Hong Kong

For the first time since I left London back in February, I find myself in a place I've been to before: Hong Kong. Thanks to my flight's eight hour delay, it wasn't really until the morning when, opening the curtains, I was struck once again by the complete and utter insanity of the place.

I braved the humidity for a good ten minutes and just stood on the balcony watching. Twenty six floors below me, another high rise beginning to sprout from the ground. Between it and the Peak, shrouded in mist, cloud and pollution, hundreds of others are clustered impossibly close together, making Hong Kong Island look like a giant pin cushion.

Sheung Wan, HK Island

I walk out into the thick, hot air, along a street selling chinese medicine; turtle shells, the strangest contorted roots and fungi, lizard skins. I ponder my good luck as a few spots of rain fall - maybe the humidity will ease. But they're not raindrops, just specks of water cast off by the air conditioning units poking out of the giant lego towers that surround me.

Hong Kong is sculpted by its history and geography in equal measure. The colonial legacy lingers on, and it still feels quintessentially British in places, defiantly Chinese in others. The once great meets the now great in every corner here, with seemingly few problems. But when two things rub against each another, there is friction. Friction creates energy, heat. In such a small space, you can almost feel it; a buzz on the streets, something, other than moisture, in the air.

It's all around you, in all the contradictions; the guy with no arms begging in front of the Rolex store; the Star Ferry, unchanged in over a century, delivering sharp suited workers to the world's coolest office buildings. Old and new, rich and poor, east and west.

Two IFC, Central Hong Kong

A twenty minute cab ride from the shadows of the skyscrapers and you can find yourself mercifully alone. Embarking on a trek over Dragonback Mountain perhaps, or on the beach at Big Wave Bay. And you need to seek salvation in these places, because in the crazy heart of the city, there's nowhere to hide.

Escalators, The Peak

Walking through a labyrinthine subway station with my friend Nick, we are fighting against an unstoppable tide, the odd gwei lo head floating above the sea of Chinese ones. "Wherever you go in Hong Kong," he remarks, "everyone else is going the other way." Then, after a pause: "Even when you turn round."

Turning Japanese

I had always thought the Japanese were a quiet, reserved people; fanatically traditional and presumably easily offended by my crude western ways. It's not exactly true.

They drink like pufferfish. When the cherry trees blossom in spring, they throw hanami parties and get shamelessly shitfaced under their boughs. They drink and frolic wildly in public for days on end. In order to facilitate this endless boozing, they even have vending machines that sell beer and sake. On my last night, we went to a bar that sells Suntori whisky by the hour rather than the glass or bottle.

My stereotype wasn't exactly inaccurate, rather it mistook those qualities for another, and one that the Japanese have, and exhibit, in abundance. Politeness. Whenever you walk in a shop or restaurant, you are greeted by a hail of salutations from the staff. No one would dare use their mobile phone on public transport. They play this message on the airport bus;

Passengers are reminded that portable telephones should not be used on the bus as they annoy the neighbours

Beautifully put, but that's for the benefit of the gaijin, not the locals. They wouldn't dare.

They keep to the left when they walk, like when they drive. And they drive surprisingly considerately for a big city. Not a bit like like Seoul, where the drivers are rude, impatient and charmless. Coming into this culture of consideration and good manners from America was a greater shock than any sense of foreignness or alienation one is supposed to feel when arriving in Japan for the first time.

The Japanese seem acutely aware of the people around them, and take great care not to encroach upon their freedom and dignity. You can get by with just two expressions in their language: arigato gozaimas (thank you very much) and sumimasen (excuse me), supplemented with lots of smiling and bowing. So long as you can bow and stay on your feet after three hours of Suntori, that is.

I think it might catch on.

Doors to manual

I like to leave boarding a plane as late as possible. I stowed my hand luggage in the overhead compartment, fastened my seat belt and pretended to pay attention to the safety briefing. My neighbour and I exchanged courteous nods, but little else.

