Japan has been one of those places we’ve always wanted to get to, but just hadn’t gotten around to. The stars aligned (meaning we got mileage tickets), so this was the year.
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When deciding where to go within Japan, Tokyo was a given, we wanted to do a small town, and Kyoto seemed like a must once I started doing research. We eventually settled on Takayama for our small town destination, and used it to split up Tokyo and Kyoto since the latter is a decent-sized city. We also spent the last night of the trip in Tokyo so we wouldn’t be traveling back the same day as our flight out.
Flights and trains
We booked our flights pretty quickly once we found mileage tickets, but as I did more research it seems like a popular option for tourists to do open jaw tickets with Tokyo and Osaka. While this would have saved us backtracking to Tokyo, we were able to fly non-stop from our home airport to Narita and back. But if you have to connect to get to Japan anyway, it’s something to consider.
The rail system in Japan is extensive and efficient. The easiest way I found to look at schedules and routes is hyperdia.com. There are a couple very important things to keep in mind, though. First, don’t think traveling by train is a cheap option. It can actually be a little expensive if you don’t buy some sort of pass. Second, there are two basic distinctions of trains: Japan Rail trains and private railways. This is a big deal when you’re using a JR pass.
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We really sat down and had to figure out whether JR passes were worth it for us since we were going for 10 days and they come in 7-, 14-, and 21-day options. Once we looked at our schedule we realized that we were really only using trains between cities for 7 days, and the pass would save us a bunch of money, so it worked out well. We got our JR passes through JTB Travel. They have an office in my city so I just bought them in person, but you can call and have them mailed to you, too. They’re only available to tourists or Japanese citizens living abroad, and they must be purchased before you leave for Japan. To get to and from Narita and around Tokyo we got the Suica card/N’EX ticket combo. The N’EX is the Narita Express train, which gets you to and from Narita in about an hour (reservations are required). The Suica card is Tokyo’s subway/train card. It comes loaded with ¥1,500 and there’s a ¥500 deposit you can get back if you turn the card back in before you leave.
The passes start the first day you activate them, so we went to the Shinjuku station to exchange our vouchers and get our first tickets. It was super easy and the women working at the exchange counter in Shinjuku station were very helpful and nice. To book reserved tickets with them we just went up to a ticket counter, and to use them on local trains we’d just flash them at an agent (although they recommend always having your passport handy because you can be asked to show it).
Tokyo
Hotels:
Best Western Astina Shinjuku: We didn’t spend a lot of money on any of our hotels so we’d feel no guilt about spending money on food during the trip, so none of the hotels we stayed in was too fancy. The location of this one was great — not too far from the train station and there was subway stop slightly closer, lots of shopping and food nearby, Golden Gai was right behind us, and the room wasn’t huge but spacious enough. It’s smack in the middle of the red light district, but it’s Tokyo so it was completely safe and not terribly noisy. When we got up early to go to the fish market we were headed to the train station with people still drunk and stumbling from the night before. The buffet breakfast was better than the other hotels we stayed in, but the wifi in the lobby was terrible.
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Tokyu Stay Suidobashi: Very cheap and basic. We chose it because we were seeing a Yomiuri Giants game the last night of our trip and I figured it’d just be easier to stay near the Tokyo Dome. Most of the other hotels in the area were at least $100 more (I’m guessing because of the game), and we just figured for one night when we were going to be at a baseball game most of the time it didn’t make sense to stay somewhere fancier. This worked OK for us, but I wouldn’t recommend it for tourists in general. There wasn’t a ton in the neighborhood, the rooms are small, the breakfast buffet was pretty bad, check-out is at 10 (!) and I couldn’t get the lobby wifi to work at all.
Stuff to do
Honestly my favorite thing to do in Tokyo was just wander around neighborhoods a bit, do some shopping, and hang out. It’s a great city and urban environment. We did do some specific touristy things, though.
Golden Gai: This is one of the coolest bar areas ever. There are more than 200 tiny little bars crammed into a few alleys in Shinjuku (right behind the hotel we stayed in). Some are members only, but others welcome anyone. We wandered up and down the alleys to take a survey, then chose one with a cat sleeping on a stool out front. It turned out to be one with a Spanish theme. The bartender was a very nice woman, the owner cracked macadamia nuts for us, and the only other guy in the bar was dozing off on his stool. It was a fun, laid back experience. If you’re trying to find this one, look for the white cat on the stool! It’s on the end of one of the rows on the end closer to the nice brick walkway.
