Between Two Worlds

Arrive in Tokyo and transfer privately to Janu Tokyo, in the contemporary heart of Azabudai Hills. There is no sightseeing today. Settle in. Sleep if you need to. Or don''t.

In the late afternoon we go up — high, and alone — above a city that extends past every horizon. What you are looking at is not an old capital. It is a surface. Nineteen twenty-three took the city down once; nineteen forty-five took it down again. Almost nothing in view is older than a grandmother.

Hold that in mind for the next ten days: a country that lost its physical past twice and chose to keep continuity in gestures, materials and hands instead. Everything later in this journey follows from that decision.

Then one dinner. A counter, a chef, very few seats — and the first evidence of what it costs a person to do one thing exceptionally well.

Morning in a working district of studios — the kind of low buildings where welders, printers, ceramicists and lacquer workers share a street and a coffee machine. We visit two people in their own rooms. No showroom, no display, no interpreter smoothing the edges.

Then your own hands. A blade set against a whetstone, a brush loaded correctly, a sheet of gold leaf that tears if you breathe at it. Twenty minutes of failure teaches what a museum label cannot: how much of this country is muscle memory.

Tonight unfolds in stages. The first place is extraordinarily refined. The second is considerably less obvious. The third does not appear in this itinerary.

There is one appointment today. Only one — but the road to it is part of it.

On the way north the road runs beside a harbour that is no longer a harbour. On the first day of January 2024 the seabed here rose several metres in a few seconds, and the fishing boats were left standing dry above their own waterline. We stop for ten minutes. There is no guide and no commentary. You will understand what you are looking at without being told.

Then the appointment. Among what broke that morning were workshops that had made lacquer in the same families for three hundred years — kilns, drying rooms, tools, stock, and the wooden houses the drying rooms depended on. We sit with one of those makers. Not for a lecture on technique. For the account of that morning, what was lost that cannot be reordered, and the decision — taken slowly, and not by everybody — to begin again on the same ground. He will show you a bowl that survived and a bowl that did not.

Before we leave, something practical: with him, and at your discretion, the materials for the next season's work — urushi, wood stock, an apprentice's year. It is arranged quietly, in his name, not ours, and it is his to direct.

Then back to the ryokan. Onsen. Garden. A book. Tea. Nothing.

We begin very early. Before the gates open, we are inside one of the places that made Kyoto famous — not to see it, but to be in it while it is still private. Cold air, unswept gravel, one bell.

Whoever receives us belongs to the building: a priest, the head gardener, the person responsible for what is kept in the storehouse. They speak beside the object rather than about it, which is a different register entirely — and if you ask what worries them about the next thirty years, you will get an honest answer.

If you wish, you sit for the morning practice. Not observed from the aisle. Sat, on the floor, for as long as your knees allow.

Afterwards, breakfast in a quiet neighbourhood. The rest of the day is deliberately open.

The morning is open. In the late afternoon we return to a part of the city you have already walked, but at the hour when it belongs to Kyoto again — lanterns, shadow, wooden sandals on stone, shutters coming down.

Before that, if you want it, there is an hour available with a priest at a temple that does not receive visitors. Not zazen instruction. The conversation people tend to have on the ninth day of a journey like this, when they have begun to work out what they came for. Whether you go is entirely your decision, and we will not ask about it afterwards.

Then the evening that most guests remember longest, and the one we describe least in advance: a private house, a family who are part of our life here rather than our supply chain, their own kitchen, their own table, their children coming and going. No performance, no explanation of the food, no scheduled end. Correspondence usually continues after you leave. That is the point of the evening.