I declined the complimentary champagne on account of the hour (11am), opting for a Perrier instead. A little later, we were served a passable three course meal by our impeccably dressed, and quite beautiful stewardesses. After lunch, and a couple of glasses of surprisingly good wine, I think I may have dozed for a short while, before flicking through the on board entertainment system and finding something to amuse me briefly before returning to my book. Occasionally I'd get up to stretch my legs and use the bathroom.

Little else of any real consequence happened until, at 3.25pm, twenty-five minutes ahead of schedule, we disembarked the aircraft and shuffled up to the gate. All of which would have been perfectly acceptable were it not for the fact that, save for a brief sortie to the end of the runway and back, for four and a half brain-punishing hours, we had been rooted to the same fucking spot.

Manaita

Tsuguyasu Kida used to be an architect. When he retired, he decided to indulge his passion for food, built himself a restaurant and called it Manaita meaning chopping board. Built, as in, with his own bare hands. It's a small place; eight seats around the counter and another four at a small Japanese table. He cooks, a girl serves. Every morning he goes to Tzukiji market and comes back with whatever takes his fancy. Then he paints the daily menu on two sheets of A4, sellotapes them together, hangs them on the wall, and opens the door.

Manaita

A Japanese potato, liberally seasoned with sea salt and accompanied by a few cold edamame beans are the opening gambit. Simple, understated, delicious. Next, a small bowl of tiny raw white fish, long and thin, like broken strands of vermicelli with microscopic eyes. A dab of wasabi, add your own soy sauce. Fresh, clean and silky. Tofu next. In the bowl next to it, a raw egg yolk and chopped green onion. The soft, creamy texture of the tofu and the crisp acidity of the onion, tempered by the rich smoothness of the egg. Masterful.

Tsuguyasu with his spanner crab

An enormous oyster, adorned with a solitary blob of hot pepper sauce, follows. The crab is next. Spanner crab, a half each, its cavity filled with delicious white meat you normally find hidden in the darkest corners of the claw. In the course of any other meal, this would be the crowning glory, but the best has been kept to last. A white fish soup (something approximating cod, with firm meaty flakes, in a clear broth with cabbage and seaweed. It is the greatest rendition of the sea that has ever passed my lips. Pure, unadulterated ocean, right there in that bowl; the water that lapped the shores of Eden could not have tasted any finer.

Ocean in a bowl

Kamikochi

Kamikochi is neither a town, nor a village. It's a scattering of hotels and onsens, a bus stop, a few buildings, and a lot of trails that carry countless happy hikers around the Japan Alps. As I strode away from the bus terminal, I noticed a Japanese man, the only other person on his own in a sea of groups and couples, turn and look back at me. He hesitated long enough, and smiled, for me to recognise the polite invitation to join him, and smile back.

Kamikochi

We talked as we walked, his English slightly broken but evidently once proficient. He wanted to know where I'd been, where I was going and where I'd walked. We talked about the parks in America, about Arizona and Utah, which he knew well. He'd been up Kilimanjaro and to Everest Base Camp, can see Mount Fuji from his window and decides in the morning whether to climb it or not, something he's done more times than he can remember. He tells me about Kamikochi; the peaks, the river, hesitating only to slap his forehead as he occasionally searches for a word.

Like all people who are great company, he doesn't talk too much, and we probably spend three quarters of our short time together saying nothing; sharing an experience rather than thoughts or words, rendered superfluous by the unmistakable, unutterable glory of that walk. After forty minutes or so we reached a bridge. I was crossing it, he was not, so with another smile, and a handshake, we relinquished one another's company as quickly and easily as we had taken it up. "See you again," he proffered with a cheery wave, and I waved back, sure in the knowledge that, sadly, he would not.

I march over the bridge, pace quickening now and the arms swinging, the peculiar ennui rendered upon me for the past few days vaporised by the fresh alpine air as I resume my solitude once again.

Matsumoto

There's not an enormous amount going on in Matsumoto, but once you get past the cordon of shit business hotels around the station, a small, elegant little town fans out before you. Classical music is piped through speakers in the flower beds, and the curtains of a thousand tiny restaurants flutter gently in the alpine breeze that flows down from the great mountains circling the city.

