One Week in Japan: A 7-Day Itinerary for Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka

For Tokyo and Kyoto, yes. For anything more, no: a week that tries to add Hiroshima, Mount Fuji or a night at a ryokan becomes a week of check-ins, and the right answer is a longer journey rather than a fuller one.

The arithmetic explains why. Seven days are six nights. The first day goes to the flight and the drive in from the airport, and the seventh to the flight home, which leaves five full days on the ground. Two of them belong to Tokyo, three to Kyoto, and one of the Kyoto days goes to Nara, which is thirty-five minutes away and too good to leave out. There is no slack in that sum, and there should not be: the week works because it asks for nothing it cannot hold.

Osaka is the honest exception. It sits between Kyoto and Kansai Airport, so a week can pass through it on the last day without spending a night there, and that is the shape this itinerary takes. A first visit with more than a week to spare should read the case for nine days in a first trip to Japan; a traveller with a fortnight has a different journey altogether.

A first trip to Japan: where to go, how long, what to avoid →

A luxury Japan itinerary: fourteen days from Tokyo to Osaka →

The week is based in Nihonbashi, the old merchant quarter, at Mitsui Garden Hotel Nihonbashi Premier. The choice is practical before it is anything else: Tokyo Station, where the Nozomi leaves for Kyoto, is about ten minutes away on foot, so the one long journey of the week begins without a taxi. The hotel keeps a large bath of cypress on its ninth floor, which is the right place to end a long-haul day.

Nihonbashi bridge, a few minutes from the door, is the zero point of Japan's roads; the present bridge of stone, with its bronze lamp standards and winged kirin, dates from 1911. Ginza lies a quarter of an hour south. On Saturday and Sunday afternoons its main street, Chuo-dori, closes to cars, a custom begun in 1970, and the department stores and galleries spill onto the asphalt. A first evening in Japan asks for no more than that walk and a quiet dinner.

Mitsui Garden Hotel Nihonbashi Premier, Tokyo →

Where to base in Tokyo →

Edo Castle's keep is gone, but its foundations are not. In the East Gardens of the Imperial Palace the Tenshudai, the stone base built to carry the castle keep, still stands about eleven metres above a wide lawn, and the old guardhouses and the Fujimi-yagura tower keep the shape of the fortress that ruled Japan for two and a half centuries. The gardens close on Mondays and Fridays, so the Tokyo days of a week are ordered around them.

Meiji Jingu fills the afternoon, on the other side of the city. Its forest of seventy hectares was planted by hand from about 100,000 trees given from every prefecture, and completed in 1920; a century on, it is a city wood so convincing that most visitors take it for a remnant of something older. The long gravel approach ends at a shrine of plain cypress, and Omotesando, beyond the south gate, turns from the shrine to the city in the space of a street.

Senso-ji is Tokyo's oldest temple, founded in 628, and Asakusa around it is the part of the city that remembers the old downtown: low wooden shopfronts, rickshaw men at the gate, incense rising from the great bronze burner before the main hall.

The Tsukiji Outer Market is the second half of the day and the reason it has a lunch in it. The land was reclaimed from the bay after the great fire of 1657, and though the wholesale market has moved away, the outer streets carry on as they did: knife sharpeners, sellers of dried bonito and kelp, tea merchants, and counters where a plate of sea urchin or a slice of tamagoyaki is eaten on the spot. The last Tokyo evening is at a sushi counter, the chef cutting each piece in front of the guest who will eat it.

The Nozomi reaches Kyoto in about two hours and ten minutes. The Green Car, the first class of the shinkansen, seats two and two either side of the aisle, against three and two in the ordinary cars, and on the one long journey of a week it is the only sensible ticket. The luggage has gone ahead: handed to the front desk in Nihonbashi the day before, it is waiting at the hotel in Kyoto, and the traveller boards with a light bag and the window seat.

Shinkansen first class: the Green Car and GranClass →

Hotel The Celestine Kyoto Gion stands on Yasaka-dori, between the Zen temple of Kennin-ji and the Yasaka pagoda, which puts the old eastern city at its door. The afternoon is spent on foot. Kiyomizu-dera, founded in 778, holds its great wooden stage nearly thirteen metres above the slope on eighteen pillars of zelkova, joined without a single nail; the present stage dates from 1633. The stepped lanes of Sannenzaka and Ninenzaka lead back down past potters and tea shops to the pagoda, and from there the walk continues into Gion as the lanterns come on along Hanamikoji.

Hotel The Celestine Kyoto Gion →

Where to stay in Kyoto →

Fushimi Inari Taisha was founded in 711 and is the head of some 30,000 Inari shrines across Japan. Its vermilion torii, each one the gift of a family or a business with the donor's name inscribed on the back, climb Mount Inari to its summit at 233 metres. Higher up, the paths run through cedar past smaller shrines guarded by stone foxes, the messengers of Inari, and the higher they climb the quieter they become.

Fushimi lies on the way to Nara, which is why the two make one day. The JR Nara Line runs south past the shrine, and the Kintetsu limited express reaches Nara from Kyoto Station in thirty-five minutes. Todai-ji keeps its bronze Great Buddha, 14.98 metres high, in one of the largest wooden halls in the world, and the park around it is shared with 1,465 sika deer, counted in July 2025, which bow for the rice crackers sold at the stalls. The evening is back in Kyoto, with a quiet hour on the hotel's doorstep in Higashiyama.

