Move over, Rihanna: Japan's 500-year-old log rafting tradition is the ultimate chic adventure

Every working morning, the raft-masters of Japan's Kitayama River build four seven-tonne, 30-metre rafts from about 200 tree trunks bound together with metal wires. Every afternoon, they take them apart again.

For about 550 years, rafts such as these ingeniously carried cut timber downriver from the village of Kitayama to the city of Shingu on the Kii Peninsula. The vessels and their cargo were one and the same: the rafts were made from timber that was to be sold at the market in Shingu.

About 60 years ago, the construction of better roads and the arrival of heavy trucks put the raft-masters out of a job. But the centuries-old skills of raft-making and rafting were not forgotten in Kitayama. Today, villagers transport tourists on a breathtaking 70-minute ride on traditional rafts that's apparently unique to this outpost.

For the day-trippers from Osaka, the raft-masters dress in conical straw hats and navy-blue kimonos, but apparently their ancestors were highly paid and rakish adventurers, much admired for their daring, who actually wore white dress shirts on the water. Excitingly, even today's boatmen model split-toed tabi boots similar to the bifurcated shoes recently made fashionable by Rihanna, Michael B. Jordan and Dua Lipa.

However, unlike movie stars and singers, the boatmen need their tabi to help them keep a grip on rolling logs. The rafts are fitted with handrails, and the guests are fitted with life jackets, while the raft-masters casually balance with (or without) their oars.

The snaking, diamantine river, bejewelled with polished, hazardous rocks, cuts through soaring, magisterial cliffs and dense cedar forests. Kites circle overhead as the boatmen navigate nine rapids and the passengers get soaked from the waist down, but the raft (like the rest of Japan) always feels stable and safe.

Although there are a couple of stirring moments, most of the rapids might be more accurately described as "brisks". So, the log-rafting is not really an adrenaline-fuelled adventure experience - and I'm not sure I would have enjoyed it if it had been. Instead, it's a wonderful way to see a wildly beautiful and otherwise inaccessible part of Japan.

Until the 1960s, the river runners used to make a stop for the night at the village of Totsukawa in a breathtakingly situated dormitory overlooking the Doro-kyo Gorge. This 110-year-old timber building recently reopened as the Doro Hotel, serving lunch for tourists coming off the rafting trip, but confusingly it is no longer an actual hotel.