Fifteen days from Osaka to Seoul: the whole way by train, and one boat across

Hideyoshi built the first castle here in the 1580s as the seat of a unified Japan, and it was besieged, burned and rebuilt more than once. What stands is a concrete reconstruction from 1931 with a lift inside and a museum in it, which purists dislike and which is still worth the climb for the stonework of the outer walls, some of the blocks weighing over a hundred tonnes.

Two towers joined at the top by a floating observatory, finished in 1993, and you reach it on an escalator suspended in the gap between them, which is not an experience for anybody uneasy about heights. The open air roof deck is the best sunset in the city and it stays open late.

The canal south of Namba is where Osaka does what it is known for: takoyaki, octopus in batter, cooked in cast iron moulds on the street, and okonomiyaki, a cabbage pancake fried at your table. Loud, neon, crowded, and exactly right on a first night.

Founded in 593 by Prince Shotoku and generally called the first officially administered Buddhist temple in Japan. The buildings have burned and been rebuilt many times, most recently in the 1960s, but they follow the original sixth century plan exactly: a straight line of gate, pagoda, main hall and lecture hall. The garden and the treasure house are separately ticketed and quiet.

A five hundred metre covered market that used to supply the city's restaurants and now mostly feeds visitors, which has pushed prices up without hurting the quality. Grilled scallops, tuna cut to order, fugu in season. Eat standing at the stall you bought it from.

The tower over Shinsekai, a district laid out in 1912 in imitation of Paris and Coney Island and then left alone for eighty years. The first tower was scrapped for its steel during the war and this one went up in 1956. Go for the district as much as the view: kushikatsu shops, retro signage, and a rule about not double dipping the sauce that everybody enforces.

Three hundred metres of glass above Tennoji station, the tallest building in Japan when it opened in 2014, with an open air deck at the top and a glass floored corner. Come at dusk and you get the whole Kansai plain, Kobe to the west and the hills behind Kyoto to the north.

Fifteen minutes from Shin-Osaka on the shinkansen or half an hour from Osaka Station on the local line for a third of the price. Kyoto Station is a vast 1997 glass and steel thing that locals still argue about, with a fifteen storey staircase inside it worth walking up.

Founded in 1236 and named by borrowing a character each from the two great temples of Nara, which tells you the ambition. The main draw is the wooden bridge over a ravine of two thousand maples, packed to the point of misery in late November and almost empty the rest of the year. Two stops south of the station.

The head shrine of Inari, god of rice and, by extension, of business, with a mountain behind it under a tunnel of vermilion torii gates donated by companies, each with the donor's name on the back. The full circuit up and down takes two to three hours. It is free, it never closes, and after five in the afternoon you can have long stretches of it alone.

Founded in 778 around a spring, with the present buildings put up in 1633 under the third Tokugawa shogun. The main hall projects on a platform thirteen metres above the hillside, carried on a lattice of keyaki pillars assembled without a single nail. Below it, three channels of the spring are caught in cups on long poles, for long life, success and love, and drinking from all three is considered greedy.

The park behind Yasaka Shrine, and Kyoto's most popular place to sit under a cherry tree in April. Out of season it is simply a good place to stop halfway down the hill: a pond, a weeping cherry the city floodlights at night, and food stalls at the entrance.

The lanes between the park and the river do udon, soba and obanzai, the local style of home cooking served as a set of small dishes. Anything advertising kaiseki at lunch is the cheap way to try a food that costs four times as much in the evening.

Built in 1482 as a retirement villa by a shogun who wanted to outdo his grandfather's gold pavilion and ran out of money before the silver went on. It never got any, which is why it is the better building: dark timber, a raked sand cone in the garden that is remade constantly, and a moss and gravel walk uphill behind it. The canal path north from here is lined with cherry trees.

A few hundred metres of path through bamboo forty feet high, with the light coming down green and the stems knocking together in wind. It takes ten minutes to walk and it is crowded from nine in the morning to five in the afternoon, every day of the year. Get there at seven and it is a different place entirely.

The Moon Crossing Bridge over the Hozu river, named by a thirteenth century emperor who thought the moon looked like it was walking across it. The present structure is 1930s concrete faced in wood. Boats come down the gorge from Kameoka and land beside it, and the hills behind turn in November.

The main street has soba shops, yudofu specialists doing simmered tofu in the Buddhist temple style, and a great many places selling matcha ice cream. The tofu is better than it sounds and it is what monks here have eaten for eight hundred years.

The Golden Pavilion, two of its three floors covered in gold leaf and reflected in the pond it stands over. It is a 1955 rebuild: a novice monk burned the original down in 1950, an event Mishima turned into a novel. The route through the garden runs one way and takes about forty minutes, and the building is only ever seen from the far bank.

