This was published in The Times Magazine, 1994

The cook was a kind of master. A big man, more your stoker than your poet, his gesture to spirituality was to make kung-fu style passes over his huge wok, which he tossed about like a man with a coal shovel, with his big arms bursting out of a sleeveless, grey T shirt. A month in biological Ariel would not have got to the bottom of the stuff ingrained in that T shirt.

I am glad I could not afford good restaurants: this dump produced delicious scoff and an entirely new point of entry into Japan. Belch of flame, food on fire, fierce sizzling noises, and then the command from the master, with mock amazement on his face as he chopped the air with a white-knuckled fist, and wizarded the ingredients back into quiet simmering. He's working behind the bar at which we all sit to eat.

Customers pile in, pausing at the leaky towel-steamer for a wipe, and reaching down to the beer cabinet with the jungle stream of condensation to pick out a big bottle of Asahi beer. A grin and air-chop, both welcoming, from the cook. The absurd pink phone, practically luminous in the neon glare, rings beneath its mantle of grot. The kung-fu fist descends on it. I'd guess an order was solicited, and the man shouts down the counter for advice as to whether to give it, and bawls the result into his Mickey Mouse phone. This place was as loose as an English rural local or a burger bar.

Japan is rich, certainly, but its street aesthetic remains American and time locked at about 1960: coaches with chandeliers; big TVs with chrome knobs and dials which look like the fenders of Oldsmobiles; drinks vending machines offering chilled everything from cabinets like Nickelodeons. How did a country where less-is-more become so plain vulgar? No wonder they think Pringle is high tone. Indeed, they have England-envy as a special variety of their Europe-envy. Try this, on the back of a phone card, in English: "European Dream. We find out new personal in the space of a part from daily".

Flipping through a country's dirty magazines is quite a good way of getting under its skin. In Japan, they're mostly comics - and on open sale amongst the schoolbooks - and they make a good case for sending the entire country into intensive Relate counselling. Can their love-making really be accompanied with such frenzied grimaces? Somewhere, I read that there's a feminist watchdog trying to clean up these weird enterprises. It is somewhat hoist on its petard: Japanese women cheerfully read doctors-and-nurses comics in which he does pretty well the same things to her as he would have done in men's mags. The difference is that in this version, she looks happier.

A man travelling alone has time for these sorts of reflections, as beer after beer goes down in back street eating-houses (not all were grubby; but I didn't find a dull or unfriendly one). There's a lot of talk from cross young girls about how repressed Japanese women are, and how they have to speak in strange squeaky voices if they want to please their husbands. Well, maybe. I just kept coming across sensible, secure-seeming women who so far as I could see spoke their mind very freely: several tried their English out on me whilst their spouses twiddled their thumbs in embarrassment.

I took a train up to a fishing port on the Japan Sea coast. No tickets to buy because I'd got a railpass which took care of that. In the land of the fax (best way for foreigners to communicate, cutting through lowly non-english-speakers on switchboards), I had a train itinerary in English and Japanese on shiny paper. If you do your planning whilst you're there, try to fix your journeys at big stations, which can make reservations and where there is more likely to be someone who can work things out with you. Split second timing is no problem on these railways: privatised, regimented, the 15.02 on platform 4 means both those things with nary a change and men in white gloves saluting it on its way. The railways staff seem to be self-starters for whom a dumb, paper-waving stranger is an amusement to be politely got into the right carriage.

I had stayed one night in a rather down market minshuku - Japanese-style dinner-bed-and-breakfast - in Kyoto. The shoe box room made me slightly stir-crazy, and I walloped down two One-Cup takeaways of sake from the machine down the street. Here in fishy Wajima I saw what class could be. The minshuku's wooden bath (communal; no suds please; one for men, one for women) had dinky but evocative little rocks Uhu-ed into its side. I sank into the water (having showered on the tiled area nearby), but slowly, as though the heat could best lift the ache and the anxiety out of each bit of the body an inch at a time.

