Japan: Spirited away in Tokyo

Bamboo groves in Kyoto. Photo / Supplied

Thirty years after he fell in love with Japan, author Edmund de Waal returns to take his family on an intense tour of its urban and rural charms.

I am not sure if we could be wetter. The stone rills by the paths are overflowing, the pines are bowed by the torrential rain, and the stalls selling tea by the entrance to the temples are full of shivering schoolchildren in yellow waterproofs. There are slow carp in the pools in the gardens, but the downpour obscures them. And this is our morning for the temples of Kyoto, our chance to take our children - aged 15, 14 and 11 - to see the greatest Buddhist architecture in Japan. I want them to sit on the smooth cedar floor overlooking the 12th century rock garden at Ryoan-ji, to see the gardens around the golden temple at Kinkaku-ji, and definitely to experience the bamboo groves in the temples near the river at Arashiyama. But there is a typhoon somewhere to the east of Japan and it is coming our way. In the taxi I find that my long-lost Japanese is flickering back into life over the possibilities for dreadful winds to come.

This trip had started as loose talk over breakfast one morning. And had escalated into a plan before I could help it. I had a vision of the family in Japan, in autumn. There will be the early colours of the maples, the miraculous moment when the hills outside Kyoto light up, and the streets of Tokyo are golden with ginkgos. I will ring some of my old contacts and introduce the kids to the tea ceremony, to an old maker of porcelain, to a bit of Noh drama if we have space and they can all elect into their own ideas of Japan.
My wife Sue and I had travelled in Japan 20 years ago when I was studying in Tokyo. Now I have my list - and another featuring Super Mario, Ninja and Hello Kitty - and a meagre nine days in Japan. It is going to be nine days in transit from Tokyo to Kyoto and then down the spine of the country to the Inland Sea and the art island of Naoshima, and back to Tokyo and home. It is all dependent on the trains working. They always work.

Our Japan visit gets off to a terrible start. For some reason we are booked into a hotel that starts 25 floors up, in a place that shouldn't exist. When I lived in Tokyo, I tell the jet-lagged children, this was Tokyo Bay. Now it is a bit of corporate nowhere, barely connected to the ground. The views are very Blade Runner but, as they haven't seen the film, and as I can't work out how to get to my city, we end up lost. Really lost. Tokyo for families is easy. It is safe, clearly navigable, can be tremendous and invigorating. I love this city. But as I stumblingly order beef for supper for my tired vegetarians, vexed by the journey, I feel at sea. As a mission statement this first night in the city goes down badly. No one sleeps.

Tokyo works through clearly identifiable, tribal areas. With two days we eschew museums and explore Akihabara, jammed with electrical discount stores, pulsing with technological noise. Stores blasting music into the street, hawkers pulling you in, floor after floor of stuff, rooms of schoolchildren playing computer games. After the war, in a city that had been flattened by bombing, this was where the black market flourished, where the first entrepreneurs mended radios and engines and created the seedbed for recovery. And it still has that verve, a slightly raggedy quality of chancers, as if the police might turn up at any moment.

By contrast we spend a morning in Aoyama with its cafes of the perfectly poised, one boutique after another chocolatier. During the boom years of the 1980s this had been the epicentre of the new world. Now it looks like just another pricey area, as homogenised as Madison Avenue. But there was still Kiddy Land, a toyshop of mythical pull. And round the corner, away from the handbags, a gyoza restaurant.

And then there is the Ghibli Museum on the edge of a park in Mitaka in suburban Tokyo. From the outside this looks like a vast Edwardian mansion with Gaudi additions, baroque balconies and stained glass windows, domes and turrets. Inside it is even more extravagant. It is the dream of anime film-maker Hayao Miyazaki, who inspires fierce devotion and, as we wander up the bizarre spiral staircases and through his recreated studio full of sketches and piles of novels and cigarette butts, I am captivated in turn and join my evangelical kids. Tokyo was picking up.

On we go. It is Kyoto next. We pick up our rail passes and, as we go through the interminable paperwork, I think of the strangeness of coming back with my family to this country that I have loved for 30 years. I want to exclaim over the modernity of it all, but I can't. Official forms are as dogged as ever. The bullet train, that epitome of the future of travel, now seems dated. The distance between the children's experience and my expectation jolts along. Three hours of urban sprawl, apartment blocks, golf ranges and factories slung along, seems dystopian to me but passes them by as a perfectly possible way of organising a countryside. But when we get to our house in a quiet street in central Kyoto - a machiya - they are blown away. It is traditional, an entrance hall and then four rooms of tatami mats with our futons neatly folded away into the cupboards. There is a bathroom with a proper Japanese bath to soak in and a tiny garden of ferns to look into in a contemplative way. Also, as this is a self-catering house, there is a very nice person at the end of a phone to explain things when they go awry. There are restaurants nearby, but the typhoon is coming in. We hole up. At 3am everyone is awake and reading as the wind shakes us. We make a break for the temples, then back to our house.

And then on. This time a journey of five hours by Shinkansen and then local express and then a branch line that stops at country halts, until we get to the little port of Uno. And there is a boat to take us to Naoshima. It doesn't take long - 30 minutes or so - and suddenly we are rounding a headland. On a jetty is a huge sculpture of a yellow pumpkin by Yayoi Kusama, the artist famous for dots, and on the rocks there seems to be a photograph of the sea by my favourite artist, Hiroshi Sugimoto. We sweep up to the Benesse House Museum, a dozen hotel rooms discreetly placed in conversation with a collection of contemporary art. By day it is jammed with visitors, but as guests we can wander through the museum at night. It is quiet.

The main museum is built into the hillside so that little is revealed from the outside; great vents letting light into a vast space with Monet's Water Lilies, or creating a James Turrell room. Unlike a White Cube gallery each corridor and tunnel and courtyard space connects inexplicably so that we are endlessly surprised by light and shade. After all our packing and unpacking of suitcases there is time for walking, looking, reading, watching the ships passing and the light changing over the water, the hawks hunting in the early morning. Time on islands is special. There is a quality of hiatus to being away from land that matters. And for us this was pure holiday.

Back in Tokyo we stay for a couple of nights in the Peninsula Hotel. This, I worry, is a different kind of experience and one the kids must not get used to. It is just so luxurious. We are met with warmth. The breakfasts are Byzantine in complexity. There is a concierge of great resourcefulness. There are loos in the bathrooms of huge sophistication, with motion sensors. It even stops raining for us.

In a fugue state of jetlag, back home we take a straw poll on the best part of the trip. The temples in Kyoto are easy winners. That sodden day was a triumph. There was a completeness about it: sitting and listening to the water as it poured down the chains in the temples, watching the colour of the stones, the revelation of walking through those gardens. This trip was abbreviated. No time for tea masters. There were too many journeys, too much peering for platform numbers.

But if the memory is of those beautiful gardens, then it is a start. A very good start to Japan.

Getting there with Qantas: Fly via Australia to Narita airport and from August 2015 fly to Haneda airport in central Tokyo via Sydney. Enjoy food, wine, entertainment, checked luggage and Qantas Points when you fly Qantas. For the latest fares and to book, visit qantas.com