never made it to any of the ubiquitous noodle bars that many tourists make a mainstay of their visit.

Kitsune means "fox", though there's none of that particular vermin in the soup. It may bear the name because of its colour, or it could be linked to the shinto fox-god of luck and business. Whatever the origin, it's a Japanese favourite differentiated by thick, flat noodles and a fried piece of tofu. The process for making udon, it turns out, is almost exactly the same as making Italian pici: make dough, roll dough, fold accordion-style, cut thin ribbons, toss in a bit of flour to prevent sticking. The Japanese method has two important differences. Once made and wrapped in a double layer of plastic, Yasuko had us knead our ball of dough by marching on it. Then we "developed" it by wearing the stomped disc of dough next to our skin for half an hour. On that hot, humid night, it must have been like putting dough in a steamer. Whether that's a gimmick or a critical step, the finished noodles were excellent.

Yasuko's secret on the yakitori was a generous glug of Japanese whisky. My big lesson: cook low and slow with complete attention. All the sugar in the marinade makes it very easy to burn your meat skewers once you start cooking.

Okonomiyake was the most intriguing of the dishes. It's a pancake, filled with anything you can imagine, then cooked, rolled and topped with kewpie mayonnaise and a special okonomiyake sauce that delivers an intense umami hit. (Happily, both sauces are available online in the UK.) We made the version beloved of street festivals. The pancake starts normally, poured in a circle on a flat grill. You put a large shiso leaf on the grill first, giving the finished pancake a bit of tang and a finished look. Rather than flipping it, however, you roll it around two chopsticks that become the stick for the sausage-shaped treat above. The flipping was a test of manual dexterity, but not impossible once you get the hang of it. Tellingly, each student cook did better than the one before, learning from earlier examples.

After cooking our three dishes, we discovered there were benches underneath the work surfaces that pulled out, turning our student kitchen into a dining room. Our fellow cooks were one Australian and three other English, all using the rugby as en excuse to explore Japan. Conversation and beer flowed, our food was delicious and we all enjoyed the company until we wrapped up at 9:30. That's early enough to take in the lights of Shinsekai, and to perhaps get another drink somewhere. But we called it a night. There were more adventures to come.

Japan's blockbuster castle needs energy and imagination

Himeji is Japan's most famous castle. A UNESCO World Heritage site, the largest and best preserved of its kind and the setting for many famous films, it's been near the top of our must-see list since we started planning this trip. It didn't disappoint on the visual grandeur scale, though the interiors take some imagination to bring to life and it's quite a workout to make it through the whole site.

This was our first major sightseeing day and our first head-to-head confrontation with the great enemy of our trip: humidity. Most of the teams competing in the qualifying rounds of the Rugby World Cup would call it the same. Coaches described ball handling as being like juggling a bar of soap, so slicked with sweat was every surface. Throughout our visit, levels of humidity were regularly above 85%, while temperatures hovered in the high 20s (80s F). These are the horror conditions of the American Midwestern summers of my youth. You're soaked with perspiration just standing still. Sunglasses slide off your face because of the moisture. Just getting from point A to B is exhausting, much less doing anything once you're there.

These conditions should have ended by the time we reached Japan, but global weather doesn't follow old patterns these days. Instead, the humidity stayed with us until Typhoon Hagibis blew it away two days before our departure. I loved Japan but having encountered those humidity levels would never, ever consider a return in the summer. At least, in defiance of the weather, the Japanese have perfected their air-conditioning. No British-style sweltering on public transport here. While you might be sightseeing in a steam bath, the trains sweeping you to and from your destination will keep you in cool comfort.

It's a 90-minute train ride from Osaka to Himeji in comfortable, spotless and prompt trains for just £17.80 return. (Each Japanese rail experience makes the UK's infrastructure appear worse in comparison.) The journey itself is attractive, with low, forested mountains rising to your right and Japan's Inland Sea sparkling on the left. Much of the modern sprawl of the coastal plain is ugly; boxy cement blocks, webs of power lines, clusters of light industry and warehouses. But you can spot enough temples in the hills or traditional Japanese buildings in the grey, featureless sprawl to make it interesting.

