Category Archives: Travel

Osaka to Hiroshima

Moving west across Japan from Tokyo, we left Takayama and reached Osaka for a brief overnight stop. Later we were told the people of that city have a reputation for taking everything at a much faster pace and certainly it felt like a city that enjoyed a party.

Osaka

Even so, it felt uniquely Japanese which is to say both polite and safe. Travelling through the country we saw countless people on bicycles, both rural and city, and not a single bicycle lock. People trusted each other enough not to steal their bikes.

On public transport, the public information announcements exhorted people to switch off their phones, to switch down their music etc so as not to inconvenience their fellow travellers with noise. Elsewhere people worry about much more egregious behaviour. It is a polite and safe country for tourists.

The only times we came close to getting lost were finding our way out of some of the larger stations. After standing puzzled for a few minutes, inevitably someone local would stop and in often very broken English, would do their best to help us find our way.

We visited Hiroshima passing through on our way to Miyajima, Shrine Island just south of the city. Having arrived at the station, we caught a tram from just outside to the Peace Memorial and Museum.

Hiroshima Tram

As you would expect it was a somewhat harrowing experience, almost made more so by the presence of so many very young children visiting with school groups.

School trip to Hiroshima
Hiroshima

It felt an essential part of the trip, and probably necessary to understand some of the internal conflict within Japan, the pull towards and push away from the military but it was also a huge relief to leave.

Ground Zero Hiroshima
Peace Museum Hiroshima

On the way back to the station we were stopped by a group of young teen students who had been tasked with chatting with tourists to try and understand the impact of the Peace Memorial.

Peace Museum Hiroshima
Peace Museum Hiroshima

Their teacher hovered protectively as they practiced their English and struggled with the speed of our responses.

Hiroshima

They were a real delight after the intensity of the museum.

Takayama, Japan

Takayama is a city in Japan’s mountainous Gifu Prefecture,

Takayama, Japan

with narrow streets of its Sanmachi Suji historic district lined with wooden merchants’ houses dating to the Edo Period.

Takayama

Takayama retains a traditional touch like few other Japanese cities, especially in its beautifully preserved old town.

Bridge, Takayama
Temple, Takayama

It has become one of the prime candidates among travelers wishing to add a rural element into their itineraries.

Takayama

Takayama gained importance as a source of high quality timber and highly skilled carpenters during the feudal ages.

Takayama

The city was consequently put under direct control of the shogun and enjoyed quite a bit of prosperity considering its remote mountain location.

Takayama

The city is now famed for its biannual Takayama Festival, going back to at least the mid-1600s, celebrating spring and fall with parades featuring ornate, gilded floats and puppet shows.

None of which we saw, visiting in the first week of September.

Temple bell, Takayama

We did have our best meal of the entire trip though,

Takayama

staying at a very traditional inn towards the outskirts of the city, in two rooms complete with tatami matting, comfortable futons on the floor and incredibly uncomfortably hard pillows.

Takayama

There were shared toilets and sinks on our floor, and communal baths downstairs with an onsen for men and one for women.

My daughters assure me that the most traumatic event of the entire holiday was showering down in the public baths with a total stranger though I’m not sure whether getting naked in front of the stranger was more or less difficult than getting naked infant of their mum or sister.

Ho hum. Another example of where dad is held to an entirely lower standard.

Museum Modern Art, Tokyo

Since we’re a family entranced by Ghibli, it isn’t too surprising that we found ourselves at the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo walking through an exhibition on the work of Takahata Isao, one of Ghibli’s founders.

Exhibition

There was an interesting pre-Ghibli history that walked though his TV work.

Heidi poster
Animation
Art Exhibition

But it was the films we’ve loved that were most interesting such as PomPoko or Grave of the Fireflies

The films are all a little bittersweet, except maybe the Yamadas.

Culminating with his final film, bittersweet but beautiful animation.

And afterwards a rather strange walk around the main galleries and the realisation that whilst Van Gogh and his friends were being inspired by Japanese exotica arriving in Europe, artists in Japan were discovering watercolours.

