Japan

Useful Transportation Links

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timetable search for trains and flights in Japan

all about the bullet trains


Things to Do

Both Tokyo and Osaka are really cool places, with so much to see.  Go to Shinjiku or Ginza but not go to sleep.  Have a few over priced drinks and just people watch. Simply walking around is an amazing feast for the senses. There's such variety and style and everything else, its simply indescribable. You'd get more out of the people than you would a museum.

After a number of adventures involving Japanese bar touts and pimps, Russian and Japanese ladies of the evening, and a very pro-American cab driver, another passenger and I ended up spending most of the evening in a very tiny restaurant. Really tiny, drinking lots of Japanese beers, watching Japanese baseball, eating all sorts of great (well, not all of it was great) stuff, and conversing with the owner and his wife via sign language and a battered Japanese/English dictionary.

Budgets

There are a lot of expenses that just can't really be reduced. Camping in Tokyo or Osaka is just not an option. Make some hostel reservations in advance. There is a huge jump between the cheapest hostel in Kyoto (the $25 one) and the next cheapest ($40 for a dorm).

Language

Most of the things the average tourist needs to do are pretty easy to accomplish with hand gestures. If you buy anything from a store without a cash register that displays the price, they type it into a calculator so you can look at the numbers. If you learn to ask "where is X" (X-wa doko desuka?) people usually illustrate their directions with their hands. Train station staff and tourist office staff almost alway speak English and there's very little expectation that foreigners will understand Japanese. A lot of trains have English signs or English announcements too.

Trip Reports - MissHolidayGolightly

Hiroshima is definitely the highlight. It really is an uplifting city. It was a shock to see the A Bomb Dome (the only remaining building damaged by the bomb) standing in the middle of a busy riverside commercial district -- I had thought it was going to be by itself in some lonely memorial pavilion. It symbolized for me what Hiroshima is about. There are monuments and reminders of the bombing everywhere, but all nestled inside a modern, happy city that really proves it's possible to come back from anything. The A Bomb Memorial Museum is, of course, overwhelming. You should be prepared for graphic photographs and statues. Someone had brought their 8-year-old kids in and both of them were shaking and crying. There is a whole room of tiny mementos of children and teenagers who survived just long enough to be carried back to their parents. The last photos showed schoolchildren studying amid the rubble and a survivor touching a daffodil that had sprung up from the ruins. I don't really have the words, except perhaps that the museum sums up both the best and worst of humanity.

Sightseeing-wise, Miyajima Island off the coast of Hiroshima was my favorite. It's a pretty famous place for the Japanese tourist industry, with a one-of-a-kind floating shrine and red Shinto gate out in the ocean. I can imagine it being a bit of a zoo during the day, but I took the 7 a.m. ferry and got to sit on the beach by myself watching the waves lap over the shrine. I went in just in time to see the monks performing their morning prayers. Behind the shrine, a lot of paths lead up into the hills. I chose my route at random and ran across a neat little temple with statues of the 500 disciples of Buddha, each one with a different face and posture. It's in the guidebook, but I didn't know about it beforehand so it felt like a fun discovery.

Kyoto is one of the few cities that escaped bombing during WWII, so its high number of ancient temples make it very popular with the tourists. A lot of places there are worth seeing, but a little planning to avoid the crowds will make your stay much better. I had my best experiences when I just wandered off the main roads or went to the temples that had minimal descriptions in my guidebook. The best thing I did was visit the Fushimi Inari Shrine at 6 a.m. It has a pathway of 1,000 gates climbing up the side of the mountain, and it's pretty busy during the day, but I was there early enough to see it in use as a religious center rather than a tourist sight. A really sweet older lady got excited about seeing a foreigner there so early in the morning and explained all the prayer rituals to me and then took me to a smaller temple that I would never have found on my own.

You'll see a lot of pictures of the Golden Pavilion in your Kyoto research, but it was the one place I felt was really a tourist trap. It is indeed a beautiful place, but there's only one narrow path through the garden and it's hard to get away from all the tourists. The amount of merchandizing is truly amazing. You can buy Hello Kitty traffic safety charms and get your fortune in 4 different languages from a vending machine.

I stopped in Himeji for a day to visit a friend. It has a really famous castle, but I thought it was better appreciated from the outside. If you haven't been to a castle before, the defensive fortifications might intrigue you. Otherwise, the architecture is pretty uninteresting and it's a long, sweaty climb up 6 flights of stairs to get to the top. With no eating and drinking in the castle, it's a bit miserable on a hot summer day.

I only spent a day in Osaka, but I'd really like to go back and stay longer. The people are extremely friendly and happy to test the limits of your Japanese conversational skills. I spent most of the afternoon wandering around the coffee shops and used clothing stores in America Mura, a funny little neighborhood with replicas of Uncle Sam and the Statue of Liberty. In the evening, I wandered down the rich people's shopping street and marvelled at a place that can support two Coach shops less than a mile away from each other. If you follow the street long enough, you end up in Dotonbori, which is probably what you picture when you think of Japan. There's not necessarily any more neon than Times Square or anyplace else in Tokyo, but it's pretty amazing to walk across the pedestrian bridge and end up on eye level with all of it. On my way back to the station to catch my nightbus, I stopped in the plaza between JR Namba and Nankai Namba station. There were about 50 teenagers there doing the kind of synchronized dances you usually see in pop music videos. They were more performing for each other than anyone else and I think I was the only spectator. At 10 o'clock the lights went out and everybody just disappeared. The day really seemed to sum up everything I find quirky about Japan.

I traveled on a budget of $75/day for hostel, food, and sightseeing. This seemed to be a good average figure. Admission fees really add up on the days you do touristy things, but there are cheap daily transport passes for all the cities I visited and the wandering-the-city days aren't too expensive. Eating in Japan is not as expensive as people imagine. Yoshinoya is a kind of Japanese McDonald's selling delicious beef-and-rice bowls for $3.50. There are $1 stores that sell lots of pre-packaged dinner foods, and if you want something more substantial, you can hit the basements of department stores just before closing to get discounts on the leftover lunchboxes. Accomodation was between $25/night (for a dorm in a youth hostel) and $35/night (for a B&B in a traditional Japanese home in Hiroshima).

Intercity transport is very expensive if you're a resident of Japan or otherwise unable to obtain a Japan rail pass. I took the nightbus from Tokyo to Osaka and from Osaka to Hiroshima. Each ride cost me about $50 or $60. The bullet train from Hiroshima back to Tokyo was a painful $200. The nightbuses are not very comfortable, but I they do save a lot of money. Their schedules are a bit inconvenient at first glance as they're prone to dropping you off at 5 or 6 a.m., but in the end, I really appreciated getting around the city early.