Day trips from Osaka

Kioto

The bombing of the Second World War never reached Kyoto, Japan’s capital for over a thousand years, so it keeps what other cities lost: some two thousand temples and shrines, districts of timber houses, and the dry gardens of stone and gravel.

Almost everyone does the same round: Fushimi Inari with its thousands of red torii gates climbing the mountain, the gold-leafed Kinkaku-ji, the Arashiyama bamboo grove and the Gion district.

The only defence against the crowds is starting early. Fushimi Inari never closes, and at seven in the morning you have it almost to yourself.

Mount Koya

The monk Kukai founded Koyasan in 816, on a plateau ringed by mountains, and out of it grew the centre of the Shingon school of Buddhism. Getting there takes about two hours from Namba on the Nankai plus a funicular. Of the hundred-odd temples, some take in visitors, with monastery vegetarian dinner and morning prayers.

What you don’t forget is Okunoin: a cemetery some two kilometres long among giant cedars, with more than two hundred thousand graves (samurai, feudal lords, modern corporations) leading to Kukai’s mausoleum.

Shingon belief holds that he didn’t die but is in eternal meditation, which is why monks have carried food to him twice a day for over a thousand years. Walking it at dusk, with the lanterns lit, is among the most extraordinary experiences in Japan.

Kobe

Japan opened Kobe to foreigners in 1868, one of its first ports, and half an hour by train away the marks are still there: Kitano, the district of nineteenth-century Western houses, and the oldest Chinese community in the country alongside Yokohama and Nagasaki.

The beef that carries the name answers to a strict designation: only Tajima cattle raised in Hyogo prefecture meeting set marbling criteria.

It’s eaten teppanyaki, griddled in front of you, and isn’t cheap anywhere. Be suspicious of anywhere it is. The city also has a sober memorial to the 1995 earthquake, which destroyed much of it.

Nara and its deer

Forty minutes are enough to reach Nara, the country’s first permanent capital in the eighth century. In the Todai-ji stands the Great Buddha in bronze, fifteen metres cast in 752, and one of the temple’s columns has a hole at its base the size of his nostril: squeezing through brings luck, if you are slim enough. The deer are the other half of the visit, more than a thousand loose in the park, protected, coming up without fear and bowing to ask for crackers. Better not to carry visible food or papers in your pocket, because they eat them.