As some of you may know, my wife Clare and spent three weeks in Japan in March and I thought I might set out some thoughts on the trip, the country, my perceptions of it, why it was worth going and maybe even some thoughts linking the trip into work.
Japan has always fascinated me. I’m not sure why, but I think it’s the completely different culture. Those of you who know me, know that in organisational terms I am obsessed by culture. I try to quote Peter Drucker at least once a week, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Globalisation has its many advantages, but potentially one disadvantage is the fact that travelling abroad no longer has quite the differences it may have had in the past. I recall going to Italy as a child in the early 1970s and my mother buying olive oil, because you couldn’t easily buy olive oil in the UK. My local supermarket in Cheshire now stocks about 100 different types of olive oil. We get much more international (and better) food in the UK and so finding somewhere that is genuinely different and has a rich culture worth exploring becomes more of a challenge.
I was hoping to go to the Tokyo Olympics in 2020 as a sports volunteer, but that was cancelled and the re-run in 2021 was without spectators or administrators, and so I was not able to go even wearing my sporting volunteer hat, as I was neither an athlete nor a coach. Covid and then life got in the way and we eventually decided a year or so ago to book the trip. Clare retired from her executive roles last year and I am attempting, often unsuccessfully, to work a little less. We decided that there was little point in travelling to the other side of the world for two weeks, so treated ourselves to a longer break. I’ve not had three weeks off work probably since I started work some 40 years ago. This allowed more time for leisurely travel. We did note that there were not a huge number of western tourists in Japan, and those that were there broadly fell into young people backpacking and couples of retirement age, like us, enjoying themselves.
It’s worth saying that Japan Is a big country. It has a population of 120 million (and reducing), and stretches from the snowy north to the subtropical south. We started in Tokyo, which is roughly in the middle on the East Coast and ended up three weeks later in Fukuoka on the south west coast, having travelled over 1,500km. We travelled by train, bus, car and went on a ferry so we covered all modes of transport.
Our route is on the map below and we visited Tokyo, Kiso Fukishima and the Kiso Valley, Takayama, Kanazawa, Kyoto, Nara, Osaka, Hiroshima, Yufuin and ended up in Fukuoka.
We arrived in Tokyo rather jet lagged after a long flight from Manchester to Tokyo with one stop in Singapore. Our first impression was of the driver of the car collecting us from the airport being so respectful and smartly dressed, the car was spotless and the driver wore white gloves!
Japan is a very deferential society – everyone bows and thanks you constantly. On the bullet train (Shinkansen), the conductor came and checked tickets and when he got to the end of the carriage, turned to face the carriage and bowed to everyone before moving to the next carriage. That seems to sum up Japan (are you listening Avanti?). It took me a few days to stop bowing when we got home.
Japanese is not an easy language for westerners, but Konichiwa (hello) and Arigato (thank you) accompanied by a bow and a smile worked very well. Google Translate was our friend.
Our initial impressions of Tokyo were high rise, glass and neon; a vast sprawling city. Japan is a really unusual mix of old and new. There’s ancient shrines and temples on nearly every street corner and many old buildings in the middle of the ultra-modern, and every toilet has more features than the previous one. I did get a bit obsessed, and occasionally surprised, pressing all the buttons!
Our hotel in Tokyo was in the very modern downtown area. We were on the 29th floor with amazing views over that part of the city. It operates on numerous levels with walkways, flyovers, monorails etc – quite remarkable and futuristic. All the hotels were excellent. The one in Tokyo had art exhibitions on every floor, the one in Kanazawa had possibly the nicest hotel bathroom I’ve ever seen and in Kanazawa and Kyoto there was a garden in the middle of the hotel. Hotels often have washing machines where you can do your washing for a few Yen. They’re all very high-tech as you would imagine. Our hotel in Takayama also had an inevitable vending machine (the Japanese love vending machines and there are several on each corner dispensing hot and cold drinks, snacks, clothes and all sorts of unknown items) so we could have a beer whilst waiting for the washing. Very civilised.
At this stage its worth saying that I’m not really into gardening at home, but the gardens in Japan were stunning and very much appealed to my love of minimalism and order. I particularly loved the sculpted trees and a Zen garden in Kyoto consisting entirely of meticulously raked stones.
In Tokyo we saw the Imperial Palace, the modern art museum, a massive Godzilla statue, had great cocktails, visited a local bar selling home-made Doboku (a sort of fermented alcoholic rice pudding), the fish market, a street selling just knives and cooking equipment and a classic “salaryman” cocktail bar with a fabulous range of Japanese whisky. There were incomprehensible toilets and lots of fish.
When we were in Kiso Fukushima, we stayed in a Japanese ryokan, with tatami mats and no chairs. Whilst we were having dinner, the staff came and set up our futons on the floor. There was a shower, but the done-thing was to use the communal hot baths (onsen), which are rather fun. We stayed in another ryokan in Yufuin where we had our own onsen and a very lovely woman who served us spectacular food in our room. We had a guide on our first day in Tokyo, which was very useful. He showed us how to use the Tokyo Metro system and sorted out all our train tickets for the rest of our time there. We also visited some of the key areas. Tokyo is lots of areas linked together, but the Metro is very easy to use with signs in English as well as Japanese. Every station has its own tune which the train plays when it arrives! Google Maps tells you which carriage to use and which exit to take, which is useful given the size of the stations.