MOMAT

Tokyo

Ghibli Tour completed on our first day, we had a half day tour of Tokyo followed by a day free.

I found a nifty metro map that summarised the city interesting for tourists. It’s undoubtedly over-simplistic but useful nevertheless.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is img_01.png
Tourist Metro map

Based in Ueno, our organised tour (just a half day) started with Asakusa and ended in Shibuya. It also allowed us to use our japanese guide’s experience to book seats for all of our planned rail journeys. Although it’s entirely possible to travel without reserving seats, it’s more comfortable to have everything arranged.

It was also really great to have someone to introduce us to the Tokyo metro system (which is as easy and efficient as you would expect, with announcements in English following every Japanese announcement.

Asakusa, Tokyo

The Temples of Asakusa lie within one of Tokyo’s few districts that still preserves an atmosphere Tokyo’s past.

Asakusa
Asakusa Tokyo

Entrance to the temples is best through the impressive entrance gates, especially the 1000 year old Kaminarimon (Kaminari Gate) that leads straight on to Sensōji – Tokyo’s largest and oldest Buddhist temple built in the 7th century.

Visiting on the weekend meant everything was hugely busy but still great fun and an introduction to the difference between temples and shrines.

Asakusa, Tokyo
Asakusa Detail

Contemplating the physical sprawl of Tokyo is daunting and we had nowhere near enough time to even pretend to discover it seriously.

Asakusa

It has no discernible center, and clusters of skyscrapers miles apart defy the idea of a downtown core. Tokyo actually feels like a city composed of 23 separate cities, or wards, that all have distinct names and local municipal systems.

So we took our guides advice, and travelled from Asakusa to the Meiji Jingu Shrine, by way of shopping districts.

Tokyo

For the girls, our guide suggested visiting Harujuku, renowned for colorful street art and youth fashion, with quirky vintage clothing stores and cosplay shops along Takeshita Street, and traditional, upmarket boutiques on leafy Omotesando Avenue.

Harujuku Tokyo

It does’t quite compare to the oddities of Camden Market in London, more Oxford Circus maybe.

Shrine Tokyo
Tokyo

But the walk through the park to the shrine was a lovely way to break up the heat and humidity.

Saki Barrels, Tokyo Shrine
Shrine Tokyo
Shrine Tokyo
Shrine Tokyo
Prayers Tokyo Shrine

Time is limited, so we need to focus on visiting maybe just two diverse neighbourhoods on our free day, choosing from peaceful Nakameguro to eclectic, if we are to get a taste for the reality of Tokyo. For city views, the Metropolitan Government Building Observatory is free, and so tall your ears will pop in the lift to the top. There are views out to Mount Fuji, it has a cool gift shop and is just as beautiful by day as at night.

We missed out on Kappabashi, Tokyo’s kitchen capital, easily recognisable thanks to a giant chef statue peering from atop a low rise office building and surprisingly close to our apartment in Ueno, Tokyo

Buy a Japanese Knife in Tokyo

And we missed out on so many districts including Ginza, the major shopping district, Nakano for anime and cos-play shops, Tsukji Market, Aoyma Flower Market and niche boutique shops. We definitely need a re-vsiit.

After the shrine, we were left close to Shibuya with its incredibly busy five way pedestrian crossing, grabbed some lunch had a family squabble and headed back to our flat

Tokyo
Tokyo
Busy Tokyo

Tokyo Ghibli Museum

Our first day in Tokyo was based around an organised tour on a Ghibli theme.

Ghibli Tokyo

In large part this was because it is incredibly difficult to get hold of tickets for the museum and an organised tour made things much easier to coordinate.

Ghibli Tokyo

Our first jet-lagged day worked well for being so structured, with a trip to the Edo Tokyo museum leading nicely to the Ghibli Museum itself in the Tokyo suburbs.

Ghibli Tokyo

There is a no photograph policy within the museum, so pictures are typically limited to the outside of the museum and the roof garden.

