Tourism in Japan is surging – but it’s still possible to get off the beaten path

I’m in Japan, about 90 minutes west of Osaka, and I’m staring at a living demi-goddess in really unusual footwear. To be a bit more precise, I’m in Ise Shrine, the most sacred site in Japan: the Mecca, Rome and Canterbury of its national animist religion, Shinto. The Japanese imperial family are believed to descend from the first Shinto gods, and with every generation one royal is chosen as the high priest of Ise, with its various shrines, sacred rivers and amulet sellers all scattered around a sunny rural township.

The precise object of my fascination is Sayako Kuroda, sister of Emperor Naruhito. She’s the latest imperial priest, she’s just come from Ise’s annual harvest ritual, and we have all been asked to step aside as she proceeds – trailing a wake of exotic Mikado-ish Shinto priests. Apparently, her bizarre, huge, crushed velvet and bright orange clogs date back many centuries, like everything in Shinto. I guess a demi-goddess can’t get away with Crocs.

Why am I here, so off the beaten track? So I can go off the beaten track – get away from tourists like me. Because Japan these days is very, very popular. With the yen softer than the clouds in a Hokkusai painting – added to a worldwide lust for East Asian culture – tourism in Japan is surging.

All of which is great for tourists, and the Japanese economy, but all of which also means crowds. In hotspots like Kyoto, you sometimes have to queue for the queues. But I’m travelling with a tour company that promises to take me away from the obvious, while still showing me the brilliant essence of a brilliant country.

As we watch the many times great-granddaughter of the sun goddess Amaterasu dwindle into the distance, along with her clogs, my guide, the animated Jojo, clutches my arm. “We came on the right day!” she says. We certainly did, and we merrily toast our good fortune on a charming sidestreet close by – the “street of pilgrims” – with platters of hot steamed oysters. Try them with a dash of soy. Delicious.

The foodie theme continues back in Osaka. Instead of heading for the obvious destination, Dotonburi, the neon-flashing, salarymen-crowding, specially-flavoured-Kit-Kat-selling central entertainment district, my new guide, an ex-West Country punk rocker called Russ – of Bristol new wave band The Stingrays – takes me to a more obscure nightlife quarter, which is still thrumming with buzz, but way less touristy.

It’s called Shinsekai, it was built in the 1920s, next to Osaka’s day-labourer slums, as a theme park mix of Coney Island and Paris – and it is as quirky as it sounds. Among its eccentricities is a mini Eiffel Tower, available for abseiling, and a revered Shinto mascot, Biliken, designed by a 1920s American artist – who never came here.

At the far end of Shinsekai, I’m told there’s a uniquely decorous red-light district, where exquisite ladies take payment in the form of cakes. But I’m quite happy to follow Russ’s epicurean lead and scoff the more savoury street food delicacies, for which Shinsekai is famed: the lush beef offal noodles (doteyaki), the scrunchy octopus dumplings (takoyaki), the tasty wooden skewers of breaded quails’ eggs, asparagus, pork etc (kushikatsu).

It is all scrumptious and also – as Russ warns me – “bloody hot, mate” – so it all has to be accompanied by copious vats of cold Sapporo beer. Which means the following hours, when we wander from pachinko parlour to artisanal knife maker to amusingly retro shooting gallery, turn into an excellent blur, and somehow at about 10pm, I end up standing, alone, in a nearby park, on top of sixth-century kingly “kofun” tombs marvelling at the parades of glittering skyscrapers.

In any other country – tipsy, alone, at night, near ancient slums and a red-light district and standing atop a tumulus of sacrificed concubines – I might feel unsafe. Not in Japan.

From Osaka, I zip through crowded Kyoto, where I don’t go to the famous temples (though my guide gives me the best advice if you do want to visit these places: go very early). Instead, he escorts me to a plush outer suburb of Kyoto and the tiny temple of Gioji, and its sweetly melancholic moss garden. He promises me that we will be almost alone (we are) and I will come out with a new appreciation of moss (I do). The whole garden is surrounded by lofty, whispering groves of bamboo, created in honour of a spurned yet beautiful dancer called Gio, who gave over her broken heart for a lifetime as a Buddhist nun. It is lyrically poetic.

From here my offbeat Japanese odyssey accelerates. In the quaint, almost-coastal spa town of Kinosaki-onsen, in a grand traditional Japanese hotel – a ryokan – I eat the finest beef of my life (I’ve never understood the fuss about Kobe wagyu beef, until now).

It costs a packet but then down the road, by the tinkly canal bridges, I have a splendid seafood lunch – razor clams, scarlet prawns, the works, for £6. And then at night, I put on my kimono, my white socks and my own wooden clogs and I take Kinosaki-onsens’s famous waters, striding from hot steam bath to hot steam bath, along the canals and under the starlit willows, imbibing traditional schooners of ice cold beer between each session of personal boiling.

Further down this lost and sometimes lonely coast I find three of only 100 licensed samurai swordsmiths working in Japan. These guys are all about 23, and they invite me to forge a bit of sword on their anvil. I fail. It doesn’t matter. Right next door to the youthful swordsmiths I find one of the world’s most famous fabric makers, who weaves imperially-favoured clothes out of silk, gold, mother of pearl, and sometimes bits of plastic. The best kimonos cost £2 million. Then I sleep in another ryokan – this time chic, trendy, and decked with 10,000-year-old Jomon pottery. Every corner of offbeat Japan boasts tiny yet glorious surprises like this.

From here I loop around Tokyo – God, I love the Japanese train network – and my journey ends in a corner of Gifu prefecture, up in the mountains of central Honshu. There’s a famous tourist town here, dainty little Takayama – and it’s great for historical sights and massive coach parties and selfie sticks and wasabi squid. But I am staying a few kilometres away in the small, historic, sake-brewing town of Hida Furukawa.

Disembarking my train from Takayama I walk, in the dark, to my agreeable boutique hotel. I’ve maybe never been to a town so spellbindingly quiet – there are no cars, no people, no nothing, maybe a snatch of laughter from a distant izakaya. The golden carp in the canals roil in the lamplight, the moon is misty on the pines of the Japanese Alps, I am lost between Zen temples and Shinto shrines and 300-year-old whitewashed breweries, and this, I think, is it. This is Peak Offbeat Japan, there’s not a soul to be seen. And so I walk on, happily lost in my very own haiku.

How to do it

Sean Thomas travelled as a guest of Asia specialist Inside Japan, which can organise personalised trips including all accommodation, experiences, logistics, train tickets, info pack as well as 24-hour customer support. See InsideJapanTours. Korean Air offers daily flights to Osaka from London Heathrow via Seoul, with fares from £917 per person.