The town of Himeji itself offers much the same contrast. You arrive into a typical Japanese station cum-shopping mall and exit onto a broad avenue lined with mid-sized office buildings, several slightly tacky shopping arcades stretching away on the sides. This is definitely not a town like Windsor or Warwick, where the history and charm of the eponymous castle stretches to the town beyond. There's nothing to see in modern Himeji. And yet, towering at the end of main street less than a mile from the station is a fairy-tale wonder of Japanese history and architecture.

The most famous part of the castle is its keep, rising stepped pyramid style, each level with distinctive tile roofs that tip up at the corners of the eaves and display showy guardian figures.

The walls are a dazzling (freshly-restored) white, the roof tiles a gunmetal grey that glints almost silver in bright sun. In the 16th century, the locals thought the whole ensemble looked like it was about to take flight, and gave it the name "white heron castle".

Truth is, the whole thing is a lot more impressive from the exterior. After climbing up 150 feet of hillsides bristling with walls and ramparts, you'll reach the basement of the keep and start climbing up six stories ... another 150 feet ... of steep staircases. By the top, you're on something closer to ladders. Each level is mostly the same: plain plaster walls, highly-polished dark wooden floors, no furnishing and little decoration beyond showy metal nail heads. (Japanese architects liked to create these circular bits of metalwork, often adorned with family or religious emblems, to hide the evidence of construction below.) At the top you'll find a small shinto shrine (no photos allowed) and no place to sit.

This was the first time we discovered that the Japanese rarely give you an opportunity to take a break in the middle of sightseeing. There are rest areas at the end of your trail, but whether you're in a castle, garden or museum it seems you are supposed to stay on your feet to consume culture. The idea of sitting and contemplating seems alien.

The keep is so empty in part because it was entirely abandoned by the 20th century so really had no contents by the time it became a cultural landmark. But also because, unlike European castles, the keep wasn't an aristocratic living space. The owners and their inner circle lived in an enormous, horseshoe-shaped enfilade about half-way up the hill. The keep was the domain of the soldiers, and gave the residents of the halls below something gorgeous to look up at. This enfilade, called the nishinomaru, is the most interesting part of the castle but might easily be missed if you follow European logic and simply head from entrance to highest point.

The scores of rooms in the nishonomaru follow one after another along a long, majestic hall, the dark wooden floors shining like mirrors. The fact that everyone must take off their shoes, thus polishing the floors with thousands of socked feet every day, must help enormously. Sliding screens on the outer walls offer a glimpse of gardens below, and on the inner open to living rooms. There's no furniture here, either, but much of the space is filled with descriptions of the history and architecture of the castle, in both Japanese and English. Only one space at the very end could be described as "furnished"; here you'll see traditional tatami mat flooring and a figure of Princess Senhime, probably the most famous ... or at least the most romantic ... resident of the castle.

You'd never really know it, however, from what's on display here. There are a few information boards, and her figure in a fine kimono, but nothing more dramatic to convey her remarkable story. Senhime was the great niece of the first of Japan's three unifiers, Oda Nobunaga, and grandaughter of the third, Tokugawa Ieyasu. In an attempt to keep the peace she was married off at seven to Toyotomi Hideyori, son of second unifier Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who she lived with for 12 years until he lost out to her father and grandfather in a nasty civil war that ended with Hideyori and their son committing a forced suicide. Sen was spirited away, unable to rescue her son but able to save one of Hideyori's other daughters as the rest of the family followed the suicide pact. It's gripping stuff. Sen later remarried, happily, and became chatelaine of Himeji.