Ghibli Tokyo

It’s difficult to adequately describe this tiny museum. It has some rooms devoted to very lovely examples of the original artwork or cells that make up various Ghibli films, as well as to film making and animation itself.

There are interesting and new zoetropes that adults and children were fascinated by and a decent cafe at the top of the museum.

Ghibli Tokyo

Best of all perhaps, there were various rooms set up as examples of the Ghibli team’s work in progress with pieces they took inspiration from, various initial sketches worked through to the final cells etc.

Ghibli Tokyo

If you’re interested in Ghibli, the museum small but perfect, a “must-see”.

Tokyo – Edo Museum, Tokyo (Ghibli Tour 1)

We’re back from Japan so I thought I’d revisit the original plan and how it all worked out.

Staring with Tokyo, with just four nights and a stroppy teenager channelling her inner toddler, we just didn’t have enough time.

We had four nights in Tokyo, staying in a four bed family apartment near the Ueno metro station. We arrived mid-afternoon after a punishing trip so were just too tired to try anything other than finding our apartment and food for supper/breakfast.

We then woke up for a full day tour based around Studio Ghibli which includes a trip to the Ghibli Museum in the suburbs which might sound difficult given jet lag but actually turned out to be an ideal way of keeping us going, helping to acclimatise us all to Tokyo in a very benign manner.

The Ghibli Tour is based on a bus tour and includes the Ghibli Museum, a buffet lunch at Hotel Gajoen Tokyo (a possible inspiration for the Aburaya bath house in Spirited Away, and the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum.

Bizarrely for a tour that starts at 10am (or thereabouts) it starts with “lunch” at 11am at the hotel and the hotel’s link to Spirited Away felt like a stretch.

Does the entrance to the main building really look like the bath house? Does the open plan set of floors really reming me of the floors inside the Spirited Away bath house? Not convinced.

Next the tour took us to the Edo-Tokyo Museum.

Here historical buildings from across Japan have been reconstructed in the middle of a wooded park, to create the atmosphere of feudal era Japan – it’s supposed to feel like walking through a Ghibli set. And the links to Ghibli are much more obvious.

Edo Tokyo Museum
Edo Museum, Tokyo

You can believe that the people working at the nearby studio came here for a packed lunch in the museum park.

Edo Museum Tokyo

On a damp day, an empty street of historic buildings could very plausibly be the inspiration for the empty daytime row of shops leading to the bath house.

Bathhouse Edo Museum Tokyo
Edo Museum

As well as the main street there are various traditional buildings and a tram very reminiscent of the “train” over water in Spirted Away.

Edo Museum

Although nothing to do with the film, the farmhouse rebuilt at the museum was very beautiful

Edo Museum Tokyo
Edo Museum Tokyo
Edo Museum

The House of Korekiyo Takahashi, a politician of the Meiji period and the site of apolitical coup, has perhaps more links to Ghibli, with its windows very reminiscent of those of Yubaba’s through which Haku was attacked.

Edo Museum Tokyo
Edo Museum
Edo Museum Tokyo

But as always, it is the details of life, the feel of the place that was most striking – very serene.

Edo Museum
Edo Museum

Japan

A family trip to Japan was a mixed blessing. Two out of the four adored the country and the trip but the other two, not so much.

My partner was anxious the entire time, and it’s a country that really does not merit any anxiety at all. It is safe, secure and reliable. Japanese people are helpful and kind to guests. As a self-guided holiday destination it just works really well.

Tokyo subway

We used public transport to get around every day, covering large distances and only one train was late (by less than 5 minutes). Announcements are in Japanese followed by English, both spoken and written.

Though sometimes working out what the translation meant took some time.

So either my partner is just becoming more anxious with age which my friends tell me is definitely “a thing”. Or it was because of my psycho second daughter.

Let’s start with the obligatory (and entirely true): I love both of my children.

