Japan: Art, Islands & Tradition

DAY 1 | SAT 15 MAY | ARRIVE TOKYO | 3 NIGHTS

Arriving in Tokyo, we make our way to our hotel in Ginza, with a private transfer from the airport for those who have arranged one. As the group arrives at different times through the day, the evening is ours to settle in, take a first stroll beneath the lights of Ginza and rest before the days ahead.

Accommodation: Millennium Mitsui Garden Hotel Ginza | 3 Nights

DAY 2 | SUN 16 MAY | TOKYO: ART & DESIGN IN ROPPONGI

After breakfast, we set out for a day of contemporary art and design, all within easy walking distance in Roppongi. Our first stop is the National Art Center, Kisho Kurokawa’s undulating wall of glass, which keeps no permanent collection and fills its twelve galleries with changing exhibitions instead. A few minutes away, on the edge of Midtown Garden, we visit 21_21 Design Sight, founded by Issey Miyake and designed by Tadao Ando, its galleries set largely below ground beneath a roof folded like a sheet of steel.

After lunch together, we stroll to the Mori Art Museum, fifty-three floors above the city, for its latest international exhibition, finishing on the Tokyo City View deck one floor below, where on clear days the city stretches out to Tokyo Skytree and, far beyond, Mount Fuji. The evening is free.

DAY 3 | MON 17 MAY | TOKYO: YANAKA, NEZU & GINZA

This morning we take the train to Yanaka, one of the few Tokyo neighbourhoods to come through the 1923 earthquake and the wartime bombing largely intact. Here the city slows to old wooden houses, small temples, a leafy cemetery and Yanaka Ginza, a narrow shopping street of family-run stalls selling rice crackers, pickles and handmade goods. Nearby, Nezu Shrine sits among ponds of carp, its paths running through tunnels of vermilion torii gates.

In the afternoon, we return to Ginza, free to rest at the hotel or wander on past the bold flagship façades of Chuo-dori, browse the many floors of the stationer Itoya, or descend into a depachika food hall stacked with wrapped sweets and bento. Our main luggage is sent ahead to Takamatsu, so we travel light tomorrow.

DAY 4 | TUE 18 MAY | TOKYO TO TAKAMATSU & RITSURIN GARDEN

Settling into first-class seats on the Shinkansen, we speed west to Okayama, changing there to the Marine Liner for the crossing to Shikoku. From the windows, the Seto-Ohashi Bridge carries us over the Seto Inland Sea, with small green islands scattered across the water below.

A bento lunch sees us through to Takamatsu, where our hotel is a two-minute walk from the station. In the afternoon we drive to Ritsurin Garden, tended for close to four hundred years, where six ponds and thirteen landscaped hills lie beneath the wooded slopes of Mount Shiun, shaded by around a thousand pines. We take matcha at the Kikugetsu-tei teahouse, browse old tools and crafts at the Sanuki Folk Craft Museum and glide around the South Pond in a traditional wooden boat. We dine together at the hotel tonight.

Accommodation: Jr. Hotel Clement, Takamatsu | 3 Nights

DAY 5 | WED 19 MAY | NAOSHIMA ART ISLAND

Crossing to Naoshima by ferry, we are met at Miyanoura Port by Yayoi Kusama’s red pumpkin, its curved walls pierced with round openings large enough to step through, and by the private van that carries us around the island.

In the village of Honmura we walk between the houses of the Art House Project, where artists have turned empty homes, a shrine and an old dental surgery into works of art, set among the lanes where islanders still live and work. Lunch is at a small café in a restored farmhouse, before we visit the Naoshima New Museum of Art, the tenth building Tadao Ando has designed for the island. We return by ferry to Takamatsu for a free evening.

DAY 6 | THU 20 MAY | NAOSHIMA: CHICHU, LEE UFAN & BENESSE HOUSE

Back on the morning ferry, we head for the island’s south coast and Kusama’s yellow pumpkin, perched at the end of its pier above the water. From there we visit the Chichu Art Museum, which Ando set almost entirely underground so that daylight falls from above onto Claude Monet’s water lilies and the works of James Turrell and Walter De Maria, changing them hour by hour. Its garden of water lilies and willows recalls Monet’s own at Giverny.

