Tag Archives: Japan

The Urban Side of Japan: Kyoto and Osaka

08 Wednesday Oct 2025

Posted by in Japan

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Our Japan trip is slipping more and more into the distant past without my documenting two other stops, one before and one after our rewarding Kumano Kodo hike. We left Tokyo aboard the sleek Shinkansen (bullet train) to Kyoto. I love it when our transportation is part of the fun, and this was a good one. Comfy seats, urban and then rural views, and Mount Fuji out there on the right as we sped along.

We spent our first afternoon and evening in Kyoto just strolling and getting the lay of the land, wandering through Gion, the Nishiki Market, and Pantocho Alley.

We tried to get into a popular little gyoza restaurant, but while standing in line, we spied a note about their sister location that had vegetarian-only dumplings. Win-win for us as the line was much shorter and we are not big meat eaters anyway; we ordered some beers and gyoza and had a perfect, casual little feast before returning to our ramble around the city.

We were up early the next morning for a ride out to Arashiyama Bamboo Forest. We congratulated ourselves on this good move as the crowds were building rapidly by the time we ascended through the forest, roamed around a bit on the hills, and then came back down into the touristy little town.

We skedaddled pretty quickly and almost succeeded in seeing Kinkaku-ji (Golden Pavilion) without massive crowds as well. In non-typical fashion for me, we also managed to see this sparkly gem of a temple in outstanding weather conditions!

Moving from gold to silver (temples), we pushed on to Ginkaku-ji, but J was already reaching his temple limit for the day, and we made short work of this visit.

Luckily, we were not far from a famous udon restaurant and after an hour in line outside, we got in and had a fantastic lunch. We are very much not the kind of people who wait in line to eat, but we made an exception based on the tiny eatery’s reputation, and I was so happy and proud (ha!) to get kudos from our millennial children for our efforts.

We walked off the fat noodles, broth, and toppings on the Philosopher’s Walk to Nanzen-ji and then added one last mile to get back to our hotel.

After resting for a matter of minutes, we realized that if we were going to buy knives at a famous shop founded in 1560 (originally as sword makers), we would have to leave immediately to get to Nishiki Market before the knife shop closed for the next two days, at which point we would be gone.

We had to push through dense crowds to complete our mission, but we did succeed in the nick of time. I imagine we were one of the few parents whose Christmas gift to their children that year were big, fat, very sharp santoku knives! They were beautifully boxed and wrapped and even though it meant we had to check our bags on the return flights, it was worth it to have these wonderful knives in all of our kitchens.

For the second day in a row, we got out nice and early the next morning to get to Fushimi Inari Taisha, the social media-worthy series of torii (gates) that proceed up, up, up into the woods.

As advertised, the crowds thinned considerably the higher we went, and once again, we were happy with our choice to accelerate our day to avoid the tourist throngs.

Alas, by the time we’d walked almost an hour back into the main city and Kiyomizu-dera, it seemed like all of the people we’d missed the day before and this morning had converged upon this large Buddhist temple, one of the signature World Heritage sites in Kyoto.

Still, we both thought it was worth jostling with slow walkers, baby strollers, and various other impediments to free movement; the temple architecture was especially rustic and appealing, and we were able to once again clear the masses the further into the site we ventured.

We finished off the visit with lunch, a stroll through the charming cobblestone streets of Sannenzaka just below the temple, and an unplanned but gorgeous walk into Maruyama Park, a most satisfying ending to the afternoon and, other than one last city walk and okonomiyaki dinner, farewell to the city of Kyoto overall.

After our Kumano Kodo hike, which commenced the next day on the Kii Peninsula, we returned by train to Osaka about six days later to finish off our time in Japan. I’d made no major plans, just a hotel reservation, so we improvised as we went, coming up with some fun walks and a small side trip to Nara one day.

Although it was wildly crowded and kitschy, we enjoyed dinner and a walk in Dotonbori, Osaka’s well-known entertainment district, known for its bright neon signs, nightlife, and extravagant street food.

We had to eat one last giant okonomiyaki (cabbage, egg, and flour pancake – yum), and we enjoyed the Christmas lights and high street energy on our hour-long walks each way from the hotel.

On our last full day in Japan, we decided to take a train to Nara, best known for the impressive Buddhist temple, Todai-ji, as well as herds of semi-wild deer. Japan’s first permanent capital (710-794 AD) is still home to scads of heritage statues, other art, and buildings, and it’s an easy place to get around on foot.

As our very last temple of the trip, Todai-ji simultaneously blew me away and made J exhale a huge sigh of relief. The grounds themselves were mesmerizing to me, with water reflection views from many angles, allées of cherry and maple trees, and of course the pretty deer at nearly every turn.