On holiday in Japan, however, one of them was a lot easier to like. It was probably just a reaction to the inevitable stress of an overseas holiday spent travelling around. I’m under no illusions that it’s a holiday type that really does not suit some people. Many of my friends are quite clear that, for them, almost constant travelling from place to place would be the holiday from hell.

So now that my kids are both around 20, maybe it’s time to stop travelling as a family. except the oldest child was just a total delight to travel with and I’m left wondering whether we could just split the parents and kids up 2:2 and just do different holidays. Hmm. I do not have the social skills to explain that to either my partner or youngest child.

Either way, Tokyo was everything a busy modern city should be, and clean, and safe. It was astonishingly mono-culture (and mainly mono-colour) for someone visiting from London.

The food was astonishingly good and accessible even for vegetarians. Travelling around it was often easier to look for vegan food than to explain vegetarian presumably because dairy isn’t so popular within Japanese food. fast food largely consisted of noodle bars and nigiri to go for us, but the choices for unrestricted diets was extraordinary.

If my youngest child hadn’t insisted on heading back to the hotel mid-afternoon and them refusing to leave until morning, we would have enjoyed the whole experience a lot more. Tokyo felt like an evening city. Maybe all cities light up well but it was a place that also felt incredibly safe at night.

I just wish the company had lived up to the location.

Japan

Planning a trip to Japan, and I’ve started with some standard tours from a specialist firm called Inside Japan.

What I want is an extended introduction, preferably with some Ghibli overtones for my kids to enjoy. The basic specialist tour looks something like this:

Tour 1: Basic Japan – 15 Days

Map for Best of Japan

The list price for the basic trip seems to be around £1500 per person, not including air fares. A quick look at sky scanner shows a standard fare from London to Tokyo to be around £1100 each so a total starting cost for a family of four adults of around £11,000.

The basics focus most trips is Tokyo, Hakkone (Mt Fuji) Kyoto and Miyajima (Hiroshima) with a trip to countryside (Takayama). It also makes the most of the excellent rail system. With some old work colleagues living in Tokyo, we may need an extra day to hang out and visit with people. At the same time, I’m probably happy to skip the days in Hakone.

Shinjuku

But there are some interesting ways to mix things up which would all add to the cost. The basic trip includes a few days in the Japanese alps in Takayama, but we could also head south to the sub-tropical islands. We could include a bit of the countryside and more traditional Japanese towns and villages.

Looking through a Studio Ghibli article, there are a couple of places that jump out.

  • Ghibli Museum (near Tokyo)
  • Tomonoura, Seto Inland Sea – the setting for Ponyo
  • Yakushima Island – a setting associated with Princess Mononoke
  • Dogo Onsen, Matsuyama – the tea house most closely linked to Spirited Away

The Ghibli Museum is easy enough to include on any trip. Dogo Onsen, Matsuyama is currently being refurbished so would not be worth a visit and a Ghibli themed tour of Tokyo seems to claim an alternative bathhouse with Spirited Away. Hmm.

It looks like it could be a long long journey by ferry, train and shinkansen from Kyoto to the island of Yakushima, but once there it seems to be the kind of place you would stay for a long weekend’s retreat. To get to the island mostly involves travel via Kagoshima so maybe we could follow a route down through the islands from Nagasaki.

As well as being the famous second site for the US nuclear bombs, Nagasaki has an interesting role as the only Japanese port open to the West for most of Japan’s long history. It’s probably worth a visit irrespective of a jaunt south to the islands. A trip to Nagasaki would add maybe two more nights to the trip.

Maybe we could travel south slowly by train and ferry but fly back to Osaka? That would add another two to three days in Yakashima.

Japan Air Commuter, a member of the JAL Group, operates one round trip per day between Osaka‘s Itami Airport and Yakushima. Flight duration is about 100 minutes. The regular one way fare is around 39,000 yen with discount fares available for around 27,000 yen (around £275)

Looking at a Japanese natural history programme, suggests a few tours other than the Tokyo Ghibli trip. In particular there are a few sites close to Kyoto i.e..

