Japan by Bullet Train: Our 17-Day Route From Tokyo to Osaka

In short: Our 17-day Backpacking Japan: Expedition runs Tokyo to Osaka by bullet train, stopping in Nagano, Hakone, Osaka, Koyasan, Kyoto and Hiroshima. It is a small-group trip for 4 to 16 travellers, mostly aged 20 to 45, with all in-country transport, 16 nights of accommodation and 20 meals included.

Japan is the country people save for last and then wish they had done first. It is also the one most travellers get wrong, because the temptation is to pick two cities, fly between them and call it a trip. The whole point of Japan is what sits in between: the mountain town, the temple you sleep in, the island you reach by ferry, the bowl of noodles at a station counter at eleven at night.

That is what our 17-day Japan Expedition is built around, and the thing that makes it possible is the railway. Here is the route, how you actually move along it, and the handful of days people still talk about months afterwards.

Getting around: Japan by bullet train

There are no internal flights on this trip. Every long hop is made on the Shinkansen, the bullet train network that opened in 1964 and has been quietly embarrassing the rest of the world ever since. The fastest services run at up to 320km/h, or close to 200mph, and the whole thing is timetabled to the minute and famously kept there: average delays on the main line are measured in seconds rather than minutes.

What that means on the ground is that the travel days stop being travel days. Tokyo to the mountains of Nagano takes the time of a long lunch. Kyoto to Hiroshima happens between breakfast and the middle of the morning. You board with a coffee, watch rice paddies and tunnels go past at a ridiculous speed, and get off somewhere that looks nothing like where you started, with the afternoon still ahead of you.

The rest is filled in by everything else Japan runs: local trains out to Nara for the afternoon, a cable car above Hakone for the Mount Fuji views, a pirate ship across Lake Ashi (yes, really) and a ferry over to Miyajima. All of it is included in the trip, all of it is booked by your leader, and nobody in the group ever has to stand in front of a ticket machine working out which of nine buttons means "two adults".

What kind of trip this is

It is a small-group backpacking trip, not a coach tour and not a guided march. Groups run from 4 to 16 people, most travellers are between 20 and 45, and the majority book on their own and leave with a group chat that outlives the trip. A leader travels with you the whole way, with local guides joining for the things that deserve one, like the samurai class and the monks' morning fire ceremony.

Where you sleep changes as often as where you are. Most nights are hostels in the cities. Two are in a traditional ryokan in Nagano, on tatami mats under a futon, with an onsen to sink into. One is in a working Buddhist temple in Koyasan. Twenty meals are included, and the ones that are not are the best part of the budget: Japan is a country where a bowl of ramen at a station counter can ruin you for ramen everywhere else.

All in-country transport and bullet trains, 16 nights of accommodation, 21 activities and your leader are in the price. International flights, travel insurance and airport transfers are not.

The days people remember

The snow monkeys at Jigokudani. An hour into the mountains from Nagano there is a valley where wild Japanese macaques climb down to a hot spring and sit in it, up to their necks, with expressions of complete contempt for everyone watching. They are there all year, but in winter, with snow on their heads and steam coming off the water, it is one of the strangest and best things you will see anywhere.

A night with the monks in Koyasan. Koyasan is a temple town on a forested mountain, founded more than 1,200 years ago, and you do not visit it so much as stay in it. You sleep in temple lodgings, eat the monks' own vegetarian cooking, and walk after dark through Okunoin, the largest cemetery in Japan, under stone lanterns and towering cedars. In the morning you are up early for the prayers and the fire ceremony, and then breakfast is served by the people who just performed it.

Kyoto, given four nights instead of one. Most itineraries give Kyoto a day and a half and call it done. This one stays for four, which is what it takes to walk the bamboo of Arashiyama early enough to have it to yourself, climb the vermilion torii gates of Fushimi-Inari, stand in front of the Golden Pavilion, be taught to hold a sword properly, and still have an evening free to get lost in Gion.

Hiroshima, and then Miyajima. The Peace Memorial Park, the museum and the Atomic Bomb Dome are a hard morning, and they are not optional in any sense that matters: you cannot understand modern Japan without them. The next day you take the ferry across to Miyajima, where the great red torii gate of Itsukushima Shrine stands out in the bay and looks, at high tide, like it is floating. The two days sit next to each other on purpose.

And the ordinary things. Rolling your own sushi with a sushi master in Tokyo and eating the evidence. Folding origami in Nagano and making soba noodles by hand. Wearing a yukata down the street to the baths. Karaoke in Osaka at an hour you will not admit to. Feeding a cracker to a bowing deer in Nara. None of these are the reason anyone books Japan, and all of them are what people talk about afterwards.

When to go

Japan has four genuinely distinct seasons and the trip reads differently in each. Spring brings the cherry blossom and the biggest crowds; autumn brings the maples and the most reliable weather; winter puts snow on the monkeys and the mountains; summer is hot, green and the only season that opens up Shiga Kogen National Park. Our month-by-month guide to Japan's weather breaks down what each one actually feels like. Worth checking your entry requirements for Japan before you book, too, since they depend on the passport you hold.

Seventeen days, seven stops, one railway. If that is the trip you want, the dates, the price and the full day-by-day are on the Backpacking Japan: Expedition page. If you have less time, the 13-day Japan Essentials runs the same spine, Tokyo to Hiroshima, without the Nagano mountains and the night in Koyasan.