An hour and forty on a Nozomi or two hours on a Sakura, west along the Sanyo line. Sit on the right for glimpses of the Inland Sea after Okayama.

The Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, finished in 1915 to a design by a Czech architect, and almost directly under the point where the bomb detonated about six hundred metres up. Nearly everybody inside died instantly, but the blast came from straight above rather than sideways, so the walls and the steel dome frame stayed standing. It was kept as a ruin after a long argument and listed by UNESCO in 1996.

A girl called Sadako Sasaki was two when the bomb fell and twelve when she died of leukaemia in 1955, having folded paper cranes in hospital because a thousand of them were supposed to grant a wish. The monument went up three years later, paid for by her classmates, and the glass cases around it hold cranes sent by school children from all over the world.

Two buildings, the main one reopened in 2019 after a long rebuild. It leads with the personal objects, a watch stopped at 08:15, a tricycle, a school uniform, before it gets anywhere near the politics, and it does not soften anything. Allow two hours and do not plan anything afterwards.

A shrine site since the sixth century, laid out in its present form in 1168 under Taira no Kiyomori: vermilion corridors on piles over a tidal flat, joined by a stage where bugaku dances are still performed. The great torii offshore is sixteen metres high, stands on its own weight rather than being sunk into the seabed, and came out of a four year restoration in 2022 looking startlingly new.

Up the hill behind the village, and the temple almost everybody walks past. Five hundred metal sutra wheels line the steps and spinning them is supposed to confer the merit of having read the scriptures. There is a cave of five hundred lanterns, a hall of small stone arhats each with a different face, and hardly anyone in it.

Two things to eat here: oysters, grilled in the shell at stalls along the main street and farmed in these waters for four hundred years, and momiji manju, maple leaf shaped cakes filled with red bean, sold hot from the mould.

Five hundred and thirty five metres, reached by a ropeway in two stages and then a stiff half hour on foot to the summit, or two hours walking the whole way up. The reward is the Inland Sea laid out with islands to the horizon. Near the top, a flame is kept burning that is said to have been lit by Kukai in the ninth century, and it was used to light the peace flame in Hiroshima.

About an hour from Hiroshima. The line runs under the Kanmon Strait between Honshu and Kyushu, so the border between the two main islands passes without anything to see.

Founded in 757 and the spiritual centre of old Hakata. It is the starting line for the Gion Yamakasa in the first fortnight of July, when teams race one tonne floats through the streets at dawn, and one of those floats is kept assembled in the grounds all year so you can see the scale of the thing.

Kukai is said to have founded this temple in 806 on his return from China, which would make it the oldest Shingon temple in Japan. The reason to go is the Great Buddha inside, ten point eight metres of carved wood finished in 1992, with a dark passage behind it that you walk through in complete blackness feeling for a handrail.

A sandbank between two rivers, and the densest concentration of bars and restaurants in western Japan. What you are here for is the row of yatai along the southern waterfront: wooden carts with a counter, a canvas side and eight stools, serving ramen, grilled chicken and mentaiko from about six until the small hours. Cash, no reservations, and you shuffle up when somebody new arrives.

Eisai founded it in 1195 after coming back from study in China, which makes it the first Zen temple in Japan. He brought tea seeds home on the same trip and planted them, so this is also where Japanese tea culture starts. It is small, working, free and almost empty, and the point is what happened here rather than what you can see.

Kuroda Nagamasa built it between 1601 and 1607 and it was one of the largest castles in Kyushu. The Meiji government took the buildings down and left the stone bases, gates and turrets, which you can walk over freely. Climb to the top of the main keep platform for the best view of the city that does not cost anything.

The cafes along the eastern edge of the lake do sandwiches and coffee, and there is a good udon shop on the road back towards Ohorikoen station. Fukuoka claims to have invented udon as well as everything else it claims.

The castle's outer moat, turned into a public park in 1929 and modelled on the West Lake at Hangzhou, with three islands linked by bridges and a two kilometre path around the water that half the city jogs. There is a separate walled Japanese garden at the southern end which is small, formal and worth the small fee.

Three and a half hours or so on the fast craft, or overnight on the ferry with a cabin. Book ahead in summer and at Korean holidays, take a passport photocopy for the forms, and remember the clocks do not change: Japan and Korea keep the same time.

The largest fish market in Korea, rebuilt in 2006 into a building shaped like a seagull's wing, with the wet floor trade downstairs and restaurants above. It is run almost entirely by women, the jagalchi ajumma, who have controlled this trade for generations. Point at something in a tank downstairs and they will cook it upstairs for a fee.

The market that grew out of what refugees and traders sold on the street after 1945, when it was known as the Dokkaebi or goblin market because the stock appeared from nowhere. Now it is several covered blocks of clothing, tools, cosmetics and food alleys, and the street food lane is the best cheap eating in the city.