Nearby, the Lee Ufan Museum lies low in a valley between the hills and the sea, its stones, steel plates and bare walls inviting a slow, unhurried look, while the Valley Gallery shelters Kusama’s mirrored spheres in a hollow long held sacred.

After lunch at Issen in Benesse House, among works by Basquiat and Hockney, we finish at the Hiroshi Sugimoto Gallery before the ferry back to Takamatsu.

DAY 7 | FRI 21 MAY | TAKUMIKUMO VILLAGE & THE IYA VALLEY | 2 NIGHTS

After breakfast we leave Takamatsu for the mountains, stopping first at Takumikumo Village, where a group of Kagawa craftspeople keep the region’s bonsai tradition alive alongside pottery, lacquerware and carved Aji stone. A grower leads us between rows of trees, some shaped over many decades, before we sit down to tea and sweets among the finished work.

After lunch along the way, the road climbs into central Shikoku, where steep slopes and narrow gorges kept the Iya Valley among the most remote corners of Japan for centuries.

At Hotel Kazurabashi, a traditional onsen ryokan, we change into cotton yukata and take time to bathe before a multi-course dinner of sashimi, grilled and simmered dishes made with whatever the season brings.

Accommodation: Hotel Kazurabashi | 2 Nights

DAY 8 | SAT 22 MAY | OBOKE GORGE & THE ONSEN

This morning we drive a short way to the Oboke Gorge, where the Yoshino River has cut a deep ravine through pale, pebble-studded schist. A thirty-minute boat trip carries us along the clear green water between the rock walls, before lunch at a café looking over the gorge.

The afternoon is ours to rest. A small cable car climbs the hillside behind the ryokan to its open-air baths, where the valley falls away below and the warm spring water, said to have soothed the Heike clan eight centuries ago, eases every muscle. We dine together at the ryokan this evening.

DAY 9 | SUN 23 MAY | IYA KAZURABASHI, HASHIKURA-JI & TAKAMATSU | 2 NIGHTS

Leaving the ryokan after breakfast, we stop at Iya Kazurabashi, one of the valley’s last bridges woven from wild mountain vines, which sways gently underfoot as the river rushes by far below its slatted deck. A short walk on brings us to Biwa Falls, spilling into a cool pool beside the path.

Later, a ropeway lifts us up the mountainside to Hashikura-ji, a temple of more than a thousand years on Shikoku’s great pilgrimage circuit, where Buddhist and Shinto traditions are honoured side by side; several hundred stone steps lead from the ropeway to the temple halls. After lunch, we continue to Takamatsu for a free evening.

Accommodation: Jr. Hotel Clement, Takamatsu | 2 Nights

DAY 10 | MON 24 MAY | TESHIMA ART ISLAND

For our final day of art, we take the ferry to Teshima, a farming and fishing island whose shrinking villages have found new life through the Setouchi Triennale and the galleries built in its wake.

Our private van meets us at the port, and we begin at Teshima Yokoo House, an old village home reworked around the vivid paintings of Tadanori Yokoo, with a garden of red-painted stones. Lunch is at an ocean-view restaurant cooking with the island’s own produce.

The afternoon brings the Teshima Art Museum, a single white concrete shell set among terraced rice fields, where droplets of water rise from the floor, gather and roll in silence beneath two open skylights.

Back in Takamatsu, we meet in the bar for a cocktail before our farewell dinner.

DAY 11 | TUES 25 MAY | DEPART TAKAMATSU

After a slow last breakfast, we say our goodbyes, arigatō gozaimashita, and go our separate ways: a short walk to Takamatsu Station for trains to Osaka, Kyoto or Tokyo, or a transfer to Takamatsu Airport for onward flights.

We are happy to help match up guests leaving at similar times.