These rooms are ripe for a "Princess Sen Experience", similar to Warwick Castle's storytelling. But that does not seem to be the way the Japanese of doing things. You'd think that with their technical sophistication, love of computer gaming and legacy of manga and anime, they'd be at the cutting edge of using multimedia to bring culture to life. Instead, we found Himeji and the majority of their museums and cultural properties to be at least 20 years behind European best practice in interpretation and education. Generally, you look around and get to read a bit of dry, academic text. And that's about it.

That's not to say you should skip Himeji. It's Japan's most famous castle for a reason. It's an architectural tour de force, an ensemble of dramatically beautiful construction you won't find anywhere else. Just appreciate that what you're here to appreciate is a bunch of buildings. There are 83, to be exact, including towers, gates, storehouses, defensive walls, temples, etc. The complex covers 576 acres and, in another quirk of Japanese cultural sightseeing, has no cafe or restaurant within it. Pace yourself.

Fortunately there's a restaurant called Tamagoya directly across from the castle entry that serves tasty set meals and has pleasantly efficient air conditioning. You can use this as a restorative pause before checking out the castle gardens, or as a place to nurse a few beers while your companion does so. (No prizes for guessing who did what at this point.)

Koko-en Gardens lie on the flat lands below the castle, bordered by its moats and the local river. They have a separate entry about 200 metres down the road from the castle and a separate fee; best value is to buy a combination ticket.

These are relatively modern gardens, built in 1992 to celebrate 100 years of Himeji as an official municipality. But you'd never know it if someone didn't tell you. They're built on rigorously traditional lines, with all the elements you'd expect of traditional Japanese guardens: artfully curving ponds full of colourful koi, groves of bamboo, twisting pines, arched bridges, picturesque tea houses. Carefully-placed boulders cross gurgling streams. Stone lanterns collect moss in shady groves. Walls are this garden's unique feature: koko-en is actually a series of nine separate walled gardens, each with a slightly different feel.

Water, however, is significant in most of them. In the biggest garden, an enormous pond reflects diverse planting around it like a mirror while the castle looms above you. In another, a stream is forced into a u-bend along a gravel bank, like a miniature river tamed and transplanted. Sound is as important as appearance in these aquatic features, ranging from the roar of a waterfall to the rhythmic drip of a tiny stream from a bamboo spout. Even still water has noise, as koi breach its surface to grab hovering flies and return with a splash. While still a lot shorter on benches than its European equivalents, there are places to sit, contemplate and appreciate.

And there's a fraction of the tourists who throng through the castle. It's an excellent place to recover from the rewarding but energy-draining excursion up the complex above.

Osaka makes the ideal gateway to our Japanese adventure

Showy modern architecture stretching to the horizon. More shopping malls than it seems any population can support, many in bewildering underground labyrinths. A profusion of bustling areas for dining out. A surprising fascination with the Missouri-born mascot of St. Louis University's sports teams. And a cheerful, friendly, fiercely independent people who never miss a chance to tell you they're nothing like the rest of the Japanese ... especially those dull people in Tokyo.

That's what I'll take away from Osaka.

We found this an ideal place to start our exploration of Japan. Though it's the country's second-largest city and sprawls expansively from its port, the main tourist sites are in a tight bundle along an easy-to-use subway (tube) system. The Osakans live up to their reputation for hospitality; this was one of the first cities to fully open to the West and has always been full of merchants with eyes open to possibilities.

We flew in to Osaka's Kansai International airport and took the train to the main station; our destination the Ibis Osaka Umeda Hotel nearby. I'd braced myself for culture shock on arrival in Asia for my first time. It wasn't too bad in the airport, with plenty of signage in Latin script and the familiarity of international travel hubs. The foreign feeling escalated a bit in Osaka's main station, with crowds that made London Waterloo's rush hour look small. It's always tough to be a tourist, trying to figure out where you're going, as thousands of busy commuters rush past you in patterns you haven't figured out yet. The toughest bit, however ... on the first day and for most of our visit ... was navigating the short distance (perhaps 200 metres as the crow flies) from station to hotel.