Google Maps and Google Translate linked to a portable WiFi box were invaluable. There were no real translation issues. The Japanese have a tendency to use English words in retail settings in contexts that don’t work for native English speakers. I wasn’t sure that a women’s clothes shop called ‘Hysteric Glamour’ would work in the UK and we certainly didn’t visit the Moron Café, despite the ‘Welcome Moron’ sign.
When we left Tokyo we got the bullet train to Nagano. The train was shockingly 20 minutes late. This apparently was the headline news in Japan and even made the news in the UK. The average Japanese train is one minute late every year – we worried that we’d brought our bad ‘Avanti vibes’ with us! At Nagano, we picked up a more local train that took us to Kiso Fukushima in the Japanese Alps. It was here that we stayed in the ryokan and wore our kimonos to dinner. We had a full day there and walked a part of the ancient Shogun route between Kyoto and Tokyo. It is called the Nakasendo and we walked through snowy mountains on an ancient path between two beautiful ancient Japanese villages, ringing the bear bells as we went to keep the bears at bay. These worked as we didn’t see any bears. Having mastered trains we moved onto buses for the day (and all on time to the second). We bought hot buns from a street trader – one cabbage and one red bean paste!
After this, we got the train to Takayama, which is a lovely old town. There’s lots of very ancient streets and saki breweries – it seemed rude not to sample a few. We found a rather intriguing Alice in Wonderland themed bar and chatted in broken English and sign language with some locals. They seemed bemused that we live near where Lewis Caroll grew up (Daresbury to save you looking it up).
From Takayama we got the bus to Kanazawa, but stopped for a few hours on route at an ancient town high in the Japanese Alps called Shirakawago. The weather was glorious and the snow was deep; shoulder height. We looked at the ancient houses and enjoyed a matcha tea ice cream before continuing onto Kanazawa.
Kanazawa is a beautiful city. It has very ancient quarters and we had a guide for the morning who showed us round the geisha teahouse quarter and the Shogun quarter. We also visited an artisan designing and printing material for silk kimonos by hand using ancient techniques. It was a lovely city to wander around. We ate some beautiful Wagyu beef in a restaurant, after a drink in a completely Scottish golf themed bar. The range of Scottish whiskies was immense, as was the wonderful Japanese whisky; more of that later. When the Japanese decide to do something they do it extremely well. We found independent coffee shops where they roasted and ground the beans and weighed the ground coffee to the gram, before tamping to a certain pressure and extracting the coffee.
The food in Japan is fabulous. In the ryokan we had Japanese breakfast with a dozen little dishes and the western hotels had huge buffets with a mixture of Japanese and western alternatives. In Tokyo I watched a chef make some sushi, which I had with a croissant! We had particularly good service in one restaurant in Tokyo, which turned out to be because the staff has mistaken me for Robert di Niro. Clare couldn’t stop laughing all evening!
Japan was good value compared to the UK with the exception of Wagyu beef, which was horrendously expensive. We had 100g of it one night – beautiful, but not (in my view) worth the cost, especially compared to all the amazing seafood available. On the subject of food, the food halls in the basements of Japanese department stores were on my sightseeing list in every large city; the variety and quality of food was immense.
From Kanazawa we took the bullet train to Kyoto, which did run to the second, like every other train in Japan apart from our first. My inner nerd had my phone clock us at 185mph. Kyoto is the sightseeing jewel, with so much to see and do. We had four days there. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site with over 2,000 shrines and temples. We had a very formal tea ceremony, which was a fascinating and very beautiful, and walked miles. One Shinto shrine has over 10,000 Tori – the red/orange gates. We also found an amazing jazz and whisky bar – the Japanese take both very seriously. I ate an octopus on a stick and we both had some fabulous grilled eel.
When we left Kyoto for Osaka, our luggage was forwarded for us and was in our room when we arrived. This enabled us to go via Nara, which was the ancient capital of Japan in the eighth century. It has a temple with the biggest ever Buddha, and also its own species of deer who, in a very Japanese way, bow at the tourists in order to be fed. That was great fun. We also discovered the joy of matcha KitKats.
Despite looking, I never found the fabled wasabi KitKats. Osaka is another big city, but with a very different feel to Tokyo. It’s a port city and much livelier. It’s famous for its street food and we enjoyed Takoyaki, which are batter stuffed with octopus and covered in a rather lovely sauce with seaweed and dried tuna flakes. We signed up for a walking tour of the city which was fascinating. It’s very neon and full on. As we were there on St Patrick’s Day, we found an Irish bar and had some fabulous Guinness, and cheaper than in Dublin! We also went to a kushiyaki restaurant, which just serves different types of chicken on skewers with fabulous flavours, all ordered from a tablet at the table which you take to the till when you leave. All dishes and all drinks (including decent beer) were about £1.80.
