Luxury Japan Travel
Japan, built for you.
A private tour designed from a blank page, carried through by the same hands, from the first morning to the last.
The Custom Tour of Japan, in ten pages: how it is built, who runs it, what it costs, and how it begins.
Yours alone
A tour that begins on a blank page.
The Custom Tour of Japan is the most complete journey we make. It is the pinnacle of the Japanese experience, and highly sought after. We therefore welcome only a small, select number of valued guests each season.
There is no listing for what we build. No booking page shows the room at the ryokan in the season guests want it most, and no menu carries the kaiseki dinner made for one evening only. We find these things by relationship, and ask for them ourselves. We begin with what you came to Japan for, and we build one party's journey at a time.
The range of it
Tell us the Japan you want,
and we build it.
Nine of the things we build a tour around. Choose one to read it; tell us which of them is yours.
By relationship
The rare and the personal
This is the part of a tour that runs on relationships rather than booking systems. An evening with geiko in a private room, in a world that has run on introduction for three centuries. A counter with no sign, a workshop down an unmarked lane, a door that opens because we asked early, and asked in person. None of this is booked through a system; each is arranged by introduction.
Japan cannot be seen,
Japan must be discovered.
Let us show you how.
We plan, organise, and run every tour ourselves.
Much private touring is assembled by a chain of people, each of whom knows only their part. We work from one place, Kyoto, with one team, and we speak for you ourselves: for the table that is arranged in person, and for the room that never reaches a booking engine. The people who plan your tour are the people who run it, and your Tour Director is beside you when you want them.
The rooms guests want most, in the weeks they want them most, go to whoever asks first, so we start asking the moment the design begins. The result is a Japan with nothing left for you to find, ask for, or carry.
How it begins
It begins with a conversation.
You tell us the Japan you have in mind. What follows is a video call with the Tour Director who would lead your tour: present for as much of each day as you want, and out of view for the rest of it.
It is one conversation, face to face, with the person whose judgement you would be trusting, about what you came for, how you travel, and the Japan you have in mind. It is complimentary, and it commits you to nothing. Some of those conversations end with us saying we are not the right people for the tour, and we say so plainly.
The design begins only when the tour is one you want. A journey curation fee of $1,500 sets it in motion: non-refundable, and credited in full against your tour, so beginning the design adds nothing to what you pay.
From there the months before you fly are part of the tour: the route drawn, the rooms chosen, the introductions made. You see the whole itinerary before a single part of the tour price is due.
Their expertise in Japanese culture and language, and the care they took to look after us down to the smallest detail, was second to none.
Melissa K., 2026
Highlights included a private dinner with geiko and the old-fashioned hospitality of an onsen ryokan in the seaside town of Kinosaki.
Graham E., 2025
It was a first class and outstanding tour in all respects.
William H.
Your assurance
Nothing on the ground is yours to manage.
You see it first
The full itinerary, every property and every day, in your hands before anything else. We refine it with you until you would not change it; only then does a deposit confirm your dates, the balance 95 days before you travel.
If something changes
Your Tour Director knows the route and knows Japan. They stay close enough to solve a problem before you know there was one, and far enough back that you are never aware of being managed.
Built around what your party needs
Tell us what your party needs, dietary, medical, mobility or pace, and we design around it from the start.
Discreet by design
It is built for depth rather than display: the quiet room, the table without a sign, the morning no one photographs.
Questions
Questions, answered.
A private tour is priced per person, per day, in US dollars, and the rate turns on the size of your party: two guests from $3,500, three to four guests from $2,750, five or more from $2,000. A journey curation fee of $1,500 begins the design and is credited in full against your tour, so the design adds nothing to the tour price.
It covers your properties, private vehicles and drivers, every train and transfer, and the meals we curate for you: some evenings composed and booked on your behalf, others left deliberately free. Above all it covers the work of our Kyoto team, who arrange in person what no listing carries, and a Tour Director whose knowledge of the country shows you a Japan you would not find alone. International flights are not included: we advise on routings and timings, and you book the flights yourself. We give one number because the tour is one thing.