Osaka, a local guide explained, is punishingly hot and humid in the summer. Winters are bitterly cold. (The first of many parallels I drew to the American midwest.) Savvy locals get from point to point in vast, temperature-controlled shopping malls or networks of elevated passages. It's very easy to lose any sense of direction in the seemingly-endless, relatively featureless subterranean corridors. By day two we'd started to grow confident with the path from hotel to station,  navigating shop front by shop front. Then we returned after closing time when all the shutters were down, eliminating our visual cues. Our departure on our fourth day was probably the first time we navigated with confidence.

Osaka has a reputation as a party town, full of locals who love to eat and drink. There's even a word specifically associated with the place, kuidaore, that translates as "eating oneself to ruin." (The original proverb says you dress into ruin in Kyoto, and eat into ruin in Osaka.) The most famous place to do this is Dotonbori, an area jam-packed with restaurants and street food stalls on either side of the Tombori River, now strictly confined between embankments and used for tourist boats. This area is also famed for its showy signage, most frequently photographed from the Ebisu Bridge. Here, you get Osaka's version of Piccadilly Circus or Times Square. This seemed an easy choice for our first evening, dazed with both culture shock and jet lag, and so it proved.

We approached down Shinsaibashi-Suji shopping street, 600 metres of covered, but thankfully above ground, local boutiques and international brands running into the famous bridge. On a Monday night in late September, crowds resembled the pre-Christmas rush on Oxford Street. Though there were plenty of Western tourists, the Japanese were out in force as well. The mass stroll gave the place an almost Italian feel of the passeggiata on a hot summer's night. Price checks on a few items in the shops suggest that costs are about the same as London, but you'll come out slightly ahead on major purchases because of getting the tax back.

We thought the most best area for eating would be the Tombori river walk, and we did wet our appetite with local beer and snacks at one riverside bar. How "foodie" is this city? The tiny, simple-looking place we settled on specialised in all things smoked, including some of the beer. Smoked cod roe on slices of crisp cucumber makes for a simple and tasty amuse bouche. But we found the action one street south much more thrilling on both the signage and the food fronts. This street is awash with three-dimensional, moving figures above the shopfronts. Bulls swing their tongues and roll their eyes. Crabs wave claws. Octopus writhe tentacles. The most famous snack on offer from the street stands here is takoyaki, a mix of batter and chopped octopus poured into a dimpled pan and turned with blinding speed and precision into fried balls. Basically, octopus donuts. They're delicious.

We wanted to sit down and take things slowly, however, so we opted for a popular sushi place called Daikisuisan. It's conveyor-belt style, which gave us a comforting postponement from the challenge of navigating a Japanese menu. But the real reason we went in was the enormous carcass of a blue fin tuna sitting on a bed of ice outside. We didn't understand his words, but the street hawker's gestures and the video above him made it clear that they'd purchased the fish this morning and its parts were now circling the conveyor belt in all its glorious variety.

In England we generally know two types of tuna: regular, and the fattier belly meat called "toro". Here, they have posters dissecting the body into various cuts, as you'd see for pork or beef in a British butcher.

These cuts circled the belt, along with spine slivers, cheeks, deep fried chunks ... plus other fish and tempura vegetables. (Tempura okra, it turns out, is fabulous.) We both tried o-toro, the most luxurious cut, almost raw-chicken-pink in its pale fattiness. Though an exquisite sensation, it was almost too much, and we both found we preferred the highest quality "akami" from the back. This fresh, the humbler cuts were better than anything at home. And the price was 10% to 20% cheaper.

Though all the guidebooks will point you to Dotonbori, I preferred Shinsekai. This area was originally developed in the early 20th century to look like New York and Paris, but after WW2, extensive development and a few decades of being Osaka's worst neighbourhood, it's lost that feel. Now it's the edgier, hipper cousin of Dotonbori, benefitting from recent urban regeneration. The main streets spread from the bottom of the Tsūtenkaku Tower and are jammed with restaurants, shops and pachinko parlours. Covered lanes leading away from here are jammed with the small, sit-at-the-bar style local places that I hope to have the nerve to try before the end of this trip. Shinsekai signage is as bright as Dotonbori but there's less neon and more three-dimensional figures. There's a particularly magnificent building covered with registers of banners painted with famous sumo wrestlers.