In what is becoming a common refrain in this post, we appreciated the deer more the farther we got into the park. (Just keep walking, and everything will get better! I think I follow this philosophy in many parts of my life, but I digress …!). In the early stages, the deer were clearly habituated to human feeding, and they were aggressive and dirty. As always, I questioned the ethics of feeding/not feeding these formerly wild animals. In spite of the fact that these graceful creatures have decimated some of my own landscaping over the years, and are overfed here, I can’t help but adore them for their lithe elegance, and so I let myself enjoy walking among them in such a picturesque setting.

That evening, we enjoyed this lively and modern city’s night lights one last time as we walked to find some good beer.

We scored a window seat at a small craft beer establishment in a high-rise building and reviewed our fantastic two weeks in this country of manners, cleanliness, and wide-ranging beauty.

The Urban Side of Japan: Tokyo

05 Wednesday Feb 2025

Posted by in Japan, Travel - General

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Before we started our Kumano Kodo hike, we visited two popular Japanese cities, Tokyo and Kyoto, and added a stop in Osaka after that adventure. We began our trip overall in Tokyo and hit the ground running, almost literally. Overwhelmed at first by the big and busy train stations, we decided to cover huge swaths of this huge city on foot. We were out the door within 30 minutes of checking in and walked around the Akasaka area for several hours that evening, grabbing a casual dinner and then crashing after our 16-hour + travel day.

On our next, first full day, we put in well over 30,000 steps, rambling through the Chiyoda district of government buildings, then Azabudai Hills, Shibuya City, Yoyogi Park, Harajuku, Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden, and Shinjuku City.

There was a brief stop for an açaí bowl in Harajuku, but other than that, we just kept moving.

The city was surprisingly quiet! We expected throngs of people (we got most of them at the famous Shibuya Scramble crossing) and the busy sounds of traffic and city life, but the streets were mostly uncrowded and the silence in many parts of the city was astonishing. (We found out the next day – when we finally went into Tokyo Station – that it was a three-day holiday weekend.)

We had booked our only “nice” dinner of the entire trip at Isana Sushi Bar, a tiny, eight-seat omakase restaurant with a kind and patient sushi chef who served us 12 courses of fish, seafood, and vegetables and explained everything in very good English.

We had seen the movie “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” and thought it looked fun but slightly daunting to be served at one of these teeny traditional places, so when I found Isana and its good reviews for being unintimidating, we booked it very early in our planning. We joined two Australian women on a university graduation trip, a couple from Madrid on their honeymoon, a businessman from New York City, and a Japanese man who now lives in Spain.

We saved “old Tokyo” for another day and spiced that up with some trendy areas that our son recommended, places that would have never hit our radar otherwise. Again, we chose to make our way on foot, starting with a rainy walk to the Imperial Gardens.

After taking some misty photos while balancing an umbrella overhead, we soldiered on to Tokyo Station to see its unique architecture, modeled after Amsterdam’s Central Station, and to preview our routing to Kyoto a few days later.

(I’m glad and not glad we checked. The station was an utter madhouse and we felt panicky about our ability to navigate it when we really needed to. Later, we learned that many lines had shut down that day due to a typhoon, and when we went back on our real travel day, we were fine.)

Stubborn walkers that we are (and freaked out by the train station chaos), we decided to hoof it to Senso-ji, the city’s oldest temple, in the Asakusa neighborhood, with stops along the way in Akibahara and Ueno. We knew nothing about Akibahara, known as “Electric Town,” a shopping area for things we had little interest in (video games, manga, anime, and electronics) but which our youngest son had told us was very fun to walk around.

He was right! We gawked at the window displays, signage, and general busyness of the area and then moved on to Ueno and its big city park which, after the visual stimulation of Akibahara, we found a bit boring. On we trudged in the rain, eventually giving in to the damp cold and our hunger, stopping to eat a nice warm meal on a quiet neighborhood street.

Senso-ji was our final stop for the afternoon. Built in 645 AD and the oldest Buddhist temple in Tokyo, Senso-ji is a brilliantly colored, five-story pagoda with swooping eaves. The walk toward the temple itself is a huge shopping thoroughfare, jam-packed with both local and foreign visitors.

No longer in the market for travel tchotchkes, we pushed through and just walked slowly and aimlessly through the temple grounds, enjoying the smell of incense (me – it always reminds me of the Himalayas) and the thought that we were done sightseeing for the day (J)!

In addition to all the city rambling we did in Tokyo, we also bought tickets well in advance for teamLab Borderless, an exhibit by an art collective with several shows in the city. Billed as a “museum without a map” the artworks transcend rooms, intermingling with each other and viewers alike, creating novel experiences for all involved.

We’d seen similar shows in U.S. museums, but this was a whopper, and we spent several hours exploring the rooms and images throughout. It was a perfect, sparkly send-off from bright-lights Tokyo.

Up next: the bullet train to Kyoto and a whole different vibe!

