Tohoku, the deep north

I'd give the first day to Sendai and Matsushima, the gentle south gate of the deep north — and to the trip's first lesson, which is that up here even the beauty is something people made. Sendai is Mori no Miyako, the City of Trees: its leafy avenues are a four-hundred-year habit begun by the warlord Date Masamune, burned away in 1945 and deliberately replanted, so the green you walk under is a city grown back on purpose. Then out to Matsushima Bay — a scatter of pine-tufted islands long counted among the Three Views of Japan, and the place that, famously, left Bashō unable to write a word. (The little verse tourists quote at Matsushima isn't even his; the real homage is his silence.) The casual visitor glances at the islands from the crowded waterfront and thinks 'pretty, but small.' The trick is to get on the water and climb to a hill-view, where the bay opens out whole — and then, like the poet, to just look.

Today the trip turns west into the Yamagata hills, and I'll be honest that this is a loop you'll double back from — but it's the loop Bashō himself took, turning off the northern road into the Dewa mountains, so it's authentic to the journey, not a detour from it. The morning is Yamadera (Risshaku-ji), a temple stitched up a cliff-face: a long stone climb where, in the old mountain practice, the ascent itself is the point, and the hush at the top is the exact stillness Bashō caught in his most quoted line — shizukasa ya iwa ni shimiiru semi no koe, the cicada's cry soaking into the rocks. The afternoon carries you on to Ginzan Onsen, and there the night is the whole reward: a wooden hot-spring street kept just as it was a century ago, whose gas lamps — and, in winter, whose falling snow — belong to the people who stay after the day-trippers have caught the last bus down.

Back to the spine and north into Iwate — and I won't pretend the morning isn't a travel-heavy one, since rejoining the Shinkansen from deep in Yamagata means looping back the way you came. I've never once regretted the backtrack. Hiraizumi was the capital of a northern golden age that rose, dazzled, and vanished inside a century, and what survives is a UNESCO landscape of Pure Land Buddhism — paradise built on earth. Chūson-ji's Konjikidō is the real thing: a hall gilded inside and out in 1124 to console the war dead 'whether friend or enemy,' the actual twelfth-century structure, not a modern rebuild like Kyoto's golden pavilion. Mōtsū-ji keeps a Heian garden laid out as a map of paradise around a still pond. And this is the ground where Bashō stood among the ruins and wrote the lament half of Japan can recite — natsugusa ya tsuwamonodomo ga yume no ato, the summer grasses, all that remains of warriors' dreams. It's the second half of Day 1's diptych: living beauty silenced him here; lost beauty gave him his words.

Up the spine now to the very top of Honshu, where the deep north shows two faces. Hirosaki Castle wears its making on its sleeve more than anything else on the trip: the only original keep left standing in all of Tohoku, and a building that has spent four centuries being remade — it burned, came back smaller in 1810 as a modest turret the shogunate would allow, and right now sits mid-restoration, its little keep rolled bodily off its stone base while the wall beneath it is rebuilt stone by stone. Its cherry trees were planted by the very retainers who'd lost the castle, and are kept doubly full by a pruning trick borrowed from the apple orchards; in late April they're among the last and densest blossoms in the country. The other face is Aomori and Nebuta — the August festival you don't watch from behind a barrier but step into, leaping alongside the giant lantern-lit floats as a costumed haneto. Whichever face you came for, the lesson holds: up here, the thing you remember was made, and is still being mended.

The finale is a season as much as a place. From Aomori a seasonal bus climbs over the Hakkōda passes and drops you into the Oirase Gorge — a stream of waterfalls and moss-furred rock you walk on a level boardwalk beside the water — and on to Lake Towada, a deep, still volcanic caldera. Come in mid-to-late October and the gorge turns weeks before Kyoto does, because it's northern and high; the 'big lake and a quiet river' that can underwhelm in the wrong month becomes a tunnel of colour in the right one. (The bus only runs the warm half of the year — in deep winter the gorge closes, and Tohoku's snow belongs instead to Ginzan and to Zaō's frost-trees back on the Yamagata wing.) Then the trip needn't stop at all: from the top of Honshu you can turn south for home, or carry straight on under the sea.