A group tour follows a set programme on fixed dates with other guests. A private custom tour begins on a blank page and is built for one party: yours. The dates, the regions, the pace, the experiences are yours alone, and you travel with your own Tour Director, present when you want them and out of sight when you do not.
No. The tour is made of what is hard to reach from outside Japan: the room that goes to those who asked earliest, the table with no sign and no way to book it, the afternoon at a workshop that does not advertise. Our Kyoto team arranges each of these in person and well in advance, and they are secured for you before you travel.
Solo guests, couples, families across generations, and groups of friends: any party who wants Japan built for them rather than around a published schedule.
It is $1,500, paid when you are ready to begin the design. It sets the work in motion, the routing, the research, the building of an itinerary made only for you. It is non-refundable, and credited in full against your tour, so it adds nothing overall.
Only the $1,500 curation fee, which begins the design. You pay no part of the tour price until you have seen the full itinerary, refined it with us, and decided it is right.
A tour designed without time pressure is a better tour, and the dates guests ask for earliest, spring and autumn, fill first. Most guests come to us several months ahead; for those seasons, more time is better. It is always worth asking what is still open.
Yes, and most do: a city neighbourhood and a hot-spring town, a traditional ryokan and a city property that suits a long sleep after a full day. The sequence is part of the design.
Often, and it is some of our favourite work. The day is designed around the family as it is, with different stamina and different interests, planned from the first conversation, not added afterward.
At the design stage. Every itinerary is built with your requirements in front of us, so the properties, routing, meals, and pace are right before you leave home.
Your Tour Director is with you throughout, and an adjustment is made before you need to know about it. They know the route and the alternatives in every direction, and read the day well enough to know when you want them close and when you would rather not see them at all.
Many of the guests we design for are first-time visitors. The tour is built to work at whatever depth of knowledge you arrive with, and the places we choose give a first-time guest the context that makes the rest of the country legible.
Anywhere in Japan: Kyoto, Kanazawa, the Kii Peninsula, Naoshima and the Inland Sea, Kyūshū, Tōhoku, Hokkaidō, one region in depth, or several in a sequence that makes sense on the ground.
Yes. The itinerary you first receive is a proposal, not a contract. We refine it with you, more days in one region, fewer in another, an element removed, until you would not change it. The deposit is paid at that point, not before.
The curation fee is paid by card. Tour deposits and balances are paid by card or by bank transfer, in US dollars. A deposit confirms your dates, and the balance is due 95 days before departure.
What it costs
A tour made once, and only for you.
A private tour is a different object from a published departure. None of it exists until you ask for it, and once you have travelled it, it will not be run again.
One number, built with precision: your properties, private vehicles and drivers, the dining we curate for you, and the expertise of the Kyoto team and Tour Director who arrange every day. Where you want an evening to yourselves, we leave one.
Per person, per day, in US dollars, tax inclusive. Starting points, not quotes. International flights are not included.
Built once. Run by the people who built it.
Begin.
Tell us the Japan you have in mind: where you want to go, and what you want it to feel like. What comes back is a video call with the Tour Director who would lead your tour: there for the parts of each day you want company, and gone for the ones you do not.
The first conversation is complimentary, and commits you to nothing.
The rare and the personal
This is the part of a tour that runs on relationships rather than booking systems. An evening with geiko in a private room, in a world that has run on introduction for three centuries. A counter with no sign, a workshop down an unmarked lane, a door that opens because we asked early, and asked in person. None of this is booked through a system; each is arranged by introduction.