The most noticeable character here, however, is a pointy-headed genie-type creature called the billiken ... the "god of things as they ought to be".  Though he looks convincingly Japanese, St. Louisans will immediately identify him as a home-town boy, and a bit of research reveals that he was created in Missouri in the early 20th century as part of the same craze for cute that gave birth to the Teddy Bear and the Kewpie Doll. Though mostly forgotten in the United States, the billiken has endured and prospered in Japan, especially in Shinsekai. One of the greatest joys of wandering this area is spotting his different incarnations. He's dressed as a fisherman outside of a restaurant where you can catch your own fish, a wrestler in front of the sumo-themed place, a baseball player in front of a sports bar, etc.

Others make a pilgrimage to Shinsekai just for Tower Knives. Founder Bjorn Heiberg is testimony to the fact that sometimes it takes an outsider to discover a country's magic. Canadian-born, Danish-raised, he married a Japanese woman and discovered the unique properties of the local cooking knives. Soon he'd ditched his English-teaching job for knife sales and started promoting their quality around the world. His shop features blades from the best craftsmen from across the country; one of them is usually at work behind windows at the back. Even if you have no intention of buying, it's worth a visit to look at the beauty of the products on display.

Steel blades are strengthened by a folding process called "damascening". The smith creates layers in the steel much like pastry chefs do with dough and butter in the laminating process. A true artist can produce exquisite patterns on the blade, like ripples flowing across a pond. The examples on sale here are of a beauty I've only seen in museums before. A multi-national staff helps shoppers from all over the world, many of them professional chefs. The last thing my husband expected to be doing on our second day in Japan was chatting in Danish, but so it transpired, as the guy who helped us was a former Copenhagen chef so passionate about knives he moved to Japan to be at the heart of the trade. Tower also carries a range of garden tools and other bladed instruments. I'm going home with a much-prized pair of secateurs.

True to the spirit of kuidaore, the eating and drinking nightlife spots were our highlights of Osaka. Our best experience, in fact, was a cooking class in Shinsekai, which I'll cover in another entry. Osaka's other sights didn't inspire us as much.

We took a hop-on-hop-off bus tour from the station ... which is a tourist sight on its own from the modern architecture standpoint ... and were treated to lots of insights on the modern city by a local guide with fluent English. It was this day that crafted the first impressions I started this article with. I'm not sure I've ever visited another city with so many shopping districts cited as tourist attractions. You'll spot an occasional temple, and the rare pre-war building, but most of Osaka is broad, busy avenues lined with towers of glass, steel and stone. The most famous "old" attraction is towering Osaka Castle in the centre of an enormous park. But even this is modern; though the castle was incredibly important in Japan's 16th- and 17th-century wars of unification, what you see today is a concrete re-creation only finished in 1997.

Unlike the hideous urban sprawl we saw from the train on the way in, the modern architecture in the centre of town is often strikingly attractive. The northwest front of the train station complex is one of the best examples, with its grand, almost ceremonial stairs and enormous atriums looking over a plaza of fountains and a complex of dark glass buildings dedicated to tech startups. Unsurprisingly, the immediate area is full of coffee shops and hip bars jammed with affluent, creative-looking 20- and 30-somethings.

In its architecture, its commercial sensibilities and its people's love of fun, Osaka reminded me strongly of Chicago.

It's also a great hopping off point for sightseeing across the central plain, or Kansai Region, of Japan. You can easily take in Kobe, Himeji, Kyoto and Nara from here with fast, clean and efficient trains. We only did the first two before moving on to Kyoto. About them, more to come...

