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Day Trips
Day Trip from Tokyo to Nikko: Shrines and Waterfalls
A shogun built himself a mausoleum so ornate it borders on excess, then his grandson doubled down. The result, tucked into forested mountains north of Tokyo, is Japan's most theatrically decorated shrine complex.
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Day Trip from Tokyo to Kamakura's Great Buddha
Before Kyoto and before Tokyo, there was Kamakura, a fishing town turned military capital where a bronze Buddha has sat outdoors, exposed to the weather, for close to eight centuries. Take the coastal tram and you'll understand why it stayed there.
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Day Trip from Tokyo to Hakone: Hot Springs and Mount Fuji Views
Mount Fuji shows up on postcards more reliably than it shows up in person. Hakone bets on the mountain anyway, and even when the clouds win, a volcanic valley, a black-egg snack stand, and a lake full of pirate ships pick up the slack.
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Day Trip from Tokyo to Kawagoe, the Little Edo
Call it Little Edo and you've undersold it slightly: Kawagoe kept its thick-walled merchant warehouses standing through fires that leveled everything around them, and now sells roasted sweet potatoes in front of buildings older than the country's rail network.
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Day Trip from Kyoto to Nara's Deer Park and Todai-ji
Before Kyoto was ever a capital, Nara held the title, and it still guards a bronze Buddha the size of a building and a park full of deer that bow like courtiers for a cracker.
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Day Trip from Kyoto to Uji, the Home of Matcha
Long before matcha became a flavor on every menu, it was steeped, whisked, and argued over in Uji, a river town that has spent nearly a thousand years perfecting the leaf.
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Day Trip from Kyoto to Amanohashidate, One of Japan's Three Views
For a thousand years, poets have ranked it among Japan's three finest views, and generations of visitors have insisted on seeing it upside down, bent double, staring at the sky through their own legs.
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Day Trip from Kyoto to Himeji Castle
Most of Japan's famous castles are concrete replicas rebuilt after fire, war, or demolition. Himeji is the rare original, a five-century-old fortress that walked away from earthquakes and firebombing looking almost exactly as it always did.
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