Takayama

Takayama is a small town – about eighty-five thousand people – in a valley in the Japan Alps, and it is the single best antidote I know to a Japan trip that has turned into a list of famous things.

It has three streets of Edo merchant houses so dark and so intact they look staged, two morning markets that have run for centuries, sake breweries that throw open their cellars in winter, a proper onsen culture, and beef that people genuinely fly in for. An hour away by bus, the thatched farmhouses of Shirakawa-go sit under four metres of snow for a third of the year.

None of it is spectacular in the way Kyoto is spectacular. It is better than that – it is a working mountain town that happens to be beautiful, and after four days of temples it is exactly, precisely what you need.