This was all back to front: a Japanese properly baths before dinner, I think, at least according to the Otani thrillers by James Melville I had taken with me (a very good painless introduction to Japanese mores). But I had wanted to go and see the women who dive for abalone and bring shellfish to the dockside, as James Michener had described it in 1951, and I had duly seen the evening boats racing for shore as I arrived in the town. The diving women came in all sizes, but it was the tiny skinny ones who amazed: their ribs poking through their wet suits, they didn't look capable of holding their breaths long enough to rinse their hair, let alone to wrestle with crustaceans which didn't want to let go of boulders in the briny.

These women, at least, didn't seem as though they had to take any nonsense from their menfolk, whom they could probably have snapped in two at a whim. Or drowned in a bucket. That evening, supper was a seventeen bowl affair (included in the minshuku's price), eaten cross legged on the tatami matting under the eye of a holidaying midwife and her mother who were across the low table. Sake, hot and easeful, chased a dish of elvers down. Funny what you can eat when you're not entirely sober. The raw tuna and soy and horseradish sauce remains in the mind: I could eat THAT at breakfast time without warning or mood-enhancers. As I went to bed, two perfect Samurai turned up: bike boys wearing fluorescent favours - well, decals - on Yamahas. They woke up an hour before dawn and talked and joked, clearly audible through the flimsy sliding walls.

On the train to Wajima I saw a man - respectable, nice suit - kick off his shoes and sit yoga style on the seat to read his book. I wonder if this is what keeps the people sane: there is an extraordinary peacefulness about going into a house and putting on slippers, and then - approaching the bedroom or the dining room where there's matting - taking those off and going about in socks. In a world where you must kow-tow to your boss the communal bathing is important too: "The boss can't be arrogant when he's got no clothes on", said a professor, trying to unravel the social scene for me.

The Japanese keep a compartment in their minds and daily lives for simplicities such as lying for a while on bare boards at the end of the day. I don't know about the violence which they have in them (if they really do), but the vulgarity sort of doesn't touch them because that's just the getting-about and spending world; they have another.

Proof? I went to several gardens in Kyoto. The big stroll gardens are famous (you can find others, and very handsome too, in Tokyo or Kanazawa as well). But it is the smaller retirement villas, or hermitages, which take the eye and mind and heart and lift them up on stalks. An important man would scheme his last home while there was still time to live in it. My favourite was Shisen-do, in the lea of the mountains which rise east of Kyoto, and seems typical. It is the house of a 17th century sage who had been a warrior: small house, matted throughout so there seem to be no commonplace areas. External walls which come away altogether ("Any fool can design a house for the winter; what matters is to be cool in summer", goes the architects' dictum hereabouts). And then the garden. It has a gravel area - raked in patterns, sharply white, with meaningful boulders arranged in its midst. There is no lawn, just mossy banks. Carp in a reedy pool. Areas of ferns and grasses, with lichen the most colourful contrast. Importantly, old trees aren't allowed to fall down, they just get propped up (as men old men should be). And bushes are clipped into sleek, globular perfection, like well-sucked gobstoppers in green.

A charming young couple were in the house, yuppified in clompy loafers. They were lovers, sitting in familiar silence, lotus-wise as the day slid away. By chance it rained the whole time I was in these gardens: you begin to listen for every splash and to watch even the row of explosions in the sand where raindrops have fallen from a stray bamboo. Lordy: it is time to lighten up when the unbearable imminence of being is beginning to loom.

I had remembered seeing a film in which young Buddhist monks were whipped in the snow for letting their backs sag at meditation. Thinking this was something one ought to see, indeed rather needs, I took a train to Koyasan, in the mountains south of Osaka. There are a hundred monasteries there, and over fifty of them will accept guests. I couldn't find mine, Shojoshinin, but a middle aged woman in a battered car (the latter rather rare in Japan) asked me where I was going and whizzed me to the very door; she and her husband kept the cafe across the road and gave me a good lunch.

