Japan for two, a first trip together

I'd keep the first day deliberately gentle — you'll likely arrive jet-lagged, and there's no prize for forcing a sight through the fog of a long flight. Draw a little cash at a convenience-store machine, drop the bags, and let the afternoon stay close to base. Then do the one small thing that quietly sets the tone for everything after: an early, unhurried dinner together at a counter. The 'table for two?' question that can feel so loaded back home barely exists here — at a great many places you order from a machine by the door, take two stools at the counter, and watch the cooks work an arm's length away. There's nothing to fill, no performance to keep up; you just sit side by side and let the day come down. Senso-ji, lit and open into the evening once the day-trippers thin out, is a calm and lovely place to take a first slow walk together.

Today is the city at full volume, and the fun of it as a pair is the contrast — go big and bright through the afternoon, then let the evening fold back down to just the two of you. I'd open in the green hush of Meiji Jingu, a forest shrine that opens at sunrise, then step straight out into the colour of Harajuku and the tree-lined boutiques of Omotesando. In the afternoon I'd share something you can only really feel together — the digital-art world of teamLab, where you wander a glowing, shifting space hand in hand, losing each other and finding each other again; it's romance you're inside of rather than watching (book a time slot ahead — the box explains). And I'd end where Tokyo is warmest for two: a yokocho, one of the lantern-lit lanes of tiny stand-up bars and izakaya, where you squeeze onto a counter, order a few small plates as you go, and the whole room feels like someone's living room. The city is loud; the evening doesn't have to be.

This is the day I'd protect above all the others. You'll ride out of Tokyo on the Romancecar and trade the city for a mountain of hot springs — and the whole day bends toward one evening. By afternoon you'll have looped the mountain (a little train, a cablecar, a ropeway over a steaming valley, a boat across a lake to a red shrine gate standing in the water), and on a clear day Mount Fuji will be there above Lake Ashi, the way it's drawn in every old print. But the loop is really the overture. The night is the thing: you check into a ryokan, change into yukata, and the trip exhales. The bath, the slow kaiseki dinner, an evening with nowhere to be and no one else to please — this, more than any single sight, is what two people tend to carry home. If there's one splurge I'd make on a first trip together, it's this one night.

I'd steal one more morning bath before you go — a fine farewell to Hakone — then ride the Shinkansen west into the old capital. Drop the bags and give the afternoon to the eastern hills, where the old city is closest to the surface: the great wooden stage of Kiyomizu-dera, the stone lanes of Sannenzaka and Ninenzaka spilling downhill beneath it, and Gion as the lanterns come on. As a pair this is where the day slows down beautifully — you can let the tour groups stream off toward their buses while you linger on the emptying lanes into the blue hour, and then drift down to the water. For couples, a lot of Kyoto's romance sits by the river: along the Kamogawa, and the narrow lantern-lit alley of Pontocho beside it, people have come to eat and walk in the cool of the evening for centuries — and in the warm months the restaurants build kawayuka terraces right out over the river (box). A gentle reminder for Gion: people live and work in these lanes, so keep to the public streets and walk softly, and you'll be welcome.

Here's the gift two early risers can give themselves: a famous place, empty. Before nine the old city belongs to whoever's awake — so I'd set an alarm once and go stand inside the vermilion gate-tunnels of Fushimi Inari at first light, when the corridor is nearly silent and your footsteps are the loudest thing on the mountain (it's open around the clock). Then the day eases west to Arashiyama, Kyoto's riverside-and-bamboo edge: the towering bamboo grove walked early while it's still hushed, the Zen garden of Tenryu-ji opening onto the hills behind it, the Togetsukyo bridge over the river. If your dates fall in the open season, the little Sagano Romantic Train (that really is its name) clatters up the Hozugawa gorge — a slow, leaf-framed ride that needs no narration (box). I'd close with an unhurried meal somewhere, and the quiet realisation couples often end on: the trip you'll talk about wasn't the sights so much as the spaces between them — the bath, the counter, the dawn lane, the river — the room Japan kept making for the two of you.