Tokyo

A private tea ceremony with Urasenke teachers Souei Funakoshi and Souai Kawada in their Meguro tea house, which has an eight-mat room and a two-mat wabi room. Guests are served both thick koicha and thin usucha with seasonal sweets, with the scroll, flowers and etiquette explained in English.

A private hour and a half in the tatami room of Onnoza, a salon in the old geisha quarter of Arakicho, run by Fumie Shiomi, a former Akasaka geisha. She and the senior Akasaka geisha Yoshiko make tea, talk with the party and perform dance and shamisen at close quarters, one group at a time.

Zazen in the main hall of a Rinzai temple founded in 1611 by Tokugawa Ieyasu's daughter Kamehime, led by the head priest, Taijun Namiki, who directs the Tokyo Zen Center. Three short sittings with sutra chanting, then matcha, sweets and a talk with the priest.

Kenichiro Hirai, formerly of the starred Udatsu Sushi, takes guests round Toyosu, where he buys every day, including the intermediate wholesalers' floor that the public rarely sees. The party then returns to his eight-seat Nishi-Azabu counter, booked privately, to make Edomae nigiri, using fish bought that morning if they wish.

A guided walk through the collection of the bonsai master Kunio Kobayashi, more than a thousand trees, then wiring and pruning a tree under a bonsai artist's instruction. It ends with a tea ceremony in the museum's tearoom with the new tree in the alcove.

The Kanze-school Noh actor Keizo Nagayama performs shimai dance for the party on his own cypress stage in Setagaya, then teaches its movement and chant. Guests try on a real Noh costume and mask.

A behind-the-scenes tour of the five-storey workshop of Domyo, silk-braid makers in Ueno since 1652, through dyeing and braiding, then making a braided bracelet or earrings with a master artisan in a private room. Limited to six guests a day.

A session in Nisshin Kikinzoku, a family silversmithing workshop near Asakusa, with the twelfth-generation smith Sohaku Kamikawa. Guests forge a bangle of 99.9 per cent silver with traditional tools and learn how Tokyo silverware is made.

A temple cooking lesson on the grounds of Jokokuji in Akasaka, taught by the monk Risho Asao: the thinking behind Buddhist vegetarian cooking, then a one-soup, three-dish meal made by the guests. It is eaten in the main hall and followed by matcha and sweets.

Tomoyuki Ohno takes one group a day for cha-kaiseki, the meal of the tea ceremony, cooked partly from vegetables he grows himself, and explains its history and etiquette as he serves. It ends with usucha in his own tearoom.

A private workshop with the kabuki actor Ichikawa Monnosuke VIII in the main hall of a long-established ryotei, covering how actors train and how to strike a mie pose. A kaiseki meal at the same ryotei follows.

Itchu Miyako, twelfth-generation head of the Itchu-bushi school, plays and then teaches the shamisen in a private tatami room at the ryotei Akasaka Asada. Lunch of Kaga cuisine follows.

The basement counter of Koju, an incense house founded in Kyoto in the 1570s and now based in Ginza, is reserved for the party. Guests are introduced to kodo, blend their own scent pouch from more than a dozen ingredients, and take home seasonal incense.

A rickshaw for one or two, pulled by a guide from Kaminarimon into the back streets of Asakusa, for anything from half an hour to a three-hour tour. A guide who speaks English, or a named guide, can be requested.