Kamakura · Tokyo — and beyond
Your first time in Japan, or your fifth. Private, very small-group days in everyday English and French — in the places I know best, or anywhere else you have set your heart on.
The idea
Not only what you see, but what you feel.
I guide in everyday conversational English and French — nuance, humour and your questions, never a memorised script.
Small enough that everyone can hear, ask and linger. Private departures for families and groups of friends.
Your guide is also a licensed nurse and midwife — and glad to propose a private tour built around a health concern, a disability or a very small child.
The tours
Silence, Zen and a taste of tradition
Only the first temple forbids photography — we begin with a quiet stretch of birdsong and moving air, taken in with your senses alone. After that, photograph freely: Japan's first Zen monastery, a century-old teahouse, and Tsurugaoka Hachimangu, the shrine at Kamakura's heart.
Cooked in my kitchen, eaten together
Japan's oldest cooking is alive: miso, soy sauce, rice koji, vinegar, natto.
Entirely yours, start to finish
Tell me where you'd like to go and what you'd like to experience, and I'll build the day from a blank page — the pace, the places, the distance. Anywhere in Japan.
Up to 6 guests · fully customised
Guided by a nurse and midwife
For guests living with a health concern or a disability, for older travellers, and for families with a very small child.
Kamakura and Yokohama are both walking tours.
Children of five and over pay the adult rate.
All prices are the guide fee. Temple admission, transport and anything you eat or drink are paid directly by you on the day.
The signature morning
Kamakura is more than its Great Buddha. We start early — while the temples are still quiet enough to hear the birds — and I will invite you to do something we rarely allow ourselves any more: put the phone away, and simply be here.
We begin at Tokei-ji, the “divorce temple”. For six hundred years it was the only place in Japan where a woman could escape her marriage. I tell you the story at the gate. Then you walk in alone.
Photography is not permitted inside. What you receive instead is time with no screen between you and the morning — birdsong, insects in the moss, the particular green of a Japanese garden before the crowds arrive. Guests tell me afterwards that this is the part of the morning they describe best.
Then Japan's very first Zen monastery, and a rest in a hundred-year-old teahouse at its gate, where kenchin soup was invented seven hundred and fifty years ago. At a great Shinto shrine you will learn — and actually perform — the rituals of purification and prayer, and hang a wish of your own.
(And don't worry — the rest of the morning is full of beautiful places to photograph. I'll show you the best of them, and take your picture at every one.)
The story at the gate. Then time inside, alone and without a phone — the quietest part of your trip.
25 minutes
Japan's first Zen monastery, founded 1253. The great gate, the dragon on the ceiling, and a garden meant to be read rather than walked.
35 minutes · ¥500 admissionAt the temple gate, the house where kenchin soup is still made to the monastery's own recipe. Order what tempts you; this is where the conversation opens up.
45 minutes
Purification, prayer, a fortune drawn and a wish hung on the rack — not watched, but done, properly, by you.
40 minutes
Where to eat, what is worth buying and what is not. We finish here, and the rest of the day is yours.
Ends around 13:00In my kitchen
The photographs, after all, you can take anywhere else.
Private & bespoke
Every tour on this page can be taken privately — just your family, just your friends. Or we start from a blank page. A grandmother who cannot manage stairs, a teenager who only wants Pokémon, a traveller who has already done Kyoto twice and wants something else entirely: every one of those has turned into a day worth remembering.
Start a conversationIn pictures
Your guide
I grew up in Kanagawa, the same prefecture as Kamakura, and this old capital has been my favourite place since university — swimming at its beaches in summer, walking its temples in every season. Whenever family or friends visit from abroad, Kamakura is where I take them.
I am also a working nurse and midwife. That means two things for you: I tend to notice what you need before you ask, and if anyone feels unwell along the way, you are in calm, capable hands.
For years I have shown these temples and shrines to my own family and friends arriving from abroad. I would love to do the same for you.
Enquire
Tell me your dates, how many of you there are, and anything you are already curious about. I reply in English, French or Japanese — usually within 24 hours.
Check dates & book