The main tourist attraction is Matsumoto castle, the oldest in Japan, having stood resolutely upon the same spot for the last five hundred years. Which is impressive for a building made entirely of wood, sitting on a flat plain, in a country whose history is studded with habitual conflicts between warring clans. Catching my first glimpse, I like to think it survived because, well, it looks really cool. Who'd want to burn down a thing like that?

Inside is pretty smart too - low beamed ceilings and impossibly steep staircases linking the six storeys. A "warrior corridor" links two parts of the building, wide enough for hundreds of tooled up samurai to charge back and forth along in the heat of battle. Downward openings line the fourth floor, for the dropping of rocks on the sieging forces below.

By the fifth floor, the walls are really beginning to encroach. This was the command centre, where generals directed the battle below with the advantage of a 360º view. It's not always easy, in historical places, to connect the place to its own past. But for some reason, as I stoop to look out of the small openings, I experience a nanosecond of transportation, and imagine what it must have been like up there, in the throes of ferocious war. The noise, the smell, the commotion. The blood. The fear. The feeling of besiegement, entrenched in a wooden fortress, just a moat between you and your eager foes, bearing down upon you on all sides as the arrows and shot fly all around. And fire. The thought, surely, that all you were actually defending, was your own funeral pyre.

And it seems odd to think, standing on that spot, that the only thing separating me from then, is time.

Nikkō

Autumn is beginning to win the struggle with summer in Nikkō, though there's still a little work to be done. In a couple of weeks the whole place is going to burst into the most incredible colours. I'll be gone by then, sadly, but it's enough for me, in the corner of an exquisite Zen garden, to glimpse a preview of what is about to unfurl itself upon the surrounding hills.

Nikkō is a small town, borne out of temples and shrines whose history dates from the eighth century. They're concentrated in a corner of Nikkō National Park, separated from the rest of the city by a small but fast flowing river. The sacred crossing, the Shin-kyō Bridge runs alongside it's modern replacement.

The diminutive river still roaring in my ears, stone steps covered in moss carry me into the park in the shadow of ancient trees, as water runs back down past my feet from the mountains. It already feels like a sacred place, without the help of any temples. The dampness is overwhelming, but not in a cloying or muggy sense; rather it is like being engulfed by clouds, though there are none, and the sun occasionally manages to find its way through the dense natural shelter.

The further I venture into this peculiar place, where man made temples and shrines nestle in the forest's natural spendour, the more I wonder why they bothered building them. The towering, arrow straight trees are more magnificent than any of the stone pillars, and the grand temples themselves were only built by chopping them down.

The temple buildings are plush and gilded, with the sumptuous effect of a Roman Catholic Cathedral. But none of their intricate carvings can match the patterns of the fern and moss for sublimity. The forest alone is a wondrous, magical, sacred place, where the sanctity of nature reigns. The great Japanese Cedars that reside here are cousins of the Giant Sequoias that grace Yosemite, and beneath them, you feel the same awe, the same proximity to the heart of the world itself.

Everywhere I turn, I hear water; narrow channels ferrying it somewhere, as I climb higher into the forest and its core of illustrious temples. It feels like I'm tracing something back to its unknown source, in some fated, Kafka-esque, vocation. All the time though I'm touched by the moisture; by the way it snakes its way down the mountain and the fact that, as it does, it breathes life into everything it passes. It's as though I'm inside some giant living organism, and the water is the blood coursing through its veins, I think, before realising that I am.

Flying over Japan on my way back from Korea, I noticed how the rural towns and villages follow the water; forever seeking out the arable land like the roots of a tree. Here in the heart of Nikkō, where man has studded nature's canvas with his own little jewels, the essence of things seems so obvious; flowing, beating, living and breathing, right up until the point at which gravity takes over and the water, that feeds the forest, that feeds the temples, drops down into the valley below to continue its inexorable journey.