From Osaka we went to Hiroshima. When our Shinkansen arrived at Osaka station, a team of four people got into each carriage to clean it thoroughly, including the windows, and then bowed to us as they got off.
We arrived by lunchtime so started by having lunch in the station, which is always a thing to do in Japan. The local Hiroshima speciality is Okonomiyaki – a sort of savoury pancake involving cabbage, seafood, pancake, noodles with an egg on top, also served with a rather spicy sauce. Absolutely delicious!
After a couple of days in Osaka, which is great fun, we came down with a bump in Hiroshima. The atomic peace park is very sobering, to say the least (perhaps Trump, Putin etc should visit?). The exhibition is very carefully put together and explains what happened and the terrible aftermath. Most of the city was destroyed, but there is the one remaining building which they have left as a memorial.
The following day, we got a train down the coast and then a ferry across to an island called Miyajima, where there are more friendly deer and beautiful walks through the forest. The local speciality on Miyajima are oysters and some rather nice cakes, which reminded us of Portuguese custard tarts! We obviously had to try both, washed down with some local lemon beer, as Hiroshima is apparently the source of most lemons in Japan. We took a cable car up to the top of a mountain on the island, with beautiful views over the bay and then had a leisurely walk down through the forest back to the port.
That evening we hit the sites of downtown Hiroshima which, despite its terrible history, is rather fun and very lively. We found a little sushi bar down a backstreet which, like many Japanese restaurants, only had about 10 seats up at the counter. There were some other Japanese people there and the owner welcomed us in. We said that we would eat some sushi and some sashimi as there was no menu and it then just starting arriving. He was making it and putting it on our plates and telling us how to eat it. The quality was incredible and it was great fun. We then rounded off the evening in a small bar specialising in Japanese whisky.
These bars are difficult to find, often with no sign and you have to walk upstairs in a non- descript building. Once you get there, there are a dozen seats along a beautiful bar. There were hundreds and hundreds of whiskies to try!
After our visit to Hiroshima, we then got the bullet train to a place called Hakata, just outside Fukuoka. We changed trains onto the limited express train to take us to Beppu. At Hakata we had time to visit some of the interesting bento-box shops at the station. I bought myself a whole mackerel, which was on a bed of rice with some green vegetables, which I couldn’t identify! I ate this whilst watching the scenery unfold as the train went along the coast.
Having travelled by bullet train, local train, bus and ferry, we hit our final mode of transport at Beppu and collected a hire car, and drove up to a beautiful little village called Yufurin in the hills of the southern Japanese island. It’s absolutely beautiful and we appeared to be the only western tourists here. We stayed in a very beautiful Japanese style hotel and this time we have our own Onsen just outside our room, fed by the local hot springs. We were served amazing dinners in our room at a very low table wearing our kimonos by a very nice woman who bowed a lot. The food was exceptional.
Luckily the satnav in the hire car spoke English, although she was very bossy! I got shouted at in Japanese for taking my hands off the steering wheel. Driving was easy as they drive on the left and traffic is not too heavy and drivers are unsurprisingly respectful. There is no jay walking in Japan (apart from a bit in Osaka) and if you use the numerous subways to cross the roads in big cities you often discover massive underground shopping malls.
Our last day in Japan was rather fun as we still had the hire car. We had to drive from Yufuin to Fukuoka, which was only a couple of hours, so we went off the tourist trail and visited Hita (old streets), Kurume (more amazing gardens) and Dazaifu (huge temple), all of which were fabulous. We then had a night in Fukuoka (conveyor belt sushi for supper) which was a nice city and flew off to Singapore the following morning. My last view of Japan was the ground crew of the aircraft bowing to us as the aircraft pulled away.
So what did I learn? Does travel broaden the mind? I think that experiencing a different culture and immersing yourself in it for a reasonable period of time is fascinating. You realise that your own world view is just one and different people do things differently. I’m quite an ordered person and Japan appealed to me in that everything worked. I liked the polite and respectful atmosphere. Re-reading my post, it becomes apparent that I am a foodie and I loved the food; the quality was amazing. I’m also partial to a wee dram of whisky and the Japanese whiskies are suburb as are the small bars that serve them.
I think having a complete break from work is good for the mind. It acts as a refresh and you’re return ready to start again. Experiencing a different culture allows you to see the good in your own culture and maybe to challenge the things you don’t like. Japan like everywhere has its problems – a decreasing birth rate and an aging population, a certain xenophobia – but we saw no obvious issues in our time there. We met up with a few friends living there, which was fun to get a more local input, and gather that decision making in business can be slow and it is very hierarchical.
I come back to Peter Drucker and it’s all about the culture. Thanks go to my wife Clare for accompanying me on the trip and letting me find more and more obscure Japanese whiskies, to Paul Bennett for encouraging me to make the trip and for holding the fort so admirably in my absence and finally to Scott Hadden of Mark Bratt Travel for all the wonderful organisation (and the WiFi box).
I’m allowing myself to post two photos (of the 855 that I took!). The first is the most Japanese sight we saw in the bamboo Forest outside Kyoto and the other is of Clare and I enjoying ourselves in a sushi bar in Hiroshima.