  • Harie(針江), in Shiga prefecture, is known as the village of living water, near Kyoto (probably a day trip)
  • Japan’s bowing deer of Nara, Todaiji Temple probably a day trip from Kyoto

We could also include a trip to the 500 metre path through the Sagano Bamboo Forest on the western outskirts of Kyoto. All of this would need at least one extra night in Kyoto.

The places above all look as if they could be included on the standard trips via Kyoto day trips. I’d also like to visit a spa and see some macaques maybe near Nagano (Yudanaka and Shibu Onsen villages are places to stay in a traditional wooden Japanese inn and experience why the monkeys love relaxing in the onset)

Arashiyama Bamboo Grove

but we may just have to skip Japan’s black bears which are most easy to find in Hokkaido. The various cat islands also look difficult to incorporate into the standard trip – I wonder if there are any cat shrines accessible?

Or if there’s a tour that focuses on the tanuki (Japanese Racoon dogs) taking up residence in the cities?

And the firefly displays are a May-July phenomena only so we’ll miss them if we travel in September. Similarly the bioluminescent firefly squid of Toyama Bay come together in a stunning electric-blue display but in May-June, so a September trip will miss them.

Desert

For a very very wet country, Iceland felt very similar to some of the many deserts we’ve visited over the years.

Lava Fields with moss, Iceland

In large part, though for obviously different reasons, it felt very barren and obviously very empty. The almost complete lack of anyone else around us as we made our way around the country still surprises.


Driving through the uplands, across the lava fields with nothing and no one in sight, just reminded us of countless drives across the salt flats of Etosha, Namibia or Uyuni, Bolivia

Or long ago, across the desert in Yemen.

We even found the remains of trees, very reminiscent of Namibia. Iceland was essentially deforested with the original influx of people from Scandinavia.

Perhaps it was just the scale of the landscape, the huge empty spaces and vast skies.

But there was also a surprising overlap in terms of the cliffs in the Negev and the cliffs of Iceland.

Negev cliffs
Iceland cliffs
Negev Cliffs

Or even the mountains of the Yemen or Namibian hills.

Yemen

And obviously there are signs of volcanic activity across many of the parts of the world we’ve visited.

Basalt columns, South Iceland
Negev, Basalt Column
Namibia Basalt

Even the glaciers reminded me of the dunes carving their way through the African landscape.

There is something mesmerising about empty landscape, something very very beautiful. I’m not sure many of us would be comfortable in that stark landscape, aside from the obvious difficulties of surviving the environment but it’s certainly an environment plenty of us find very satisfying to visit.

Iceland South East

At the end of our trip we circled back towards Reykavik and found ourselves with some time to cover the more standard day trip tours from the city.

This included a trip to visiting the original geyser, which unsurprisingly stinks to high heaven of sulphur (rotton eggs)

There were plenty of witches cauldron pools on view plus some spectacular high eruptions to be viewed. Just be sure to stand up-wind unless you want to get very wet indeed.

Then of course there is the amazing Godafoss waterfall, with it’s crevasse plunging at right angles.

And last but not least, a trip to the wonderful folk museum to add a bit of context that might have been better understood at the beginning rather than the end of the trip.


It is surprising how very poor Iceland was up to relatively recently with famine an ever-present danger. Even now, the country is rich is terms of hydrothermal-energy and in the education of its people, but poor in terms of land resources. It is still very economically vulnerable to global shocks with it’s main sources of income tourism and fishing still.

For a country dependent on tourism there was very little to see by way of quality service.

Similarly there was very little to be found in terms of excellent food. It is a country that focuses on selling it’s natural features with very little adornment, very little added value exhibit or tourism attractions.

So far, that’s been enough. But the friction that inevitably results from dealing with so many visitors in such a short space of time, to such an empty country are bubbling up. Its history plays out in a very stoic, pragmatic attitude towards life within the people we met but they can see the damage that tourism can cause. How they manage to mitigate that damage will determine whether the tourism industry continues to thrive.

It was an amazing trip to a beautiful unique country, surprisingly different to expectations but well worth visiting.