Japan

Kyoto at six in the morning belongs to the people who live there. We walk Fushimi with a priest's son before the first bus, take breakfast at a ninety-year-old tofu house, then sleep in a machiya — a wooden townhouse with a moss garden and a bath you fill by hand.

Tokyo we keep for the second half: a counter in Nishi-Azabu with eight seats and no sign, the Toyosu market before dawn, a afternoon in a ceramics studio in Yanaka. The Shinkansen between the two is the only travel day we never try to improve.