Yomiuri Giants baseball game: They’re described as the Yankees of Japan — very popular and very successful. Both of us are big baseball fans so this was pretty much THE thing we wanted to do in Japan. And it was very fun! If you’re a baseball fan the small differences in the game are interesting to see, if you’re just a sports fan in general the atmosphere is great (although the stadium isn’t as nice as what we’re used to here), and if you’re neither you’ll probably still have a good time getting Asahi from the beer girls and listening to the fans sing while their teams are up to bat. We’ve also heard that Swallows games are fun because the stadium doesn’t have a dome. We got our tickets in advance and printed them out before leaving. The important details were printed in English so they were easy to use. If you want to try to sit among the hardcore Giants fans try to get seats in the centerfield area of the bleachers (the visiting team’s fans sat along the third base line). Food in the stadium was good, but it seemed like a lot of people brought their own bentos from outside, too.
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Tsukiji Fish Market: I think this is one of those things that some tourist years ago tried, and somehow it caught on so now everyone who visits Tokyo thinks they have to do it. We saw more western tourists here than anywhere else in Tokyo. I wish I had done some more research on it, because we just went there and wandered in around 6, and promptly got kicked out. The big thing to do is to see the morning auction, which had sold out by 5:05. But getting there by 5 would have taken a lot of effort because the subway doesn’t open until 5:30. However there are some small stores and sushi restaurants in the outer market area. We wandered around the shops and looked for a sushi place without a huge line and found Sushi-Bun. This is the best way I can describe the location: If you’re standing with your back to the central market and facing toward the street were you came out of the subway, there are rows of shops ahead of you and a row to your right. This was in one of the more left side rows in front of you (I want to say second to last row from the left) and it’s across from an egg stand. It did not have one of the enormous lines although it was full when we first walked up, but we were tired, it was getting hot, and we didn’t feel like standing around forever. The sushi was great (you choose from two set menus), the miso was probably the best I’ve ever had, and we were the only non-Japanese customers (and the only ones not drinking beer at 7 a.m.!). After we were done eating we went back to the hotel and napped for a couple hours.
Edo-Tokyo Museum and the Sumo Museum: I’m grouping these together because they’re right next door to each other. They’re…museums. I wouldn’t call either a must do, although it was interesting to see the Edo museum’s interpretation of WWII and we got to see some sumo wrestlers just out and about in the vicinity of the museum (it’s attached to the main sumo arena).
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New York Bar at the Park Hyatt: The bar from Lost in Translation, only it wasn’t as low-key and cool as it was in the movie. It was pretty crowded and fairly loud with the jazz combo. The big kicker is that it was over $100 for two drinks because you have to pay a cover charge (I assume it’s waived if you’re a guest) and the drinks are super expensive. I’m not mad we did it because several people recommended it, but I wouldn’t do it again and I wouldn’t recommend that anyone do it unless you’re a guest at the hotel. Also there didn’t seem to be much around the hotel (at least at night), and it was definitely a cab from our hotel.
Harajuku on Sunday: I don’t know if we went on an off Sunday or this isn’t a big deal anymore, but there really weren’t that many people dressed up in particularly odd ways. But it was busy and fun. We had good ramen at the Omotesando Hills Mall.
Akihabara: The fun electronics district where you can get anything and everything, from components to build your own computer to cell phone cases. Just neat to walk around in.
Food
Sorry to disappoint, but other than the sushi place I don’t really know the names of any of the places where we ate, but they were all pretty good! We had amazing ramen in a place surrounded by strip clubs not too far from our hotel, yummy tempura amongst the department stores of Shinjuku, and delicious fried chicken at the baseball game. If you are in Shinjuku, the food hall in the basement of the Isetan store is fantastic. Although I’m not quite sure where you’re supposed to eat after you buy it.
Takayama
In my research I looked for a small town that would be a break from bigger cities and a hectic pace of sightseeing. I tried to find something in Hokkaido, but the hotels and ryokan were quite expensive. I settled on Takayama because it looked super cute, was in the mountains (different scenery for us), and seemed to have enough history/stuff to see so we wouldn’t be totally bored. We weren’t totally bored, but we were a little bored. I planned for us to stay there two nights because the train ride is 5 hours from Tokyo and close to that to Kyoto, so it’s hard to get a full day in with just one night. We really did not need that much time. I guess the town gets livelier around certain festivals and maybe other times of year, but it was really dead when we were there. Our first night there we asked the woman at the front desk of our hotel to make a dinner reservation for us at 8, and she laughed and said that was way too late for Takayama.