To eat
In Kyoto, a kaiseki dinner is a sequence one chef composes for a single evening: no menu to order from, the courses tracking the season and the hour, the broth in October carrying the first cold edge of autumn, served in a private room with the garden on the other side of the screen. In Ginza, a counter that seats eight or ten runs on temperature and timing, each piece handed over and eaten in a moment. Beyond the table there is a morning at a sake brewery in Nada, the tanks cold and still, or an hour at the soba board in the hills above Nagano, in a room that smells of stone and cold water.
With family, across generations
Japan is a country where travel across three generations works, because every age finds something of its own on the same day. A morning at a pottery studio in Kyoto, one piece that travels home wrapped in a towel, is remembered longer than any admission ticket. The cedar avenue at Nikkō carries a nine-year-old and a grandparent in the same hour. A multi-generational ryokan stay turns on details no booking page shows: the room configuration, the bathing arrangement, the distance from the common areas, and we know which properties suit a family well and what to ask for when we book.
To relax
Kinosaki Onsen is a hot-spring town of wooden bathhouses along a willow canal, where the evening is spent moving between baths in yukata and wooden geta, dinner laid course by course in your ryokan. In the mountains of Akita, the milk-white and the iron-brown springs of Nyuto Onsen sit a short walk apart through beech forest, and a day there needs no programme beyond the bath, the meal, the walk, and the bath again after dark. The slow tour is built as carefully as any other; the pace is its own discipline, not a lesser ambition.
To understand its craft
Japanese craft is functional philosophy made physical: objects made for a lifetime, by people who have spent a lifetime learning to make them. In Kanazawa's Higashi Chaya district, the urushi lacquer studios work a technique three centuries deep, each thin layer cured for days before the next. In Sakai, knife-makers work the same steel the swordsmiths used; you can stand in the forge as a blade goes from bar to edge, and leave with the knife you watched being made. In Mashiko, a maker whose work sits in museum collections gives you an hour that is neither class nor demonstration but a window onto what sustained attention to clay and kiln produces.
To walk Japan's landscape
The Nakasendō between Magome and Tsumago is a surviving stretch of the Edo-period post road through the Kiso valley: three or four hours through cedar and old post towns, the road still stone, the river running below the ridge, lunch waiting in Tsumago. In the Kii mountains, the Kumano Kodō pilgrimage paths have carried walkers for a thousand years through deep, wet forest to the shrine at Hongū. For the more active, the Shimanami Kaidō runs seventy kilometres across six Inland Sea islands by bicycle in a day. The walking can be the whole tour, or two days of it.
Ritual and the quiet
Japan's spiritual life is not a backdrop to the sights; in many places it is the point. At Ise Jingū in Mie, the shrine has been rebuilt on its neighbouring plot every twenty years for thirteen centuries: the same form, the same cypress, perpetually new and perpetually old. At Kōyasan, the long cedar-shaded path of Okunoin passes two hundred thousand tombs beneath cedars centuries old. We build this strand for those who want to understand, to take part, or simply to sit in the quiet.
The seasons
Each season remakes the country. Spring is the cherry front moving north from Kyūshū in late March, but it is also the first bamboo shoots in Nishiki market and the plum at Kitano Tenmangū in February. Autumn is the maples running south through November, and in Kanazawa's Kenroku-en the yukitsuri ropes go up on the old pines against the snow to come. Winter is the season most guests overlook, which is why it has so much to give: the drift ice off Abashiri and the red-crowned cranes on the Kushiro marsh, the outdoor bath in falling snow in Yamagata, the silence of a real winter.
Contemporary art and design
Japan's contemporary art and architecture stand apart because the old forms are never far away. Naoshima, in the Seto Inland Sea, is the clearest case: Tadao Andō's concrete museums set into the hills, and the James Turrell room at the Chichū Art Museum, lit only by the sky above it, so different at ten in the morning from four in the afternoon that it becomes another work. On Teshima, Ryue Nishizawa's museum is a single shell of concrete with two openings to the sky, where water seeps and pools across the floor with the weather. We build the island crossings as part of the tour.