Ssiat hotteok, a fried pancake split and filled with seeds and syrup, is a Busan invention and sold from carts here. After that, milmyeon, cold wheat noodles, which refugees made when they could not get the buckwheat they used in the north.

A hillside of small houses stacked in steps, built by refugees and members of a religious sect in the 1950s and repainted in blocks of colour from 2009 as an art project that worked rather too well. Go early, keep to the marked route, and remember that several thousand people live here and most of them are elderly.

The cafes along the cliff path have become the reason half of Busan comes out here at the weekend, and the view over the shipping lanes is worth the queue. Otherwise, dwaeji gukbap, pork and rice soup, is the city's own dish and it is sold everywhere for very little.

A single row of houses on a cliff above the sea on Yeongdo island, with a footpath running along the front of them and the container port in the distance. It was another refugee settlement and it is quieter and less made over than Gamcheon, though the cafes are arriving.

The beach the city itself uses, a couple of kilometres of sand with the Gwangan Bridge across the mouth of the bay. The bridge opened in 2003, runs seven kilometres and is lit in changing colours at night, and on some weekends there is a drone show over the water. The bars behind the beach face the right way.

Two and a half to three hours from Busan Station, with trains roughly every half hour. Buy at the machine or on the app; there is no advantage in booking weeks out except at holidays, when there is no advantage in trying at all.

The ceremonial axis of the city, running from the main palace gate south, with a statue of King Sejong who commissioned the Korean alphabet in the fifteenth century, and one of Admiral Yi Sun-sin, who beat a Japanese fleet of a hundred and thirty ships with twelve. The square was rebuilt and reopened in 2022 with more grass and fewer lanes of traffic. Demonstrations happen here most weekends.

A stream that ran through the middle of Seoul, was covered over in the 1950s, had an elevated motorway built above it in the 1970s, and then had all of that demolished in 2003 so the water could be put back. Eleven kilometres of it, several metres below street level, with stepping stones and willows and office workers eating lunch on the banks.

The old printing and hardware district east of the stream has filled up with grill houses and bars in converted workshops. Order samgyeopsal, pork belly cooked at the table, and let somebody else handle the scissors.

Built in 1395 as the main palace of the new dynasty, burned in the Japanese invasion of 1592, left in ruins for two hundred and seventy years, rebuilt in 1867 and then largely demolished again under Japanese colonial rule. What you walk through is a long restoration that is still going on. The throne hall and the pavilion on the lotus pond are the two things not to hurry.

Hundreds of hanok, tiled wooden courtyard houses, on the slope between the two palaces, most of them built in the 1920s and 1930s and nearly all of them lived in. Signs ask visitors to keep their voices down and some lanes now close to sightseers in the evening, which is a reasonable request from people whose front doors you are photographing.

The street running north from the palace wall is full of small restaurants in converted houses. Look for kalguksu, hand cut noodle soup, or a bibimbap set with a dozen side dishes that keep being refilled whether you asked or not.

Begun in 1405 as a secondary palace and preferred by the kings to the main one for most of three centuries, because it follows the shape of the ground instead of imposing a grid on it. Behind it, the Huwon, a forested garden of pavilions and ponds taking up most of the grounds, is on the World Heritage list and can only be entered on a timed guided tour.

Built by the Japanese in 1908 and used to hold Korean independence activists until 1945, then by successive Korean governments until 1987. The brick cell blocks, the exercise yard and the execution building are preserved and the exhibition does not flinch. An hour and a half, and it is genuinely upsetting in places.

The museum's own restaurants are decent, or eat before you go: naengmyeon, cold buckwheat noodles in iced broth, is the summer dish and a northern one, brought south by refugees in 1950.

The national collection, moved into this building in Yongsan in 2005 and free to enter. Three floors and a very long spine of a hall, with a ten storey marble pagoda standing inside it, and a room of gilt bronze pensive bodhisattvas from the seventh century that is worth the trip on its own. Two hours minimum.

A broadcast tower from 1969 on the hill at the middle of Seoul, opened to the public in 1980, with an observation deck at the top of it and a cable car up the hill. From up here the shape of the place makes sense: a ring of granite mountains, the Han river cutting across, and the built up area filling every gap. Go an hour before sunset.

The Great South Gate, first built in 1398 and the main entrance through the old city wall, marooned now on a traffic island with the market spreading out behind it. The upper storey is a reconstruction finished in 2013 after the fire, and the stonework below it is original.

Ten thousand stalls behind the gate, trading since the fifteenth century, with alleys given over entirely to one thing: knife cut noodles in one, braised hairtail fish in another, hotteok carts on the corners. Most of it is open by seven and the food alleys are busiest at eight.