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We stayed at another Best Western, and it was fine. The staff didn’t speak the greatest English but they were super nice. The wifi worked better than anywhere else we stayed, and you could get it in your room. My theory was that data service wasn’t great up in the mountains, because a lot of businesses around town had wifi. For sightseeing we walked down the old merchant house street, tasted some sake, and did a little hike up around the castle ruins and along the temples on the edge of town.
The big highlight of Takayama was having Hida beef at Kitchen Hida. Easily the best meal of the trip and the best steak I’ve ever had in my life. The whole dinner (soup, salad, wine) was delicious, and the steak was cooked perfectly. Also around town a lot of little stands have grilled Hida beef skewers, which were obviously not as high quality as what we had at dinner but still quite tasty.
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Kyoto
Silly me. Originally I thought we should skip Kyoto and focus on smaller towns because it seemed so touristy. But then I came to my senses and realized that sometimes places are touristy for a good reason! Kyoto is a nice city full of gorgeous things to see, good food, and with really cool stuff all around as easy day trips.
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Hotel:
Ryokan Sakura: This was my compromise ryokan. Going into the trip planning process I had assumed we’d stay in a ryokan at some point. However, the more I looked the less I liked. The nicer ones are very expensive, they don’t always have typical hotel amenities like en suite bathrooms, communication can be a problem, and some have rules and curfews. This place made more sense for us because while it has traditional Japanese rooms like a true ryokan, in every other way it was basically like any other small hotel.
I was still a little nervous about the room, but it was fine. We got the hang of laying out the futons pretty quickly, and they were only a touch less comfortable than a typical mattress (so not so different from a lot of hotel beds). They provided summer kimono for hanging around the room, which was a nice touch. Even though the hotel was full and the walls were on the thin side, noise was never a problem.
This place was even harder to find than our hotels in Tokyo, though. I thought I was so smart printing off Google walking directions before we left, too. Someone driving by literally stopped and pointed us in the right direction to it, so we must have looked quite lost! But it is convenient to a bus stop (routes 9 and 28), and from there it’s just a couple minutes to the train station where you can get a bus anywhere in the city. They sell daily bus passes at the front desk, too (¥500 for unlimited uses). In retrospect I think it would have been smarter to just stay at the train station hotel since we used that as a starting point to get everywhere anyway, or in Gion since that’s where we ended up doing a lot of sightseeing and dinners.
Stuff to see:
Philospher’s Path: This is a nice walk along a small canal where you can detour into a bunch of temples and shrines, beginning with the Silver Pavilion (Ginkaku-ji). We didn’t see all of them, but it was still worthwhile.
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Fushimi Inari Shrine: A really cool hike and we took the best pictures of the trip here. You basically wander up a hill covered with gates and shrines guarded by fox statues. The paths are all paved so it’s not difficult hiking but it is uphill. Be prepared to wander because it’s easy to get lost. Go early if you can — on our way out it looked like it was getting really crowded.
Byodo-in Temple: I was really stoked to see this because the one in Hawaii is so cool. This one doesn’t have quite the same effect. There were a lot of people and you have to pay an extra fee to actually go inside. If you do go there are a few little restaurants around it that were good for lunch.
Kinkaju-ki (Golden Pavilion): We figured it must be worth seeing since a picture of it’s on every piece of tourist information related to Kyoto. It is more impressive in person, but it took forever to get there by bus and I don’t know that it was worth it.
Kiyomizudera Temple: One of the big temples, and even though we wandered in toward the end of a long day it was still worthwhile. There’s a little restaurant at the bottom where you can sit on covered platforms overlooking a wooded ravine next to the temple. If you’re in need of trinkets or snacks there are lots between the bus stop and the temple entrance.
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Gion: Known for being a big geisha district, but I thought it was a fun place to hang out in general. Lots of good restaurants and shopping, and strolling along the river was nice since it was so hot when we were there. I’m not sure if we saw any geisha. We definitely didn’t see any apprentice geisha, and the women we saw in kimono with fancy hairdos might not have actually been geisha.
