Kamakura

For more than a century, Kamakura was the seat of the shoguns, and the town has spent the eight hundred years since perfecting the art of remembering quietly. Zen took root in Japan here; its great temples — Kenchō-ji, Engaku-ji — still ring their bells over cedar valleys barely an hour from Tokyo. The Great Buddha of Kōtoku-in has sat in the open air since a tsunami carried away his hall five centuries ago, green with patience. Add the surf breaking at Yuigahama, hydrangea lanes climbing the hillsides, and lantern-lit streets at dusk, and Kamakura becomes what it has always been: the capital's most civilised escape.

This is a journey best made entirely by road. Your FFGR chauffeur collects you in central Tokyo — the Toyota Century, perhaps, for so dignified a destination — and takes the Yokohama–Yokosuka Road south, a drive of little more than an hour when timed to miss the morning tide of traffic. We suggest an early start: the great temples are at their most eloquent before ten o'clock. The car then shadows your day discreetly, from the hillside gates of Kita-Kamakura down to the coast, sparing you the crowded local trains, and stands ready whenever you choose to continue along the shore towards Enoshima or Hayama.

In June, the hydrangea stairways of Hase-dera and Meigetsu-in turn impossibly blue, and an early arrival is everything. Autumn colour comes late here — late November into December — gilding the great ginkgo precinct of Tsurugaoka Hachimangū and the maples of Engaku-ji. Take matcha in the bamboo grove of Hōkoku-ji, lunch quietly near Kita-Kamakura, and keep the late afternoon for the Great Buddha, when the day visitors have receded and the bronze face softens in low light. Should you wish to linger, the seaside hotels of Hayama lie minutes along the coast. Kamakura is a day that feels like a retreat; we make certain nothing interrupts it.