Setting expectations for an exceptional visit to Japan

I haven't gone travelling for more three weeks since I was in my 20s, and that was probably the last time I prepared so long, and so thoroughly, for a trip. We reserved our spot on England Rugby Travel's client list for the World Cup 18 months ago. That's left a lot of time for research.

I've worked my way through my husband's favourite Samurai films. I've researched top travel magazine's guides going back five years. I've immersed myself in Japanese historical fiction and the loving observations of American expat and Japan expert Alex Kerr. I've listened, twice, to Cameron Foster's excellent 35-episode podcast on the history of Japan and assembled my own YouTube library of useful videos. Over 18 months I've compiled, then distilled, "must sees" and "nice to sees" into an excel spreadsheet, studied maps and read etiquette guides. I even dabbled with language lessons, though I can't claim much success.

All that pre-trip immersion means I've also had a chance to form a lot of expectations. They may be informed, but will they be right? As we kick off 21 days across Osaka, Kobe, Kyoto, Tokyo, Nikko and Kamakura, I thought it might be worth setting those expectations down here so I can come back on the 15th of October without any hindsight bias to check where I was right and wrong.

And thus, I expect to...

• Feel like Gulliver in Lilliput. I've always been over the average size, even in Western countries that lean towards obesity. Add in height and skin colour and I suspect I'll stand out everywhere I go. I think it will be deeply uncomfortable, but probably a very important life lesson in what it's like to be in the minority. (And perhaps an inspiration to diet.)

• Be incredibly frustrated by the language barrier. Between the two of us, my husband and I can make our way in most European languages. I can even sound out Cyrillic, having taken Russian in University. But this is our first experience of being functionally illiterate. I know we can use digital translators to help, but I think I'm going to be incredibly frustrated by the gap between what I want to know and what I'm going to be able to learn. We'll get by, but be unable to plunge into detail. That will be especially frustrating in restaurants, where we'll want to understand lots about what we're eating and how it was prepared..

• Be uncomfortable with ... and quite possibly horrified by ... all the modernity. Tokyo, in particular, looks daunting for a person who hates urban sprawl. Endless tourist photos of skyscrapers, neon, crowds and computer gaming meccas make my skin crawl. I'll be working very hard to find history, traditional architecture and nature, but I suspect it's going to be tricky.

• Be overwhelmed by temples and gardens.  As the daughter of an art historian, I've never really understood those people who talk about "another bloody cathedral" or think all the paintings in a museum look more or less the same. Having been doused in high culture since childhood, I can happily wander through 20 Georgian country houses in succession and point out their nuanced differences to you. But I'm on alien territory here. My reading has given me a bit of insight, but only enough to know that I won't be able to differentiate much between the scores of sites on the tourist trail. Thus I've tried to narrow the itinerary to a handful of significant or particularly quirky things, so I can spend time really trying to appreciate them.

• Continue to be perplexed, mystified and deeply turned off by Japan's pre-occupation with the juvenile. The obsession with the cute, the weird cafes, the obsessive cos-playing all seem at such dramatic odds with a culture of deep elegance and sophistication. Even if I don't like it, I'd like to leave Japan with a better understanding of it.

• Be deeply impressed by Japanese design. From the "logos" of ancient noble houses to the fine points of ceramics to the placement of rocks in a garden, this is a culture that takes the visual very, very seriously. I think my eyes will be delighted with many small details. And I expect to find a new pair of garden secateurs and some ceramics in my luggage on the way home.

• Love the toilets. They seem to make every travel writer's article. I can't wait to try them.

• Not notice the rugby very much. The excuse to be out here is the World Cup, but we're only going to three games and we don't join up with the "official" tour ... which is really only a shared hotel ... until half way through. So I'm not expecting to be hanging out with a lot of England fans or doing much related to rugby outside of our game nights. But who knows...

• Consider these to be the highlights of our trip: Himeji castle, the gardens and temples of Kyoto, our 2-night luxury ryokan stay and the National Museum in Tokyo.

