I’ve always wanted to visit Japan, though I can’t quite explain why. Somewhere in the mix of childhood influences ranging from You Only Live Twice and Shogun, to Tenko and those Clive James shows, came an impression of a complex, frenzied, contradictory and quietly beautiful culture that fascinated me. There’s one thing all the guidebooks agree on, though: don’t go in August. Go in springtime, when the cherry blossom blooms. Or in autumn, when the copious greenery turns a blazing copper. But avoid hot and humid August. So, on 9 August last year, my friend Emma and I depart.

Tokyo, when we get there, has caught the tail end of a super-typhoon. After a long flight, it’s genuinely refreshing to walk through the sweeping curtains of rain. Itchy-eyed and numbed with jet lag, we nevertheless manage to shuffle around the excellent Tokyo National Museum, everything feeling slightly unreal and accompanied by a constant clip-clop refrain as though someone were following us around with a glockenspiel. It turns out to be a young couple in exquisite his & hers kimonos and those dazzlingly white, slightly sinister bifurcated socks, their chunky wooden sandals beating the distinctive tattoo as they traipse around.

Struggling to stay awake, we find a nice little place to eat. There’s much pointing and laughter as we negotiate our way around the menus, but the waiters are kind and helpful. Though we’re screened from our fellow diners by laminated curtains, the smoke from their scandalous-seeming cigarettes drifts through on to our delicious raw quail. It’s quite nostalgic. We drive back through a violent storm, Tokyo now bursting into blurry neon life: the cab driver in white gloves, the car with whispering automatic doors, like something from the future as envisioned in the 1970s.

The next day, after a fantastic sleep, there’s an apologetic waitress at breakfast: “Sorry for keeping you waiting.” She bows and smiles and smiles and bows, though she hasn’t kept us waiting at all. We go down on to the amazingly clean, efficient tube system, which is fairly quiet during this holiday period, with none of the fabled pushing and shoving. First stop: the famous Tsukiji fish market; a strange mix of working atmosphere and tourist attraction. Octopus suckers writhe in smashed ice. Men with hooks slice at giant frozen tuna, like medieval artisans carving pink alabaster pillars. Tuna flakes skitter to the floor, though whether they’re thrown away or headed for Sainsbury’s, it’s impossible to know.

Next, we visit the first of many (many) shrines. One was erected to the memory of the great reforming Emperor Meiji, with beautifully laid-out forest trails leading to purification areas and little booths where you can make a wish for the spirits to answer. It soon becomes clear that all the shrines have these, like concessions in a department store, flogging benedictions. Is it any different, though, I wonder, to the little shops in cathedrals selling CDs of plainsong? The rituals involve washing both hands and the mouth, then writing down a wish that is hung up on a wooden plaque. There is something a bit relentless about the commercialisation of this, and about the sheer number of shrines you traipse through.

One fascinating aspect of the Meiji temple are the strange indentations that cover the great wooden pillars and doors. With more than 3 million visitors a year, it can get very busy. Pilgrims have taken simply to hurling coins towards the shrine from a great distance, pockmarking the woodwork. They do offer, though, oases of calm in the sometimes overwhelming bustle. Most have been lovingly rebuilt after total destruction during the war.

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We plunge back into a crazier, ultra-fashionable, teen-centred Tokyo – though, as always in a strange city, I fear that I’m actually standing in the middle of the equivalent of London’s Camden Town. Fashions are mysterious and charming. Many women wear a sun-shunning outfit of broad-brimmed hat, long gloves and pretty lacy parasol of dusty pink or grey. They look like Victorian ghosts in surgical masks, keeping to the hard shadows or cycling past on the thronged pavement.

Next day we leave for Hiroshima and our first experience of the bullet train. It is filled with impossibly cute children and super-efficient staff who bow as they enter and leave each carriage: the levels of courtesy and friendliness are so staggeringly different from Britain, it’s shaming.

