Japan in 5 days: Tokyo and Kyoto, nothing else

Five days is two cities, and the second one is Kyoto. Fly into Tokyo, fly out of Osaka's Kansai airport if your airline allows it, and you save yourself the journey back. The shinkansen from Tokyo to Kyoto takes around two and a half hours, with Nozomi the fastest service, so the transfer costs you a morning and not a day. Do it on the morning of day four, bags and all, and use the coin lockers at Kyoto Station if your room is not ready. Everything below assumes you are staying near a station in both cities.

Day one goes to the old east: Senso-ji in Asakusa, founded in 645 and the most visited religious site in the world with over 30 million visitors a year, then Ueno for the park and the museums and Akihabara after dark. Day two is the west: Meiji Shrine in its 70-hectare forest of 120,000 donated trees, Harajuku and Omotesando, the scramble crossing at Shibuya where up to 3,000 people cross on a green light that comes every two minutes, and Shinjuku in the evening. Day three is yours: Ginza and the Tsukiji outer market, or Yokohama and its Chinatown, the largest in Japan.

Take an early shinkansen and you are in Kyoto before lunch. The city was the capital from 794 to 1868, holds roughly 2,000 temples and shrines, and had seventeen of its historic monuments inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage in 1994, which is why the honest advice is two or three sites a day and the streets in between. Spend the afternoon in Higashiyama, the eastern hills: Kiyomizu-dera, one of the few Kyoto temples older than the city itself and part of that UNESCO listing, then the old lanes down towards Gion. Eat downtown near Nishiki Market, the covered arcade of about 130 food shops known as Kyoto's kitchen.

Fushimi Inari-taisha is free and open around the clock, which is the whole trick: arrive at dawn from JR Inari station and the Senbon Torii tunnel, about 800 gates of the roughly 10,000 donated by businesses, is yours. The trails up Mount Inari, 233 metres, run for 4 km and take about two hours if you go all the way. Come back down for late breakfast, then cross to the north-west for Kinkaku-ji, the Golden Pavilion, three storeys and 12.5 metres high, with its top two floors in gold leaf and the current building rebuilt in 1955 after an arson attack. Finish in Arashiyama on the western edge, by the Oi River.

Osaka, for one, which is fifteen minutes from Kyoto by shinkansen and still does not fit: you would be adding a hotel change for one evening. Nara and its deer park, Himeji Castle, Hakone and the onsen, Nikko: all of them are day trips that this plan has no day for. Do not try to solve it by moving hotels every night. If the missing pieces bother you, add two days and use the ten-day plan on this site instead, which takes in Osaka, Nara and a day trip out of Tokyo without changing the rhythm.

The Japan Rail Pass comes in 7, 14 or 21 consecutive days and its days end at midnight, so a five-day trip cannot use one properly. It also stopped being the automatic answer: since 1 October 2023 the fastest Nozomi and Mizuho services need a supplement, and prices rose that year. Buy single tickets, and use a Suica or Pasmo IC card for local trains, subways, buses and the convenience store. Reserve a seat with an oversized-luggage space on the Tokaido line if you are travelling with big cases.

Goodbars sells a Japan eSIM you install at home and switch on when you land; it runs on NTT docomo, Japan's largest mobile network by mobile contracts, and our Japan coverage page shows where it reaches and what independent speed tests measure.