Kanagawa

The town was chosen as a seat of government in the twelfth century precisely because ridges enclose it on three sides and the sea shuts the fourth, and the narrow cuttings through those ridges were once the only ways in. That defensive shape is still the thing that governs a visit: the temples founded then are spread through separate side valleys, so moving between them means going up and over rather than along.

Which means the best way to see it is on foot, on the ridge paths, rather than by shuttling back to the station between each stop. The walking trails linking the valleys are proper woodland paths with roots and steps, they take a couple of hours end to end, and they turn a queue of temple visits into a day out. Wear something you can climb in, carry water, and start from the far end so that you finish at the sea.

Two days, and they are two very different days. Kamakura is one: a coastal town of temples and a great bronze buddha, about an hour from Tokyo, walkable and cyclable, with a small railway running along the sea to Enoshima. Hakone is the other: a volcanic caldera of hot springs, ropeways, a lake and a boat, roughly ninety minutes out, and best with a night in it.

Three days lets you add Yokohama, which is thirty minutes from Tokyo and deserves an evening rather than a day — the waterfront, the Chinatown, the red-brick warehouses.

The Hakone loop is the one route in this prefecture worth following exactly as designed: a mountain railway, a cable car, a ropeway over a sulphur valley, a boat across the lake and a bus back, sold as a single pass and genuinely the best way round. Trying to improvise it with taxis costs more and sees less.

Until the treaty that opened it, this was a fishing village. Within a generation it was the country's principal window on foreign trade, and almost everything a visitor looks at there dates from that opening or its aftermath: the brick warehouses on the water, the oldest and largest Chinatown in the country, the Western merchant houses on the bluff, the foreign cemetery, the early parks and waterworks.

Read as a set, they make the nineteenth century concrete in a way that museums struggle to. Give it an evening rather than a day — the waterfront is best after dark and the Chinatown is a dinner rather than a lunch — and walk from the harbour up to the bluff rather than taking a train between them, because the climb is short and the change from docks to villas is the whole point.

Trains do nearly all of it. Yokohama is 30 minutes from Tokyo Station, Kamakura about an hour on the Yokosuka line, and Odakyu's Romancecar reaches Hakone-Yumoto in roughly 85 minutes from Shinjuku. Hakone is then a chain of connections — mountain railway, cable car, ropeway, pirate boat, bus — which the Hakone Freepass bundles into one ticket and which is genuinely simpler than driving the switchbacks. Kamakura and Enoshima are linked by the single-track Enoden. Haneda Airport sits just over the Tokyo border. A car only helps on the Miura peninsula and the western Tanzawa foothills.

Kamakura in high summer or on any pleasant weekend. It is an hour from the largest city on earth, it is small, and the lane to the bamboo temple is a queue. Weekday mornings, or November weekdays for the maples, are a different town.

Hakone's constraint is the mountain rather than the crowd: the ropeway closes for wind and for volcanic activity, sometimes at short notice, and the sulphur valley section has been shut for extended periods in the past. Check before travelling rather than assuming the full loop runs. Golden Week and the New Year holiday put Kanagawa's inns at their most expensive; the Hakone relay race in early January closes roads and fills every room along the route.

Trains, and specifically the private lines from Shinjuku, which sell area passes that cover the Hakone loop or the Kamakura and Enoshima circuit and are cheaper than the sum of the fares. This is a prefecture where the excursion ticket is not a marketing exercise but the actual right way to travel.

A car helps in one place: the Miura peninsula, south of Yokosuka, where the fishing ports, the coastal roads and the capes are poorly served by rail. It is a hindrance almost everywhere else — Kamakura's lanes are narrow and congested at weekends, and Hakone's roads wind up a caldera wall that a mountain railway climbs more pleasantly.

Shirasu, translucent whitebait, is landed along the Shonan coast and eaten raw when the season allows — the raw version is banned during the winter closure, so what you get depends on the month. Yokohama's Chinatown is the largest in Japan and dates from the 1860s port. Ie-kei ramen, thick noodles in a pork-and-soy broth with spinach and nori, started in Yokohama in the 1970s and spread nationally from there. Odawara has made kamaboko fish cake since the Edo period, when it fed travellers on the Tokaido road.

Kanagawa is mild all year — coastal January highs near 11°C, snow only in the Hakone highlands — so the question is crowds rather than weather. Hakone and Kamakura are heaviest during Golden Week, in the November foliage weeks and on any fine summer weekend. Kamakura's hydrangeas draw queues at Meigetsu-in and Hase-dera through June, in the middle of the rainy season. Summer is humid and above 32°C, and the beaches at Yuigahama and Zushi open in July and August. Hakone's autumn colour peaks in mid-November, later around Lake Ashi. February brings plum blossom at Odawara.

A first visit is Kamakura, on a weekday, on foot. The combination of a big seated buddha in the open air, a dozen serious temples in walking distance, a beach at the bottom of the hill and a tram-like railway running between them is unusually easy to enjoy without any planning, and it is an hour from Tokyo.

A second visit is Hakone with a night in a ryokan, doing the full loop rather than one piece of it. And a third should go to the Miura peninsula, which almost no foreign visitor reaches: fishing ports, tuna at Misaki, cliff walks and small islands, forty minutes beyond Kamakura and in a different century from it. That trip wants a car and rewards it, which is not true of anything else in this prefecture.