The Classic Cherry Blossom Tour of Japan 2027

The journey begins before you fly. Your Tour Directors meet you on a private video call, take you through the twelve days and hear what you most look forward to. A digital welcome pack follows, with what to pack for the season, the details of your chauffeur, and reading for the flight. When you walk out of arrivals in Tokyo, you are already known and already expected.

The journey opens with three nights at Executive House Zen, the hotel within Hotel New Otani Tokyo, with its own Executive Lounge and its own concierge above the New Otani's Japanese garden. On the first evening dinner is served in Nihonbashi beneath a Noh stage: a course is cleared, the room settles, and a performer steps forward with the painted pine behind him, Noh and Kyogen between the dishes. On the second day the cherry trees of the Meguro river reach towards one another above the water, the picnic is opened in Yoyogi Park, and that night you take your seat at a celebrated Edomae sushi counter, close enough to watch each piece shaped and set down before you. The third day is the tunnel of cherry trees along the Chidorigafuchi moat, Asakusa, the lanes of old Yanaka and the long view from Tokyo Skytree, and the evening is yours.

First class on the shinkansen, and the first sight of the mountain from the window. At the ryokan the stillness of the garden replaces the scale of Tokyo, your room has your own open-air bath with Fuji in view, and the afternoon belongs to the water. Dinner is kaiseki of Yamanashi and the country around the mountain. The next morning your Tour Directors lead the way up through the cherry trees to the vermilion Chureito Pagoda, majestic Mount Fuji behind it, and lunch is robatayaki, grilled over charcoal at the hearth of an old thatched farmhouse. The second evening brings a second, different kaiseki.

Kyoto arrives as a change of scale: tiled roofs, narrow streets and the eastern hills. Three nights at Hotel The Celestine Kyoto Gion, in the old streets of Higashiyama, with Gion a short walk home. On the first evening you walk the stone slopes of Ninenzaka and Sannenzaka down to Gion and the Shirakawa, and dinner is kaiseki at the counter of a Kyoto kitchen with two Michelin stars, spring expressed course by course in taste, texture, ceramics and temperature. Then come the thousands of vermilion torii of Fushimi Inari, the cherry trees arching over Keage and Nanzen-ji, the Golden Pavilion above its mirror pond, and the second picnic, laid in the park of the Imperial Palace from a Michelin-starred Kyoto kitchen. On the eighth evening a private room in a Gion teahouse is yours, with geiko and maiko.

North through the forested mountains to Amanohashidate, the bridge of pine across Miyazu Bay, and on to the Japan Sea and a night at Nishimuraya Honkan, the historic wooden ryokan of Kinosaki, a member of Relais & Châteaux kept by one family for seven generations. The yukata and geta are laid out for you, and the seven bathhouses of the town begin at the door. Dinner is the Sakura kaiseki of the San'in spring, Tajima beef first, with the seafood of the Japan Sea, and there is one more bath in the morning before the road south.

The road from Kinosaki ends at Osaka Castle, in a park of some three thousand cherry trees above its moat and great stone walls, and the last two nights are spent at the Imperial Hotel Osaka, on the Okawa River. The first evening is free. The next morning your Tour Directors take you through Minami, the Dotonbori canal and the food streets that made Osaka the nation's kitchen, and the afternoon is yours: Umeda for shopping, the cherry banks of the Okawa, or the Imperial itself. The journey closes with an omakase at an Osaka sushi counter, each piece made in front of you and served the moment it is ready, and the chef knows it is the last night of twelve days.