In September 2010 I was lucky enough to be able to travel to Japan (日本). One could write whole essays about the first journey of a Westerner (so steeped in European history) to the Orient, but suffice to say that I was delighted, stupefied, astonished, seduced, inspired, and utterly humbled.

As usual, clicking makes the photos bigger, and more information is hidden in the captions.

Tokyo (東京) is a great city - on a par with London, Paris and New York - full of all the contradictions of Japanese culture: modernity versus tradition; industry versus nature; conformity versus liberation.

Sumo (相撲) seems less like a sport and more like a competitive ritual, being so related to Shinto. That made it even more surprising to see a few European wrestlers, who might have started their careers as Mancunian bouncers.
The Imperial Palace, site of the Chrysanthemum Throne, occupies the centre of Tokyo. The Imperial Household was transferred from the old capital Kyoto in 1868. Unfortunately much of the historical fabric of the palace, and much of Tokyo, was obliterated during bombing in the Second World War.
Ueno Park is home to several museums, largely dating from the Meiji era, when Japan was exposed to Western styles of architecture.
Meiji-jingu is hidden in a wood near Harajuku. It commemorates Emperor Meiji, who ended the Tokugawa shogunate and Japan's period of isolation from the rest of the world.

Kyoto (京都) was the capital of Japan for around a thousand years and consequently has an overwhelming wealth of monuments, shrines and temples. I had to visit twice to begin to get a reasonable sense of the place.

Kinkaku-ji (The Golden Pavilion) is a Zen Buddhist temple dating from the 1390s.
The extant structures of Chion-in (below), including the largest bell and largest gate in Japan, were built under the orders of shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu.
Yasaka-jinji is close to Gion, the famous geisha district.
Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu ordered the construction of Nijo Castle (below).
Fushimi Inari-taisha is dedicated to Inari, the god (kami 神) of - amongst other things - foxes (kitsune 狐), and is the sixth imperial shrine of Japan. Paths arched over by thousands of donated torii lead deep into the forest above Kyoto.

Nikko (日光) is probably the one place in all the world where I have been awestruck the most - partly because of its undeniable, sublime beauty and partly because I had so little in the way of preconceptions. Indeed, there is a Japanese proverb that says "until you have seen Nikko, you should not say 'magnificent'".

Traditionally only certain people could only cross the Shinkyo bridge which leads from the town of Nikko to the shrines in the forest.
Tosho-gu was built for the famous shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu. He moved the de facto capital to Edo (Tokyo) and restricted European influence to the Dutch East India Company. His remains were moved here with great ceremony in 1617.
An unexpected echo of Europe can be found in a baroque candelabra, which was a gift from the Dutch, along with a bronze lantern.
Taiyuin-byo was built for another shogun, Tokugawa Iemitsu, not long after Tosho-gu.