Okayama

Okayama is a major junction: the Sanyo Shinkansen reaches it in about three and a quarter hours from Tokyo and 45 minutes from Shin-Osaka, and it is the transfer point for every train crossing to Shikoku over the Seto-Ohashi bridge. Kurashiki is 15 minutes away on the local Sanyo line, so the two are easily combined. Okayama Airport handles domestic routes. Within the city, a short tram line runs to the castle area. The Kibi Plain route is best done by rental bicycle between Bizen-Ichinomiya and Soja, about 15 kilometres. The northern towns of Tsuyama and Bizen need the slow Tsuyama and Ako lines, or a car.

Okayama is one of the few places on this side of the country where the arithmetic of a trip clearly favours staying put. It sits on the main shinkansen line, it is the transfer point for everything crossing to Shikoku, and the local line reaches the merchant quarter that most visitors are actually coming to see in a matter of minutes. Hotels are priced for a business city rather than a tourist one.

So the pattern that works is one hotel and a series of returns: the garden and castle on foot in the morning, the warehouse district for an afternoon and evening, the ferry out to the art islands on another day, the hill towns inland on a third. Visitors who instead book a night in each of those places spend a large fraction of their holiday moving luggage between stations that are twenty minutes apart, and see less for it.

Two days, and Okayama's advantage is that it is a shinkansen stop with an unusually good set of half-day trips around it. The city itself has one of the three great gardens and a black castle beside it, which is a morning. Kurashiki, fifteen minutes down the line, is a canal district of white-walled merchant warehouses and is the reason most people come.

The second day goes to the islands or the hills: Naoshima and the art islands are a ferry from Uno, about an hour from Okayama by train and boat, and belong administratively to Kagawa but are reached from here. Inland, Bitchu Takahashi has a mountain castle above a sea of cloud and Fukiya is a preserved village of red-ochre buildings.

Three days does the city, Kurashiki and the islands without rushing, which is the trip most visitors should be planning.

Okayama records fewer days of rain than almost anywhere in Japan, and there is very little snow, so the shoulder seasons are unusually reliable here. January highs sit near 10°C and August above 33°C with humidity. Fruit dictates the calendar: white peaches ripen from July into August and Muscat grapes from August into October, both with pick-your-own orchards north of the city. Korakuen's spring and autumn night illuminations run for short periods in April and November. The Saidaiji naked festival, held on the third Saturday of February, is one of the odder things in the Japanese calendar.

West of the city the land opens into a plain that was a centre of power long before the region had a name anyone would recognise, and a marked cycling route runs across it linking burial mounds, old shrines and temples strung through farmland. It is flat, it is short enough to do in a relaxed half day, and bicycles can be picked up at one end and left at the other, so it does not have to be an out-and-back.

This is the part of the prefecture that gets skipped, and it is the one that best explains why anything is here. The mounds are large and unfenced and you ride between rice fields rather than around a site boundary. Go in spring or autumn — the plain is exposed and there is little shade — and treat the stated distance as generous, because the stopping is the point rather than the riding.

White peaches are the prefecture's signature fruit and the pale, low-acid varieties grown here are picked from July; Muscat of Alexandria grapes follow from August. Barazushi is a lidded box of vinegared rice scattered with seafood and vegetables, invented — according to local telling — to satisfy a lord's order that commoners eat only one dish per meal. Demi-katsudon replaces the usual egg with demi-glace sauce and comes from a Western-style restaurant in the city. Hiruzen in the north raises Jersey cattle, and Bizen has fired unglazed pottery for around a thousand years.

Trains for almost everything. Okayama is a major junction — the shinkansen stops, the line to Shikoku crosses the bridge from here, and local services reach Kurashiki, Uno and the inland towns frequently. The art islands are a train and a ferry.

A car is worth having for the inland north: Fukiya's ochre village, the limestone caves, and the roads up to the mountain castle at Takahashi, where the walk from the station is long and the cloud-sea viewpoint is a separate drive again. That is a specific, rewarding day and the only part of the prefecture where driving pays.

Okayama markets itself as the land of sunshine and the claim is broadly fair — the Inland Sea side is drier and milder than either coast, which makes this a good winter prefecture. The August heat is real, though, and Kurashiki's canal district has little shade.

The pinch point is the art islands, which are busy in summer and during the triennial festival years, when accommodation on and around them books out far in advance and the ferries queue. Museums on Naoshima also close on Mondays, and getting there to find the main gallery shut is a common and entirely avoidable waste of a day.

A first visit is Kurashiki and the garden. The canal quarter is a genuinely intact merchant townscape with willows over the water and an early modern art museum in it, and it is fifteen minutes from a shinkansen station. Korakuen in the city, with the black castle behind it, is one of the three gardens people compare and the least crowded of them.

A second visit goes to the islands or into the hills. Naoshima and its neighbours turned a set of declining Inland Sea islands into a permanent contemporary art site, and it is best over two days with a night on one of them rather than as a dash. Inland, Bitchu Takahashi's mountain castle and the ochre village at Fukiya are a completely different prefecture and see almost no foreign visitors. Fukiya's colour comes from the iron oxide the village mined and used on its own walls, which is the sort of detail that makes a two-hour drive worth taking.