Such a town was bound to yield exquisite corners, and did. But I returned to my own venerable joint in the late afternoon: it was a worn wooden structure on stilts, making a series of small courtyards surrounding gravel, water and gardens. I was looking forward to the tatami of my cell, with the door-wall slid back to listen to the carp in the pond and to watch the light fail on the mossed bank which rose away from my veranda, becoming quite a big hill.

Time for a soak before slipping into the yukata - a wrap-around cotton dressing gown provided everywhere - for dinner, served in my room in solitary state. I had emergency sake, but needn't have bothered. "Beer? Sake? One, two? Three?", asked the monk who served me. Dinner was vegetarian, with every delicacy: pickled cherry, various dull bits and pieces which are designed to provide a background vehicle for the spiced this and that dish after dish revealed.

I had by then become an addict of Japanese television: one show imported several Americans of incredible largeness, thinness, and tallness, and paraded them in the street to everyone's huge amusement. Another spent hours dismembering a Trabant, a machine everyone thought almost as comical as the freaks had been. But I did not switch on the set in my cell. Nor was I distracted by the family party going in the next two cells, joined together by the simple expedient of sliding the walls away. And especially the comings and goings of the elderly couple who passed from time to time on their way to the loo and the baths did not distract me.

Two monks took the triple-decker tray away, and there was much play as they laid out two futons, in view of my being a bit long, they thought. Up at five the next morning. A single bell, deep and sonorous, sent out one dull lingering note. The old couple were there, in the temple room. We sat cross legged behind the row of monks, as they passed a chant between them. The service was gorgeous, noisy and luminous. No-one came about with whips, though the faithful were asked behind the altar for a word or two with a monk in white socks. They received a little present from him and then regained their places. I felt miffed, which was probably not a good sign of spiritual improvement.

A train took me back to the world. There were five other passengers in the first class carriage. A Buddhist monk, head polished against the anti-maccasar. An elderly white-haired man in a black suit worn over a perfect white shirt with gold cuff links; he was paying stately court to his beautiful old wife, who was dressed in the height of western chic. And - sprawled in his recliner - a big man in a lime green windcheater worn over go-faster parachute-fabric tracksuit bottoms, with a baseball cap pulled over his eyes for shade. His wife caught me looking at this rich oaf and made a small smile. We had the beginnings of a cross-cultural conspiracy, I think. The monk, the tycoon and the jerk: if I had known the story of those people, I would have understood Japan.

The following information was true in 1994:

1994 is the year Kyoto, once Japan's capital, celebrates 1200 as a city: expect many excitements as blossom-time (late March, early April) gives way to high Summer in the city of temples and gardens. The Japan National Tourist Organisation is very efficient, and will - especially given time - try to help with lone travellers' requests, and understands many people's preference to travel cheaply, which is far easier than myth has it. JNTO proudly points out how much cheaper Tokyo is than London. Their free guides and handbooks take a good deal of the anxiety out of travel in a country in which you are unlikely to speak more than a word or two of the language, nor read the majority of the signs. The handbooks include tips on how an English monoglot can use Japanese-style accommodation, which enables one to manage without social disaster. Restaurants usually display plastic replicas of dishes served, and prices, in a case outside: keep a notebook to write down your selection, or grab a waitress to point. Trains and tubes and buses are made easier by many English signs and helpful, plentiful, staff.

The Japan Travel Bureau UK Ltd, the largest travel agent, will make bookings, including selected Japanese-style accommodation, and sell you a Railpass which makes for cheapness and convenience on most Japan Railways (but not all Bullet) services (and it's not valid on other private railways).

There's a free English-speaking tourist help line available throughout Japan. The Japan Centre sells several guides: the one I used and enjoyed was Gateway to Japan, by June Kinoshita and Nicholas Palevsky, published by Kodansha. I have been enjoying A History of Modern Japan by Richard Storry, Penguin, stereotypes tumbling everywhere.