Sights - Tokyo has an amazing number of museums, many of which are private collections with rotating exhibitions, so you're never sure what's on where. If you have a particular interest it's worth asking a tourist info place - I found my favourite ukiyo-e exhibition this way, a temporary show in a shopping mall in the docklands. Most take a less-is-more approach - eg the National Museum has very few items on display, giving them all a lot of room, but they are of very high quality. I would give top marks to this and the Matsui, which had a small collection of mainly lacquerwork.
Statue in the National Museum - Japan is generally very good at telling you which items you are allowed to photograph
Views - there are plenty of high-rises with good view, and some are free. I'd recommend Shinjuku for the view from Tokyo Metropolitan Govt Building* at sunset - good view of Mt Fuji on a clear day (the one cloud in the sky obscured it on my visit) and the city in the other direction. But there are plenty of others.
* Tip - there are twin towers, south has a cafe but north is open later. Both are free.
People - are almost unfailingly polite and as helpful as they can be, from convenience store staff to JAL staff on the day they find out that their airline is planning massive redundancies. Nobody hassles you. A few words of Japanese are much appreciated. (We went to a great restaurant in Shinjuku where they give you a gaijin's guide to ordering food, which says "the first drink is always a beer", which got me on board right away, and tells you how to say "same again" and even how to thank the cooks and waiters - "Gochi sousama". I think this one phrase got me more respect than any other, but sadly only from bars and restaurants I was leaving and would never return to. What I really need is a good entrance line...)
Clean and well-looked-after - from old buildings to new, they are well cared for, the streets and facilities are clean, and generally everywhere we went was as you would hope.
Subway staff will even help you pick up your litter..
Transport - Japanese trains are as efficient as you hear - I literally did set my watch by them - I think one of ours got in 2 minutes late on a very snowy day. They're also big, comfortable and fast, and all the platforms are clearly marked so you know where to wait for your reserved carriage seats. Genius. The metro in Tokyo is also pretty good, although some of the interchanges seem as far as the gap between stops (c.500 metres, and others take you above ground). Can be expensive though, with a mix of public and private lines, monorail and railway. (Worst is getting to and from Tokyo airport, so far away it could be a Ryanair "Tokyo". We worked out that a taxi would cost more than 100 pounds!) Their equivalents of Oyster cards make life very easy, and for train travel the Japan Rail Pass, which you must buy before you visit Japan, is a must. Buses are a bit more intimidating in Tokyo, but a great way to get around Kyoto.
On the downside, navigating on foot is incredibly difficult - there are almost no roadsigns. And where there are maps, they like to have a random direction as 'up', rather than north, which doesn't help. (Contrast Vietnam, where almost every shop etc has its full address posted outside and navigation is very easy.)
Crossing the road requires patience - every stage of traffic light signals, including the green man*, lasts for geological ages. But the Japanese almost invariably will not jaywalk, even across the smallest, quietest side-roads - unless we do it first. Then they tend to do likewise. On the bright side, they have the safest drivers we have seen on our travels. Although they do cycle on the pavement, even when there's a perfectly good cycle lane. Somehow this feels a little out of place.
* If you look closely, most of the pedestrian crossing symbols are little men with hats on, which is a funny throwback.
Food - as predicted by many, I didn't really get on with the local food. If you don't like seafood and you don't like noodles, you'd better like your food greasy and deep-fried.* And hopefully anyone with with you likes that too, because your chances of finding somewhere that does rice dishes AND noodle dishes, or seafood AND meat, are pretty slim. There's not much fruit around and what there is is expensive (I guess it is winter).
* Even in a Vietnamese restaurant the chicken was resolutely Japanese-style - 60% skin and fat. It's fun removing that with chopsticks. And a tasty curry in an Indian restaurant contained large chunks of chicken on the bone, with skin on.