Hiroshima is a quietly devastating place. Now a bustling modern city, it’s nevertheless entirely defined by the events of 6 August 1945, and signs everywhere show what used to stand or how far you are from the “hypocentre” of the atomic explosion. The shattered dome above which the A-bomb detonated stands within the Peace Park, where the accompanying museum pulls no punches. Inside are displays of melted spectacles, watches all stopped at 8.15am, burned and bloodied children’s clothing, dropped-out hair, fingernails. We emerge, humbled and moved, into a balmy red evening, scores of people sitting in quiet contemplation.

Later, down a back street, we find a tiny place for dinner. It has linen curtains and fat lanterns outside, and an atmosphere of slightly seedy congeniality with more, nicely rowdy smokers within. I jab a finger at the all-Japanese menu in the hope of ordering beer. Two tumblers of pale liquid arrive. “It looks like whisky!” I laugh. It is whisky. But, again, the staff are incredibly helpful, beaming, fun. We get by with a little Japanese and a little English, and enjoy huge grilled peppers with fish flakes on top and delicious sea bass with sticky rice.

A short train and ferry ride from Hiroshima is Miyajima Island, a Unesco world heritage site, where deer roam freely, nudging at tourists, tripping in and out of streams. Sadly, they’ve gone the way of all creatures closely exposed to humans, scavenging for food and, like ravenous goats, even eating paper maps. But if you get away from the heavily commercialised harbour, the island becomes more serene and attractive. There’s an unexpectedly brilliant aquarium full of delights: otters, sharks, porpoises. Moon jellyfish that change colour from white to blue to pink to green. Up the hills, through verdant gardens, are more temples with sun dazzling off their tin roofs, sonorous tolling bells and dozens of smiling buddhas wearing little knitted≈hats and bibs, most old and weathered, like grave goods. It transpires that there’s to be a fireworks display later and suddenly the whole island is thronged with visitors, most of them courting young couples, again in gorgeous kimonos. Apparently it’s become very fashionable for the young to wear these traditional clothes again, especially on dates. It’s touching to see boys and girls both looking splendid and in love. We dine, cross-legged, on oysters and eel, then watch the fireworks bloom over the island.

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Another super-efficient bullet train takes us to Fukuoka – the “gateway to southern Japan”. As we race through the countryside, the landscape can suddenly transform. Breathtaking mists creep over the mountains. A shaft of sun on a powder-blue tiled roof, or the broad white wings of cranes in wet fields, suddenly illuminate quite how different this place is. We’re on a whistlestop tour, including a video of an extraordinary local carnival – which we’ve just missed – in which hundreds of trouserless men in white shirts carry massive floats on six poles. It’s like the running of the bulls, but with buttocks. It turns out the shirts are a fairly recent addition, because people thought the near-nakedness was offensive. Why they didn’t think to put trousers on is beyond me.

In the evening, with much fanfare, we’re taken to a two-star Michelin restaurant to eat the infamous fugu fish. It’s an intoxicating prospect (with the emphasis on the toxic), because the flesh of the puffer fish is more deadly than cyanide. Only a small part is edible. The restaurant is wonderfully minimal, plain, cedar-scented, paper-walled, just as you’d hope it to be. We’re given a short tour of the kitchens and see the fugu, which arrives pre-prepared in a box, like shoes. We’re closely observed as we eat, like royal food-tasters under the eye of a wary monarch. The fugu itself is curiously bland. It comes in razor-thin slivers and has a rainbow hue, like petrol in the road. But the accompanying flavours into which we dip the fish (tiny leeks, spring onions, risotto) are delicious, and one course, unexpectedly, comes in batter. Just like Harry Ramsden’s, but with the frisson of potential death.

Still alive, next day we take the train to Nagasaki: a very different prospect to Hiroshima. As (almost) the only port open to the west during Japan’s 200-year period of isolation, it has a ramshackle mix of influences. There are lovely clapboard colonial houses from the Dutch and Portuguese settlements, and a proper neon maze of a Chinatown. Walking into town by the canal-side, you catch dark, scuttling shapes out of the corner of the eye. Astonishingly, they’re crabs, hiding in the grates and drains. Loud firecrackers start to go off – it’s Obon, the Japanese festival of the dead. As the humid air breaks into driving rain, there’s a strange, warm calm. An off-key bell tolls as families carry huge, lantern-covered “ships of the dead” down the winding streets in memory of lost loved ones, including, delightfully, a photo of Elvis. Firecrackers burst and spark in the rain, and gunpowder drifts across us in clouds. As we get back to the hotel, teams of men with witch brooms and surgical masks sweep up the soggy remains of the fireworks. Next morning, there’s not a trace. Curiously, while Japanese cities are quite grubby-looking and industrialised, litter is virtually nonexistent. It simply doesn’t occur to people to drop rubbish.

