The Japanese have a fascination with Chinese paintings and stories when they craft their beautiful gardens. They draw inspiration from the swirling mists seen on countless scrolls and translate it to ornamental features such as a special arrangement of rocks that water falls around with eerie precision. Rikgui-en in Komagome (Northern Tokyo) is one such of these. Rather it is deemed one of Tokyo’s finest gardens.

Landscaped around a large lake, the walk talks visitors clockwise around the gardens admiring the various scenes such as ‘dragon in the water’ or a hill known as Fujisode (for it is thought of as a mini-Fuji-san with sweeping views of the entire garden). Meiji-period teahouses were tucked away in parts, the wood warped into such fantastical shapes by time that it appeared almost Dali-esque. Then there was a pond, a small waterfall that had been designed with carefully placed rocks so it looked like three powerful waterfalls tumbling into the pool.

Unsurprisingly, Rikugi-en was a pleasure garden for the Japanese nobility, having been established in 1702 Yoshiyasu Yanagisawa, a feudal lord of the region. This link with history is particularly noted by a series of maps that greet visitors at the entrance with charts of Tokyo’s urban development from 1683 to the present day. I love such maps, I always try to find my home, which is always off the map in a rice field somewhere.

They had a small teahouse in the gardens serving tsumetai matcha and a small sweet azuki-filled cake. It was a delight to sit there on a sunny day, as the combination of sweet cake and bitter tea became as exciting for the mouth as the 88 scenes of literature in the garden were for the eyes.

Tokyo has the most confusing weather right now, so confusing in fact that you cannot find a single weather forecast that agrees wholeheartedly with another. Yahoo Tenki says rain, the BBC rainy showers and weather underground, ‘cloud’. You wake up to discover the true weather is somewhere in between all these, despite the previous day being entirely cloud free. Suddenly a plan to head to the beach on one’s day off starts to look shaky but in an attempt to make the most of the warm weather before Autumn brings back the cold, you go anyway. Tokyo’s weather continued to look moody as I boarded the train at Shinjuku and steamed off in the direction of Yokohama. Moody, until we arrived in Enoshima, a small town on the Kanagawa coastline where brilliant sunshine greeted us. It felt like the popular summer island was forcing the summer feeling on the weather, not that we minded of course.

By this point though, neither of us had brought swimwear – and given a charity party I was attending that evening I did not want to take sand home with me – so we spent a relaxed afternoon exploring Enoshima. The gentle main street of the island was lined with shops filled with the usual tourist tat, of plastic samurai swords and the Hello Kitty of the area that intermingled with small traditional food outlets baking soy-covered dango on barbecues and hawking brightly coloured kakigouri. It rather reminded me of Kyoto and the approach to Kiyomizu-dera.

The shrine at the head of the path stood at the top of some steep stairs with an imposing white gate – one that seemed rather Chinese in its grand immenseness – confronting new visitors to the shrine. To the side was an escalator, to transport the lazy up the hill although for this first stint we climbed it: a hard job in the heat. As we made our way into the island interior the humidity sharply climbed as the foliage around us became denser and more jungle like. Little time was spent at the shrine, we merely followed a good luck path creating an invisible knot around a strange ring made of reed and straw – confusedly as even our combined japanese knowledge could not read the sign – and then onwards to the top.

Around the corner the area opened out with a viewing platform and a stunning vista of the entire Enoshima-Kamakura-Zushi area. We paused briefly to admire it before continuing for an even better view. My friend was unsure of how far it would be to this elusive top and so we paid for the escalator. It turned out that the top was no distance at all. We strolled around this parkland area near the lighthouse for a while, looking for the best place for a good view – we found one that looked out to the Pacific, a vast expanse that glimmered under the hot rays of the sun. It looked so very inviting! I am continually amazed at the power of both ocean and a forested mountain to calm the senses and looking out over tropical vegetation and then the Pacific was a delightful way to spend a day far from the stressful architecture of Tokyo.

Not wanting to leave too soon, we went on a walk along the top, through a small town that sits isolated on the back of the mountain. It was a step back in time as the pathway wound past old wooden facades that hid tatami mat dining rooms and plates of soba with a view. Initially we thought this path was a way down but when we wound up at another temple with seemingly no further path to anywhere we realised our error and retraced every step back eventually heading down past the escalators once more.

Back down by the bridge that links Enoshima with mainland Japan, we mused on the beauty of the island and of the ocean and our luck in finding a sunny day. This was accompanied by some tasty and interesting sofuto kurimu in a mix of vanilla and apple mango flavours. On the horizon though, in the direction of Tokyo a very angry cloud hovered pitch black against the blue of Enoshima. It was time to leave; maybe after all that then the BBC was right.