Japan

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The gates stay lit until eleven and the day-trip crowds leave at six. Two hours in between are the best time t

Japan fires several million shells between July and September, in front of crowds that arrive six hours early.

Striped flower fields in summer, a pond the colour of antifreeze in autumn, and a drive between them that is m

Six metres of snow a year, light enough to blow off a glove, and a landscape that goes down to two colours. Wh

The front starts in Hokkaido in late September and reaches Kyoto at the end of November. Two months of colour,

Two and a half hours from Tokyo, and the one city that kept its teahouse streets intact. Ropes on the pine tre

Thirty minutes from Ikebukuro is a street of clay-walled merchant warehouses that survived the fires Tokyo did

Two hundred and sixty pine-topped islands in a shallow bay, forty minutes from Sendai, and three red bridges t

The sea really is that colour. What the photographs do not tell you is that you need a car, that the best wate

Three thousand cherry trees around a seventeenth-century moat, and a keep that looks better from a distance th

The bay side of the city is twenty years newer than the rest of it and built to be looked at after dark. Four

The window is about ten days and it moves by up to a fortnight from year to year. Where to stand, which hours

Tokyo gets a real snowfall once or twice a winter, and the city is spectacularly unprepared for it. What it lo

A 1914 brick station rebuilt to its original shape, a plaza designed for the view back at it, and the one part

Sixty-eight years old, 333 metres, and still the better photograph of the city's two towers. Where to sho

The gate marks the point where ordinary ground stops. What the shape means, why some are vermilion and some ar

Thirty minutes from Tokyo, and the only skyline in the country that is best seen from the water it was built o