For almost two decades, Luxury Japan Travel has created and operated journeys through Japan with one purpose: to make your time here exceptional. You should experience Japan with depth, ease and intimacy. Our experience and relationships allow us to know what deserves your time and to shape each day around the way you want to experience Japan.
Japan is all we do. It is the only country we have ever offered, and that complete focus is the source of our expertise and our authority. We know the ryokan worth making the journey for and the table worth planning an evening around, and we can tell you exactly why.
We plan, organise and run every tour. Nothing about your journey is left to strangers. The people who design it have given their working lives to Japan, and everything they know of it is yours. The most sought-after doors in Japan, and its most exclusive places, open only from within. Your Tour Director opens them: one of our own, fluent in English and Japanese. They enhance every day, turning a beautiful journey into a deep and authentic experience of Japan. One of our guests wrote that their Tour Director was “deeply knowledgeable about Japan in a way that went far beyond the guidebook”.
Traditional Japan keeps its most sought-after places for those who are introduced, and most visitors never reach them. In Gion the teahouses keep a rule called ichigen-san okotowari: no first-time guest is received without an introduction, because the teahouse meets every expense of the evening and settles the account later, on trust. Many of the great kitchens and ryokan of Japan work in much the same way, and what counts is who vouches for you. Our relationships were earned over many years, and we vouch for you. In Kyoto you spend an evening in a Gion teahouse with geiko and maiko.
You stay in the finest luxury hotels and ryokan in Japan, each one chosen personally by us for its luxury, its comfort and its setting. Our journeys bring together the very best of contemporary Japanese luxury and traditions refined across generations: Tokyo’s great hotels, remote hot-spring inns, immaculate sushi counters, seasonal kaiseki and cultural experiences rooted firmly in place. You sit before some of Japan’s top chefs, Michelin-starred kitchens among them, and we choose each table as carefully as we choose your hotels.
The old calendar of Japan divides the year into seventy-two seasons, each only a few days long, and the country has never stopped paying attention. Each spring the Japanese news follows the sakura zensen, the cherry blossom front, as it moves north, and in autumn the colour travels the other way. Long experience of the country is in every route we draw, and it is why The Classic Cherry Blossom Tour of Japan and the Cherry Blossom Tour of Hokkaido are two separate journeys. One guest called travelling with us “a life-altering experience”.
From the moment you land, Japan comes to you. A private luxury car and chauffeur take each couple to and from the airport, and you never stand at a front desk. Your Tour Director takes care of every arrangement. Our seasonal tours never exceed eight guests, because the places most worth reaching in Japan are small, and at eight you are received in them as guests and the day moves at your pace.
Our seasonal tours leave on fixed dates at the height of cherry blossom, summer and autumn. The Private Collection is four private journeys, Essential Japan, Classic Japan, Definitive Japan and Pure Hokkaido, each travelled on your own dates exactly as we designed it. The Custom Tour of Japan is created for you alone, around the Japan you have in mind. The Expert Japan Itinerary is a complete day-by-day plan, written by us, for those who would rather travel on their own.
Let us show you how.