Japan

Japan stands in a category of its own in world travel — a country that has perfected the art of contrast with unmatched refinement. In a single day you can meditate in an Edo-era Zen garden, lunch on a perfect bowl of ramen in a sixty-year-old counter restaurant, then plunge into the neon sprawl of Shinjuku or Akihabara. That coexistence of the immemorial and the ultra-contemporary, of rural and hyper-urban, of the sacred and the profane, is the first cultural shock a visitor feels on arriving in Japan — and one of the keys to its lasting power of attraction.

The country holds 25 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, from the Buddhist monasteries of Nikko to the primeval beech forests of Shirakami-Sanchi, the historic villages of Shirakawa-go and the sacred island of Miyajima. But Japan's real heritage extends far beyond UNESCO's list: it lives in the ritual of the tea ceremony (chadō), in the mastery of a craftsman who devotes a lifetime to perfecting a sword or a bowl of ramen, in the silence of a temple at dawn or in the split-second precision of a shinkansen that arrives to the second. Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka and Hokkaido form the reference quartet for a first trip, but the archipelago hides less-known treasures — Kanazawa, Yakushima, Naoshima, Hiroshima, Okinawa — that reward the curious traveller generously.

Japanese gastronomy, listed by UNESCO as an intangible cultural heritage under the name of washoku, is a philosophy of seasonal precision, product respect and visual composition raised to an art. From Edomae sushi to Ginza tonkatsu, Sapporo ramen, Osaka takoyaki and Kyoto kaiseki, every region has its specialities and codes. Japan counts more Michelin-starred restaurants than any other country in the world — and its neighbourhood izakaya often rival fine dining tables in sheer quality and value.