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The contrast between our present location and Koyasan could not be greater. Naoshima is an island dedicated to contemporary art. It is home to the museum/hotel/spa complex of the Benesse foundation and the Chichu Art Museum. Both buildings were designed by Tadao Ando.

The Benesse House and Benesse House Annex could easily have been the setting of a James Bond movie. The three main buildings are set into a hillside with the top part, called the Oval, only accessible via a small monorail. Benesse hotel guests can roam the art collection until 11pm before retiring to their rooms located conveniently inside the museum.

Chichu Art Museum is a collection of minimalist underground spaces custom-designed for the works of art they contain. They are lit entirely by natural light and provide a gallery experience unlike any we’ve ever had. The artists on show are Walter de Maria, Claude Monet and James Turrell. Near the museum is the Chichu garden planted with the same plant species as those found in Monet’s Giverny garden. Photography of the buildings is not allowed but they have a great website that gives information in English and shows the work: http://www.chichu.jp

Dotted around Naoshima’s Miyanoura Port are various buildings belonging to the Art House project. Some draw on traditional Japanese architecture for inspiration while this one is built using local reclaimed materials.

Last but not least, there are many sculptures along the shore of the Inland Sea, the most famous being the red and yellow pumpkins by Yayoi Kusama.

Autumn has arrived in all its splendour. We ascend to the top of the Koyasan temple mountain in a monorail, surrounded by trees glowing brightly in their red and yellow foliage. After a stroll through the small town and its vast ancient cemetery we bed down for the night in a monastery. We join the monks for morning prayers in the darkness of their sanctuary. It is unheated apart from a small gas heater and the candles lit one by one by a monk slowly making his way around the room. From behind a paper wall, another monk with ancient features enters the sanctuary. As the younger monk begins the prayer rituals, his chants punctuated by the low rumbling coughs of the older monk, it dawns on us that these two are the last inhabitants of the monastery. With more than fifty active monastic orders, Koyasan is one of the most sacred Buddhist sites in Japan. We seem to have stumbled on the only congregation slowly fading away. Thanking the monks for their hospitality we leave for a last walk under the canopies of towering trees, past temples and tombs bathed in glorious sunshine.

Next stop: Naoshima.

Today we visited Nara, Japan’s first real capital. The city is home to the Todai-ji temple and its Daibutsu-den hall, the largest wooden building in the world. The temple burned down several times in its history and it is hard to believe the present Daibutsu-den is only two-thirds the size of the original building. The enormous bronze Buddha figure housed inside made us feel like ants in the house of a giant.

The Daibutsu-den hall of Nara’s Todai-ji temple

The Daibutsu, or Great Buddha. To give you an idea of scale: The golden figures in the halo are approx. human-size.

Detail of a smaller wooden figure outside the temple hall