Japan, and nothing else

For a thousand years a family in Japan has been known by its kamon, a single crest with the whole of a family within it, dyed into the curtain at the door, lacquered onto the boxes carried between households, set into the roof tiles, and worn in five places on formal silk. A family of any standing never announced itself. It was simply recognised.

A crest meant nothing on the day it was drawn. It came to mean something only after generations had stood behind it, in what they made, in the word they kept, and in the way they received a guest. The crest recorded a reputation; it could never invent one.

Ours is a five-fold sakura, a cherry blossom, drawn the old way, with a bamboo compass, a straightedge and a brush of a few hairs, circle laid upon circle until the geometry vanished and only the blossom remained.

We took it in that understanding, and we have spent every year since deserving it.

The Story of Our Kamon

What we make

For almost two decades, Luxury Japan Travel has created and operated journeys through Japan, and Japan is the only country we have ever offered. It is old enough and particular enough to reward a lifetime of attention, and attention is what our journeys are made of.

A Japanese kitchen has a word, shun, for the short season in which a thing is at its best: the bamboo shoot in the first weeks of spring, the matsutake in autumn, the snow crab of the Japan Sea in the depth of winter. A kaiseki dinner is composed around shun, course by course, and it is composed with ma as well, the considered pause that gives each course a place of its own. We compose a journey in the same way. Each one is set in the weeks when its season is at its height, and each day is given its moment and its pause, so that a morning beneath the blossom is followed by an afternoon given to an onsen and to nothing else.

We were the first to offer luxury tours of Hokkaido. The island keeps a later spring and a cooler summer than the rest of the country, and for a guest who already knows Kyoto and Tokyo it holds a second Japan entirely, from the lavender hills of Furano in July to the far coast of the Shiretoko peninsula. Four of our seasonal journeys are set in Hokkaido and the north today.

The word we keep

In the old merchant streets of Kyoto and Osaka, a shop's name was dyed into the noren, the curtain that hangs across its door, and Japanese still speaks of guarding a reputation as noren o mamoru, protecting the curtain. Japan has more companies that have lasted a century than any other country on earth, and they have lasted for the same reason: no one was ever allowed to harm the curtain.

We keep our word in the same way. We plan, organise and run every tour. Our own people in Japan arrange every part of a journey and run every day of it, no part of it is handed to another tour company, and the people who plan a journey are the people who answer for it.

The way we receive a guest

Omotenashi, the Japanese art of receiving a guest, asks the host to see what is wanted before it is asked for, and then to leave no trace of the effort.

That is how our journeys are run. A Tour Director of our own, fluent in English and Japanese and at home in both, travels with each tour. They explain why the gravel of a temple garden is raked to stand for water and what is said on arriving at a teahouse and on leaving it, and at a sushi counter they know what the chef chose at the market that morning. Then they step back, and the day belongs to the guest. Our seasonal tours never exceed eight guests, a small number of couples, which is the number a sushi counter or a private boat on Lake Toya receives at once.