• Travel at a very different pace than the last time I set out on a trip this well-researched. In my 20s, I could vault off a trans-Atlantic into a packed day of sightseeing. I'd jam in four to six significant sites a day, never sitting down or "wasting" time on a meal until all museums and tourist attractions were closed. I generally came home totally exhausted. I'm not that girl any more. It's 3 in the afternoon in Osaka. We took our time getting to our hotel. We've showered, My husband is napping. We might go out for a stroll later. We have time. 21 days, to be exact...

Chihuly wows the Kew crowds with his glassy take on nature

The face of modern art doesn't get much friendlier than Dale Chihuly.

The glass sculptor is famed for learning the time-honoured techniques of Venetian glass blowing, then adapting them into fantastical works of modern art. He's known for enormous chandeliers of writhing tentacles, collapsing bowls that look like sea urchins, undulating platters that become enormous flowers and spears of bold colour. He often displays his pieces in large groups, compounding the explosive blast of colour. He's also very fond of teaming with botanical gardens, where his work can be placed amongst living things to show off its organic nature.

London's Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew are now six months into a seven-month show called Chihuly: Reflections on Nature, which is packing in the visitors. There's a trail of 32 artworks in 13 locations, including gardens, glasshouses and an indoor gallery for smaller, more delicate works. Kew is a big place and the installations are widely-spread, so seeing it all will take at least half a day. If your time is more limited, head directly to the Temperate House, where you can see the densest concentration of installations outside of the gallery and appreciate the newly-cleaned and restored glass and steel structure of a Victorian architectural treasure.

I suspect critics of "serious" modern art turn their noses up at Chihuly and probably tar him with a contemptuous "populist" brush. He also comes in for criticism as being a producer rather than an actual artist. Physical disabilities have prevented him from blowing glass himself since very early in his career: he designs and a large workshop implements. Many of those he's trained have gone on to do very similar stuff, and his influence has cascaded down into tableware and decorative pieces in high street home stores. I don't much care. Chihuly has always given me great joy, and continued to do so across Kew.

I've been fortunate to get up close and personal with his work thanks to my art historian mother. His major exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum took place right after she started working there, so I got all sorts of behind-the-scenes access and plenty of education. In the next decade he was back in town at the Missouri Botanical Gardens, doing an early version of what we see today at Kew. Some of the forms, like the magnificent blue and white starburst exploding outside a Doric temple, are new since my St. Louis encounters.

But most of what's at Kew will be familiar to anyone who's seen a Chihuly exhibition before. Which did get me thinking. Chihuly's glory days were solidly in the '80s, with a bit of active work in the years on either side of the decade. Since then, his blockbuster exhibitions around the world have increased as his fresh ideas have dwindled. His workshop produces in enough bulk to fuel four current major exhibitions. That's on top of eight permanent exhibitions and individual pieces in museums, gardens and other public spaces across the globe. Is this modern art, or a design brand? It's certainly no surprise that Chihuly's permanent home in London is in the design-focused Victoria and Albert Museum, where one of his chandeliers hangs in the main rotunda, rather than in Tate Modern.

The Kew show, however, reinforces my opinion that his essentially organic forms look best in nature, where their striking colours either contrast with the green background:

or blend in so thoroughly it's hard to tell where nature ends and Chihuly begins.

My favourites remain his Seaforms series, where pieces look like they've just been plucked from a coral reef.

And I think few people do "blue" as well.

But the most striking image in the whole Kew show is probably inside the water lily house, where white flowers arc out of a carpet of pads and blooms, extending their impact through the reflections below.

Chihuly: Reflections on Nature is on until 27 October and included with the gardens' admission price.  You can also see Chihuly Nights from 7:30 to 10:30, when the works take on a totally different appearance as they're illuminated against the darkness. Sounds like a great way to cope with the shrinking daylight, but book in advance. The night sessions are only on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays and are likely to sell out as the show gets close to its end.