Day Trips from Kyoto

Nara was the capital from 710 to 784, before the court moved to Kyoto, and the concentration of what survives is extraordinary: Todai-ji, whose Great Buddha Hall is one of the largest wooden buildings in the world and holds a 15-metre bronze Buddha cast in 752; Kasuga Taisha, a shrine lined with three thousand bronze and stone lanterns; Kofuku-ji's five-storey pagoda; and the deer, about a thousand of them, which have wandered the park since they were declared sacred messengers and now bow for biscuits.

The whole of it fits in a park you can cross on foot in forty minutes. Kintetsu's limited express from Kyoto takes 35 minutes and puts you five minutes from the park; the JR line is slower, cheaper and leaves a longer walk. Go early: the deer are calmer, the Great Buddha Hall is quiet before ten, and the coach parties arrive at eleven.

The Nara page has the fees, the hours and the walking route; a half-day guided version exists for anyone who wants the Great Buddha explained and to be back in Kyoto for lunch.

Uji is where Japanese tea is from — not metaphorically, but literally: the plantations here have supplied the imperial court since the twelfth century, and the shops along the main street still grind matcha to order in stone mills you can watch through the window. It is also where Byodo-in stands, the Fujiwara villa turned temple whose Phoenix Hall is on the back of every ten-yen coin, floating on its pond exactly as it has since 1053.

Add the Uji river, two suspension bridges, Ujigami Shrine — the oldest surviving shrine building in Japan — and the Tale of Genji museum, and it is a comfortable five hours. The JR Nara line gets you there in 20 minutes for $1.63 (¥260). The Uji page has the detail.

Kyoto Prefecture runs all the way to the Sea of Japan, and the top of it is a different country: a sandbar covered in pines that has been one of Japan's three classic views since the seventeenth century, a bay lined with funaya — wooden boathouses built with their ground floors in the water — and, on the way, the thatched farmhouse village of Miyama.

Doing this by public transport means a limited express to Fukuchiyama, a change to a private line, and then a rural bus with a handful of daily departures. It is possible; it is also a two-day trip with an overnight. The coaches that run it leave Kyoto at about 08:00, cover all three stops and are back by 19:00, which is the entire argument for them. Prices start at $50.60 (¥8,096) for the Ine and Amanohashidate run.

The view at Amanohashidate has a ritual attached: you climb to the viewpoint, turn your back to the sandbar, bend over and look at it upside down between your legs, at which point it is said to resemble a dragon flying to heaven. Everybody does it. There is a designated platform for it.

Osaka is 25 to 45 minutes away depending on the line and is the antidote to Kyoto: loud, modern, built around eating, and open late. Dotonbori after dark, the covered market at Kuromon, the castle in its park. Go for dinner rather than for sights — the food tours here have their equivalent there, and the last train back runs close to midnight.

Kobe is an hour, and worth it for the harbour, the hillside foreign quarter and the beef, which is a genuine speciality rather than a marketing exercise.

Himeji is 90 minutes by shinkansen and holds the finest surviving castle in Japan — a white six-storey keep that has never burned, never been bombed and never been rebuilt in concrete. It is a long day for one building, and the building justifies it.

All three are trivially easy on an IC card. The three-city coach that does Nara, Osaka and Kobe in 10.5 hours exists for people with exactly one spare day and no interest in navigating.