Hiroshima

Hiroshima sits at the western end of the Sanyo shinkansen line, under two hours from Kyoto, and is the natural turning point of a corridor route. The city was rebuilt around a wide grid of rivers, and the Peace Memorial Park occupies the delta at its centre — the preserved skeletal dome, the museum, the cenotaph. Give the museum a full morning and go before the school groups. It is a demanding visit, done well, and it does not pair with anything else that day.

Miyajima is the other half of the stop: a short train ride to the pier and a ten-minute ferry to an island where a vermilion torii gate stands in the shallows at high tide and on wet sand at low. Both versions are worth seeing and they are hours apart, so look up the tide table before choosing your ferry. The island also has the region's best-known grilled oysters and a mountain trail behind the shrine that most day-trippers never start.

Staying the night is what makes the two fit. Day-trippers arriving from Kyoto get the museum or the island, not both, and leave on the last useful train. With one night you take the memorial in the morning, the island the following day, and eat okonomiyaki on a griddle counter in between — which is the local dish and genuinely different from the Osaka version.