Food
Another one of those situations where I don’t actually know the names of all of the places we ate. Once we wandered into a place near the train station that seemed popular with groups of co-workers and had excellent agedashi tofu. Two other nights we ate along Ponto-cho, a tiny alley a block off the river in Gion that’s just blocks and blocks of bars and restaurants. One night was Issian-Pontocho, which is run by a super nice guy named Ken who lived in the U.S. for 19 years before returning to Japan to take care of his parents. He cooks everything on a flat-top grill in front of you and chats. Another night was sushi with a view of the river. We found these places by looking them up on our iPad and taking a picture of what the name looked like with my phone, then matching that to the sign. Another night we ate at shabu shabu place we found via a blog, but it was nothing to gush about. Lunches were usually noodles grabbed somewhere.
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Nara
We didn’t stay overnight in Nara, but did spend the better part of a day there. We took the train from Kyoto using our JR passes. We initially got in line to get tickets, but since it’s a local line we didn’t need them. It’s about an hour and there’s an express and a much slower local. There is a LOT to see. If you’re really into temples and shrines I think you could enjoy staying overnight and getting up early to see as much as possible and beat some of the crowds.
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From the Nara train station you can take a bus to Nara Park, the area with all the temples and shrines, but after an hour on the train we decided to walk through town. There are lots of little touristy shops and places to eat along the way. Before hitting up the temples we decided to check out the Mochiidono-cho area. This was cute, but not so different from a lot of what we’d already seen in Kyoto to make it worth the extra walk. A lot of things also seemed to be closed, maybe because we were there on Sunday.
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A little before you get to the park you see the Five Story Pagoda and other parts of the shrine, and across the street is the Sarusawa-no-ike Pond. A lot of the buildings around the pagoda were covered for refurbishment, which dampened the effect a bit. This is also where you first see a few of the Nara deer. Deer are considered sacred to the city and are allowed to wander everywhere. You can pet them, take pictures of them, and feed them little biscuits. Apparently they can be aggressive, but the worst I saw was one rubbing his head on this poor woman, trapping her between his antlers. I much preferred watching the turtles in the pond.
One of the coolest things about Nara Park are the thousands of stone lanterns. They start out with just a few here and there, but as you get farther in they get pretty thick. They light them a few times a year for certain festivals and I imagine it’s quite the sight. There are some small shrines at the back of the park.
The big draw of Nara is the Todai-ji Temple. The guidebooks say it’s the largest wooden structure in the world, and I can believe it. It’s absolutely massive, and it’s hard to get an idea of the scale in pictures. The Buddha statue inside is also huge. I’m quite glad this is one of the last temples/shrines we saw because it was definitely the most impressive. After seeing this one our feet were super tired, so we took a bus back to the train station and headed back to Kyoto.
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General
Books: Lost Japan is a collection of essays by Alex Kerr, an American who moved to Japan years ago and has watched it change. It’s a really great way to learn about a lot of different aspects of Japanese culture and traditional arts as well as some of the problems the country is facing now. For guidebooks we had a Fodor’s Japan I got for free, but the most useful was the Lonely Planet Tokyo Encounter book we borrowed from a friend. It was so small it fit into my purse but still had good information.
Language barrier: We had been warned before we left by people who travel to Japan often that very few people speak English and few signs are in English. Maybe we were just stuck to super touristy areas but I didn’t find this to be the case at all. Just about everyone we dealt with spoke some English, and those who didn’t tried very hard to communicate well in spite of it. I also had almost no problems with signs or announcements.
Directions: OK, this was a pain. I had read that it’s almost impossible to find anything in Japan (Tokyo especially) by the address and this was absolutely the case. Even with advance research and printed out maps we had to ask for help to find all of our hotels except in Takayama, and specific restaurants were also tough. Some Tripadvisor reviews were helpful for finding things because people mentioned landmarks rather than streets or numbers.
Costs/payment: If you’re from a high cost of living area or have traveled to Europe recently, Japan shouldn’t be too shocking. Things aren’t cheap but they aren’t outrageous either. However be sure you have lots of cash on hand because credit cards aren’t anywhere near as widely accepted as we’re used to. If you’re going to buy something and want to pay for it with credit card, be sure to ask first. Even places that I assumed would take credit cards, either because they were big chains or sold slightly more expensive items, often didn’t. Which leads me to…
Shopping: Oh the fun stuff you can buy in Japan! I went looking for Japanese skincare and cute cell phone cases with room for charms and found both. The styles women generally wear are cute but definitely different than what we usually wear here, but they were a bit too young for me. I got some socks and I’m pretty happy with them.
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Marylandgirl's Blog 
I was waiting for you to update with your Japan travels. Thanks for sharing!
Thank YOU for sharing your awesome Japan blogs — they were so helpful when I was planning!
great blog 😉