Hiroshima & the Seto Inland Sea

Okayama is the gentle eastern doorway, and I'd let the first day stay slow. The heart of it is Korakuen, counted among Japan's three great gardens — a stroll garden of broad lawns, ponds and tea arbours, designed so the black keep of Okayama Castle sits borrowed into the view across the river. The castle's dark weatherboards earned it the nickname Ujo, the Crow Castle — the deliberate opposite of Himeji's white heron; it's a postwar reconstruction, so the keep you walk into is new, but the moat and the river-island setting are old. Then, as the light goes, I'd slip west to Kurashiki, where a willow-lined canal threads between white-walled merchant storehouses — a preserved Edo trading quarter that's lovely once the lanterns come on and the canal glows. None of these three has a WMJS deep-dive guide yet, so I'll just point you the right way and let the places speak.

Day two I'd give entirely to Naoshima, a small island in the Inland Sea quietly remade into one long work of art. Concrete museums are sunk into the hillsides — Chichu, where a few Monets and a Turrell light-room and a De Maria chamber are buried under the ground — old village houses in Honmura have been turned inside-out into art, and Yayoi Kusama's spotted pumpkins sit out on the piers, free to anyone who steps off the boat. It moves at island pace: a ferry over, a little bus that loops the sites, the sea always at the edge of things. Two things shape the day — book your timed tickets ahead (Chichu sells out), and don't come on a Monday, when the island mostly closes.

Today the Shinkansen carries you a little over half an hour west, and the trip changes register. Hiroshima is a warm, ordinary, lived-in city that chose, after 1945, to rebuild itself around peace rather than around the wound. The Peace Memorial Park is laid out along the rivers at the heart of where the city was destroyed; the A-Bomb Dome is left exactly as the blast left it, a UNESCO World Heritage site; and the Peace Memorial Museum at the park's south end asks a great deal of you and gives it back as something like resolve. I'd go unhurried, leave room to just sit by the river afterwards, and remember the city around the park is gentle and alive. Linked guide: Hiroshima Peace Memorial.

The last day belongs to Miyajima, the island just southwest of Hiroshima where Itsukushima Shrine is built out over the sea on stilts, so that at high tide the shrine and its great vermilion torii seem to float. The whole island is treated as sacred — wild deer wander the foreshore here too, and they're happiest left to roam, so I'd enjoy them at a little distance. How it feels depends entirely on the tide: come at high water and the gate floats; come at low water and you can walk out across the flats to stand at its feet. Either is lovely; I'd just check a tide table so you know which one you're getting. Above the village, a ropeway climbs toward Mt Misen for a long view over the Inland Sea. Linked guide: Miyajima.