Then there's the fun of ordering - outside major tourist centres finding an English menu can be tough. Sometimes the English menu bears no resemblance to the Japanese (so we've been offered delights such as cartilege, skin and neck). And sometimes the apparent mistranslations are accurate - yes, that really did turn out to be a hamburger in a stew. If you're lucky there may be a picture menu - we've been to at least one authentically local restaurant where everyone orders by pointing to a photo - and by squinting you may be able to work out the fundamentals of a dish. Or there may be models of food in the window, so you can see what the dishes would look like if they were converted to shiny plastic, which is not appetising, and you can drag the waitress outside to point to a model that you think may represent something tasty.
Even the beer sometimes has plastic models in case you're not sure what beer looks like
Toilets - if I actually had done a running feature on toilets, this is where it would have got slightly less boring, with traditional "squat" style holes, regular boring toilets, and fancy models with heated sets and customisable, directable jets of water. One simple model is quite smart - when you flush, you also get running water from a little tap above the tank to wash your hands. This then flows into the tank to refill it. But the strangest thing is that some toilets have nowhere to dry your hands - it's traditional to take your own small towel. Lilly bought one after 5 such toilets in a row (the cold weather was not conducive to drip-dry), and then hit an extra-ordinary run of fully-equipped facilities. She refused to use her new towel until she found a bathroom where she needed one - in fact I'm not sure she ever did! (Nice towel, though.)
Curse you, tiny Asian people - I don't feel like Gulliver in Lilliput here, but my feet seem to be - I have been trying to buy a particular pair of trainers but despite many attempts, I can't find them bigger than a UK 9 - a tantalising half size too small. (Lilly had a similar problem finding jeans in Vietnam, which are almost exclusively available for the Asian bodytype.) This problem also manifests in the many historic buildings that require you to swap your shoes for one-size-"fits"-all slip-ons, with my heels dangling over the back. (A few places have a small stock of "large" size, which are too big for me and tend to slip off. Can't win!)
Safe - everywhere feels very safe and I had no worries about leaving valuables in hotel rooms or bags in reception. If you do fancy a career grabbing cash out of people's hands, I can highly recommend Japan, where people seem to routinely wave around large wads of notes as they cross the street. (As a sidebar, Japan has the most pristine banknotes I have ever seen - I don't think I had a single one of any denomination that didn't look as if it had just been printed.)
3 things Japan could learn from elsewhere: gift shops, straws and cleaning hotel rooms.
(1) When you've just seen a beautiful old building, lovingly preserved/restored, you expect the on-site gift shop to be full of stylish souvenirs. But they are invariably just tat. Even inside the imperial palace at Tokyo or Himeji castle. Disappointing. (Ghibli is the honorable exception. And yes, I would expect tat anywhere else, it was just disappointing here.)
Oh well, you can always buy things that aren't supposed to be souvenirs, like these prayer offerings
(2) If you buy a little drink carton it normally comes with a straw stuck on to the diagonal of the box, so it's long enough to reach the bottom corner. In Japan, you get a vertical straw - but it's extendable - there's another straw inside the first that slides out! Surely this must be more expensive. Surely some juice executive must have gone abroad, noticed the diagonal straw and thought, hey, there's a saving to be had here. (This bugged me for some reason. I know.)
(3) Hotels have early check-outs, late check-ins, and discourage residents from being in their rooms in between. As far as I can work out, they want to clean all the rooms in a fixed order - they don't seem to grasp the flexibility that would let guests use their rooms for more time. Hotels are expensive and rooms are small, and wifi is very rare, which makes Japan an anomoly on our trip.
Weather - we were lucky again, one day of rain in Kyoto, a couple of cold days, but mainly cool and sunny. Few crowds, since we're distinctly off-season. However, I think the best time of year to come must be April for the cherry blossoms - you see so many images of them here and they do seem to make for stunning scenery (NB not the end of April during Golden Week when all of Japan goes on holiday). Autumn leaves would be a second choice. There are some lovely gardens here, and trees are a big part of many historic sights. The bare trees we saw were nice but there's often a sense of a bit of colour missing.
Japan is expensive, but otherwise hard to fault as a destination. We spent 8 or 9 days in Tokyo alone (pushed back our flight a couple of days to see more of it). Highly recommended.
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