Nagoya travel info

At eight in the morning, order a coffee at a neighbourhood kissaten and it arrives with a thick slice of toast and a boiled egg, and you only pay for the coffee. The toast comes slathered in butter and sweet red bean paste. Locals call this 'morning', and on weekends there are queues outside the cafés for it. This is how Nagoya starts its day.

Lunch is hitsumabushi, grilled eel over rice that you split into quarters and eat three different ways. Dinner is pork cutlet under a near-black miso sauce and peppery fried chicken wings with draught beer. People come here for food with a lot of flavour. In between, look up at the golden shachihoko perched on the roof of Nagoya Castle, rummage through second-hand clothes and street snacks in the Osu shopping arcades, and ride up the old TV tower in Sakae (now the Chubu Electric Power MIRAI TOWER) to look down on the city's grid of straight streets.

Getting around is easy. The μSKY airport express reaches Nagoya Station in about half an hour, and a handful of subway lines cover almost everything in town. The Shinkansen gets you to Kyoto in 35 minutes and Tokyo in 1 hour 40, so it slots neatly into a Kansai or Tokyo trip. It's far less crowded than Tokyo or Osaka.

Chubu Centrair International Airport (NGO)