Next stop: Kagoshima. It’s a hot and cloudy day, and the volcano is smothered in cloud when we arrive. The resort in Ibusuki is beautifully designed, with luxurious, cool rooms in traditional Japanese style, as unlike a western spa as you can imagine. Men and women (segregated into different areas) walk about happily naked. There are plunge pools and steam baths and the famous sand baths, warmed by natural springs. We change into kimonos and Emma and I are buried up to our necks in the soft, grey, alien-looking sand by stringy young men with rakes. It’s a strangely pleasant sensation, not too hot. We last about 15 minutes, the sweat beading our faces like raindrops. Only Boris Yeltsin, apparently, has managed to last more than half an hour entombed like this. We’re soon hysterical as our host, the extraordinarily kind Mr Shimotakehara, asks us which parasol we want planting into the sand over our heads, like bathing belles on an Edwardian postcard.

A long train journey gets us into Kyoto, back in the central region of Honshu island, which is immediately very different from anywhere else we’ve been. Charming, winding streets and lots of older buildings not flattened in the war. There are shrines, of course, but also genuinely lovely shops and cafes. We have a gorgeous (and very cheap) sushi lunch with green tea ice-cream, and then there’s much excitement as a couple of genuine geishas – apparently a rare sight – stroll by. It really is something to see them: the death mask faces, the fantastically elaborate hair, the tiny strip of exposed skin at the nape of the neck.

Dusk shows Kyoto at its best. There’s a low-key quality to the atmosphere, subtle and quiet, especially in the charming Pontocho Alley with its half-turned-down lamps, where we eat the justly famous black beef.

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Next day, we visit the Shogun’s palace with its extraordinary sprung “nightingale” floors designed to squeak in order to warn of assassins and then, farther afield, to the Fushimi shrine with its endless orange tunnel. It’s undeniably spectacular, but we’re shrined-out by now. Then it’s on to the towering bamboo forest, with a swollen, muddy yellow river close by, and fit men doing rickshaw rides with the same swagger as lads on waltzers, cocky and rough.

We’re sad to leave Kyoto – the undoubted hit of the trip – but one last night in Tokyo affords an astonishing view of the city. Railways stretching under motorways, cars blurring into a sea of light as we head for the Golden Gai – an extraordinary district of tiny, themed bars, each holding about 10 people. The strains of the Specials’ Ghost Town lead us to a sort of 1979 punk bar with a new wave soundtrack. There’s a fantastic incongruity to listening to Sparks and Blondie in the smoky atmosphere. We drink too much sake, happy.

Above all, it’s the people who make Japan. I’ve never been met with such extraordinary kindness, courtesy and friendliness. There’s far more English spoken than people lead you to think, and signage is bilingual – especially on the trains. I plan to return – in the spring, of course, or the autumn – as soon as I can. If this sounds evangelical, it is. Even in sultry August, Japan is a wonder. Go.

Factbox

Flights were provided by Finnair, which flies to Japan via Helsinki from £590 return, including taxes. Rail passes were provided by Japanese National Tourist Board; they cost £159 for a seven-day pass. Accommodation was provided by Hyatt Regency Kyoto (doubles from £122, room-only); Mandarin Oriental, Tokyo (doubles from £276 per night B&B); and Ibsuki Hakusuikan, a Japanese inn with an onsen hot spring spa (doubles from £188, half-board). Set fugu-tasting menus are available at two-Michelin-starred Hakata Izumi (the website is in Japanese only): lunch from £20, dinner from £56 – book through your Fukuoka hotel’s concierge. For more information visit the national tourism website. For more information about Kyoto, go to kyoto.travel.

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