Nara →

The last Kyoto day crosses the city to the west. Kinkaku-ji began in 1397 as the hillside villa of the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, and on his death it became the Zen temple of Rokuon-ji; the gold-leafed pavilion stands at the edge of its pond so that the water returns it, gilded storey by gilded storey.

Arashiyama is a short drive on. The bamboo path runs for about four hundred metres from Nonomiya Shrine past the north gate of Tenryu-ji to the villa garden of Okochi Sanso, between low fences of woven brushwood, and the stems rise so high on either side that the light arrives in bars. It is the most photographed walk in Kyoto, and still, when the wind moves the tops, the sound of it is what stays.

The afternoon is for two of the city's quieter arts. A tea ceremony in a tatami room takes about an hour: the host purifies the bowl and the scoop in an exact order, whisks the matcha, and turns the bowl so its best face is towards the guest, who has first been given a sweet of the season. Nishiki Market follows, 390 metres of covered street and four centuries of trade, called Kyoto's kitchen with reason: pickles in wooden tubs, skewers of tiny octopus, yuba, sansho pepper, and the knife shops the city's cooks still use.

The final evening in Kyoto is kaiseki: a procession of small courses that follows the month, served in lacquer and ceramics chosen to match it.

Osaka gets a day here rather than a night, and the reason is geography. Kyoto lies north-east of Osaka and Kansai Airport south-west of it, so the road and the railway to the airport both run through the city. A night in Osaka would have to come out of Kyoto, which cannot spare one with Nara in it, and would add a third hotel for a single evening. The luggage goes from the Kyoto hotel to the airport ahead of its guests, to be collected at the counter in the afternoon, and the last day becomes a free one.

Osaka Castle comes first. Toyotomi Hideyoshi began it in 1583; the keep that stands above the moats today was rebuilt in 1931, rises 55 metres in eight storeys and keeps a museum of the castle's history and an observation deck at the top. Kuromon Market, about 580 metres of covered street and some 150 shops, is the lunch, eaten as the city prefers, standing and walking: tabe-aruki, scallops grilled in the shell, wagyu on a skewer, hamo in summer and fugu in winter. Dotonbori, a few minutes on, is the canal that Nariyasu Doton began digging in 1612 and did not live to see finished in 1615; it carries his name, and its lit signs and theatres have made it the city's stage ever since.

From Namba, beside Dotonbori, the Nankai rapi:t reaches Kansai Airport in as little as thirty-four minutes; from Tennoji, the Haruka takes about thirty. A traveller whose flight leaves before the afternoon skips Osaka and takes the Haruka straight from Kyoto Station, about seventy-five to eighty minutes.

Osaka →

Two hotels, chosen for their addresses: Mitsui Garden Hotel Nihonbashi Premier for its walk to the shinkansen, and Hotel The Celestine Kyoto Gion for the eastern city at its door. A week with a larger budget for its nights keeps the same shape and moves up a level: The Okura Tokyo or Aman Tokyo, then Hoshinoya Kyoto, on the river at Arashiyama, or Aman Kyoto, at Takagamine in the north of the city.

The Okura Tokyo →

Aman Kyoto →

Two more days change the character of the week more than its route. The simplest use of them is two nights in Osaka in place of the airport day: Hotel New Otani Osaka stands on the edge of Osaka Castle Park, with the keep across the trees, and the castle, Kuromon and Dotonbori stop being a day's errands and become two evenings in the city Japan calls its kitchen. Imperial Hotel Osaka, on the Okawa River, is the alternative a level up.

The other use is a ryokan. Kinosaki Onsen, two and a half hours from Kyoto by limited express, is a canal town of willows and wooden inns where guests walk between the public onsen in yukata; it deserves two nights of its own, which is why it belongs to a ten-day journey rather than to nine.

Hotel New Otani Osaka →

A ten-day Japan itinerary →

Essential Japan, a journey of The Private Collection, is this week given its two extra days: nine days, three nights in Tokyo at Mitsui Garden Hotel Nihonbashi Premier, three in Kyoto at Hotel The Celestine Kyoto Gion with Nara and Fushimi Inari on one day, and two in Osaka at Hotel New Otani Osaka. It is taken privately, on the guest's own dates, with a Tour Director present every day. A private chauffeur meets the flight and returns the guests to the airport at the end, the cities are joined by the Green Car, and the luggage is sent ahead between hotels.

The tables are part of it: sushi at a counter in Tokyo and again in Osaka, kaiseki in Kyoto, a private tea ceremony in Kyoto and a sake tasting among the breweries of Fushimi. For the traveller who would rather make the week alone, the Expert Japan Itinerary sets down every hotel, train and sight in order, day by day.

Essential Japan: Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka in nine days, privately →

The Expert Japan Itinerary, written for independent travel →

On the sixth evening, the lanes below Kiyomizu-dera empty. The shutters of the tea shops come down on Ninenzaka, a lantern is lit at a lattice door, and the Yasaka pagoda stands black against the last of the light, a short walk from the hotel and a day from home.

The Private CollectionEssential Japan9 daysOn the dates you chooseFrom USD $18,000per person, twin shareSee the journey