Japan: Temples, Trains & the Country That Resets Every Travel Standard You Had

Japan ruined us for other countries. Not in a dramatic way—we didn't come home weeping for Kyoto or composing haiku about ramen. But quietly, insistently, Japan reset certain standards: for public transport punctuality, for food at every price point, for the particular quality of attention that Japanese culture brings to almost everything, from sandwich packaging to temple maintenance to the ritual of handing back your change with two hands. After Japan, you notice when these things are missing. Which is, in most places, always.

We did the classic Golden Route—Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka—with a side trip to Nara and an afternoon in Hiroshima. Two weeks. About 1,200 km of Shinkansen travel. More food than we've eaten in any comparable period of our lives.

Tokyo: The City That Contains Multitudes

Tokyo is not one city. It's twenty cities that happen to share a train network and a postal code. We spent five days there and felt like we barely began. Shibuya: the famous scramble crossing at rush hour, which is exactly as magnificent as advertised—the signal turns, pedestrians flood from every direction, somehow nobody collides, and then it reverses. You can watch it for an hour from the Shibuya Scramble Square observation deck and it never stops being extraordinary.

Harajuku on a Sunday: the Takeshita-dori street is sensory overload, neon and sugar and fashion that seems to come from alternate realities. We walked through it, emerged slightly dazed, and recovered with crepes from a street stall. Then: Meiji Jingu Shrine, a hundred meters away, where the forest swallows all that noise and replaces it with the sound of wind through camphor trees and the occasional wooden clack of Shinto rituals.

Kyoto: The City That Slows You Down

If Tokyo is acceleration, Kyoto is deceleration. The ancient capital of Japan carries its history lightly but seriously—17 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, more temples and shrines than you can visit in a week, a culture of traditional crafts and tea ceremony and geiko performances that continues with genuine intent rather than tourist theater.

We walked the Philosopher's Path in early morning, when the canal-side path of cherry trees was just beginning to lose its blossoms and the light was coming through the petals in a way that made everything look lit by a film crew. We visited Fushimi Inari—the shrine of ten thousand torii gates winding up the mountain—arriving at 6:30 a.m. before the crowds arrived, and stood in corridors of orange gates with nobody around us and felt very small in an extremely good way.

The Arashiyama Bamboo Grove: yes, it lives up to the photograph. The sound of bamboo in wind is unlike any other sound in the world, and walking through it feels like being inside a different kind of silence.

Osaka: Where Japan Eats

Osaka has a reputation as Japan's kitchen, and it more than earns it. The philosophy here is kuidaore—eat until you drop—and we committed to it with enthusiasm. Dotonbori at night: neon, food stalls, giant mechanical crabs above restaurant entrances, the smell of takoyaki (octopus balls) and yakitori everywhere. We ate standing up, we ate walking, we ate sitting on steps over a canal at midnight.

Kuromon Ichiba market—the city's famous kitchen market, operating for over 190 years—is extraordinary for a morning hour. Fresh seafood, vegetables, prepared food to eat while you walk, street-stall chefs in full whites cooking directly in front of you. We ate the best oysters of our lives here, at 10 a.m., for an amount of money that seemed implausibly small.

Nara & the Deer

Day trip from Kyoto or Osaka: Nara, the ancient capital before Kyoto. Famous for Tōdai-ji Temple—the largest wooden building in the world, housing a 15-meter bronze Buddha—and, perhaps more famous still, for the deer. Nara has approximately 1,200 sika deer that wander freely through the park and streets of the old city. They are technically considered messengers of the gods. They are, in practice, extremely pushy about crackers. We bought crackers. They found us before we could find them. One ate part of Harshit's pocket. No refunds from divine deer.