Japan

Since I started writing this blog in 2013, I've taken seven trips away from home of longer than a week. Each time I have done that, I've written a pre-travel blog post relating the upcoming vacation to either some part of my own personal history or an earlier trip taken during this now almost four year long journey. Those pre-travel posts have addressed everything from filling in family histories to making up for missed opportunities to sweatshirts I used to own. Call them the inspiration behind the destination, if you will.

Last month, I made my first trip ever to Japan. Breaking with tradition, I didn't write a blog post before leaving home mostly because there was no personal connection to my past in Japan but partially because I had really no idea what to expect from that country or that continent. I was content to have Japan serve as my gateway to Asia while also learning and exploring some small parts of Japan's history and culture that I was sure were so different from my birth country of England and my home today in the United States.

I was right. This was in many ways an experience like no other. Armed with a little Japanese (hello, goodbye, thank you, excuse me, the ability to count to 100 and little else) and enough background on where I was going to appreciate things on some sort of level beyond just being there, I set off for a week and a half in the Land of the Rising Sun. Now that I know something, I thought I'd do my pre-trip post right after I got back before the rest of the blogging about what I found there. So here goes.

The Arishiyama Bamboo Grove in Kyoto. The one true disappointment. Way too small.

Our Japan itinerary started out as an idea about spending half our time in Tokyo (the current capital) and the other half in Kyoto (the former capital) with day trips from Tokyo to see Mount Fuji and from Kyoto to visit Nara (the capital before Kyoto) and Hiroshima. With one small change (a night on Miyajima Island west of Hiroshima), that initial itinerary ended up being our final one and I think it worked pretty well. It got us to Japan's most important modern city as well as its most important ancient ones and Tokyo and Kyoto provided a great counterpoint to each other. Tokyo is one of the world's largest cities with a population of 13.5 million; Kyoto's nothing to sneeze at as a city but its 1.5 million people are clearly nowhere near as large as Tokyo's population.

With our big picture agenda set, we started filling in a detailed day-by-day plan. When we first started this process it looked like there was no way we could find enough to do in 10 plus days in Japan; when we were complete with the major attractions, it looked like there was no way we could fit it all in. The latter turned out to be true. For the first time in a while, I actually overplanned a vacation and didn't get everything on the agenda complete during our time away. 

Two things stood in our way to getting things done that we didn't expect. First, Japan is bigger than I expected and the time it took to get from one place to the next surprised me. Second, some things took way longer than I expected, particularly visits to some of the many temples and shrines we had on our list. I anticipated visiting a Buddhist temple or Shinto shrine would be much like visiting a Christian church in Europe; an hour tops for the main building inside and out and maybe a little extra if you can climb one of the towers at the front facade of the church. Not so with some of our visits for this vacation. The Fushimi Inari Shrine turned out to be on the top of a pretty good sized hill that needed to be climbed; we arrived at about 11:30 a.m. and finally got back to the bottom of the mountain about four hours later.

Despite not seeing everything on our list, I think we got a great impression of the parts of the country we visited. Overall, things generally worked out. We had great weather every day but one (and that one was not too bad) and we (or at least I) only had one major disappointment. We got a taste of history (both ancient and modern); sport; Godzilla (yes, Godzilla); late 20th century fads; and for sure some of the varied types of food we went to Japan to try. It's rare I take a food list with me on vacation; I did for Japan. We also got some great stories to tell, some of which will be told to the world in this blog. Or at least the part of the world that chooses to read some of them.

Gachapon in Tokyo's Akihabara district.

We were sent on our way to Japan with a number of myths, although we didn't know that they were myths before we departed for Japan: the subway is confusing; nobody speaks English; the Japanese are not a friendly people; the number of people in Tokyo is overwhelming; the plastic depictions of food in restaurant windows are amazingly lifelike. None of these proved true. It was easy to navigate the subway (there are signs and instructions in English); most everyone spoke some English and pointing and gesturing generally worked if they didn't; I've been overwhelmed by the number of people on Fifth Avenue in New York way more than I was at any point in Tokyo; and the plastic food in the restaurant windows doesn't look like real food at all. Like not even close.

But more than any other myth, we found the one about Japanese people not being helpful was so far off the mark it was laughable. I was genuinely impressed with how helpful the Japanese people were. And I don't mean when asked after a quick "sumimasen"; I mean just walking up to a group of gaijin at a bus stop or train station and telling us spot on where to go without us telling them where we were going. I don't think I've met a group of people more helpful or wanting to interact with tourists in a positive way than I found the Japanese. That was pretty impressive.

Having said all that, we did find that we needed some help in making reservations for some things. Despite being technologically one of the most advanced countries in the world, Japan is remarkably telephone based when it comes to making restaurant reservations and we found some ticket sites which were all but impossible to navigate because they were in Japanese only. To solve these issues, I turned to a third party reservation site called Voyagin, which proved remarkably successful. I get that all these people are doing is charging you money because we can't read Japanese but sometimes a little service charge is OK to get to some things you really want to get to. I know we would have had a much harder (or impossible) time getting tickets to a sold out traditional geisha dance in Kyoto without them. Based on my interactions with this site, I'd recommend them to others on a spot basis.

This trip for me was a huge success. I'm not sure it got me ready for the rest of Asia because honestly getting around Japan was one of the easiest, most comfortable experiences of my life. Between the beginning and the end I got some memories that will last for the rest of my life. Let's get to the storytelling shall we?

Oh no, there goes Tokyo, go go Godzilla. At the Hotel Gracery Shinjuku in Tokyo.