Back to the Forest: The Kumano Kodo Trail

18 Wednesday Dec 2024

Posted by in Japan, Travel - General

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It had been way too long. We last did a multi-day hike in the summer of 2023, but after that, all hell broke loose with family happenings and some personal life beatdowns. Those are not worth sharing, and most took a welcome uptick by the fall of this year. So the minute we saw a chance, I booked a trip to Japan! J and I had been thinking about Japan for quite a while, but a long, expensive journey like that is easy to push down the list, and that’s what we did for many years. But sometimes things just come together to give a final nudge, and suddenly we were mere months away from this big trip.

Once again, I found that only planning a short time ahead was very freeing and exhilarating – no fussing over every detail, no time for buyers’ remorse, no far-in-the-future schedule worries, and every motivation to throw myself into the research and make decisions fast.

I created an itinerary shockingly quickly, assembling airline miles, hotel points, and old notes in order to cobble together three big city visits with a 6-day hike across the Kii Peninsula. It all worked out perfectly, and the hike was definitely the highlight of the trip.

J and I have done all sorts of hiking – solo trips with all planning and research done by me, group outings where all we did was show up and hike with a daypack, treks with tent-and-sleeping-bag stays, others with cushier lodges, and most everything in between. This time we decided to try a different hybrid: self-guided walking every day and carrying days’ worth of our own gear, but with an outfitter booking our lodging each night and providing some scheduling help with the optimal daily mileages. By the end, we were thrilled we had not gone with a group (it was the most peaceful hike we’d ever taken), and we also realized we could have done the other part ourselves quite easily (maybe better) despite being warned that traveling without help in rural Japan was difficult.

Getting to the start of the hike might have been the hardest task we faced! After three days in Tokyo and three in Kyoto, we ditched our main luggage, traveled early in the morning to Kyoto Station with our backpacks and poles, boarded a JR Express train to Shin-Osaka Station, located the Kuroshio train to Kii-Tanabe, and finally dashed for a bus to Takijiri.

After all that, we still had one of the steepest days of the entire hike ahead of us, but luckily it was only a couple of hours until we reached our tiny ryokan, a traditional Japanese inn, where we were the only guests. We settled into our tatami-matted room, showered, changed into yukata (basically loose-fitting cotton kimonos), and joined our husband-and-wife hosts for a home-cooked dinner. All of the anxiety I’d felt about getting to the hike melted away, and we knew the following days would be much more stress-free, if not a little bit more physically daunting.

Throughout the days, we passed through occasional villages on the Nakahechi Route – Takahara, Chikatsuyu, Nonaka, Hongu, Yunomine Onsen, Kawayu Onsen, and Nachi, among them – but many of our days featured nothing but deep and silent woods for hours on end. It was the definition of “zen” in the generic sense of the word, a sustained period of time for thought, absorption, and meditation.

J and I have hiked together for long enough that we fall into familiar patterns: he sets the uphill pace (think death march) and I lead the downs (skipping like a kid), and we walk together on most flats or mild undulations. Oftentimes we fall into our own reveries, focusing on nature and esoteric musings (me) and life’s problems and solutions (him).

The path itself, subtly but well-marked, alternates from thousand-year-old stone paved paths and steps to root-filled passages, both cutting through old growth trees. In more than a few places, the trail drops off precipitously into deep ravines on the left or right, and we were grateful for both our sure feet and the lack of rain on the mossy rocks and roots. We crossed several passes; although the highest ones were only a little over 3000 feet (1000 m), we gained and lost many more thousands of feet of elevation each day as the trail climbed and dipped all day long.

Some days were short (8-9 miles) and some longer, including a killer 17-mile day with serious ups and downs. On the days with more mileage and/or heavy elevation gains, we had to be cognizant of daylight hours and hustle a bit, but we never felt unsafe despite long stretches of solitude, and we would have probably been just fine even as dusk arrived. Despite being one of the two main walking pilgrimages in the world (the other is the Camino de Santiago in Spain), the Kumano Kodo trail was surprisingly quiet and unpopulated, even in high season. There were a few days when we saw no more than 10-15 people the entire time.

We passed many small Shinto shrines (oji), as well as three of the five major (“grand”) shrines in the area. There was a smattering of viewpoints along the trail, but really, the hike is almost all covered and close, with mile after mile under canopy. I’ve been known to fuss after too many hours in the “green tunnel” of the Appalachians, but this heavy woods smelled so fresh and piney, and the ancient stones and moss added so much moodiness, that I didn’t miss the sky as much as usual.

Our lodging ranged from family-owned ryokans and minshukus, where we had the place to ourselves or stayed with a family host, to larger local onsen (hot springs) hotels in “spa towns.” Although we did give the onsens a try, and they were very relaxing after a rigorous day of hiking, we were not big fans of either the accommodations or the towns; both were a little worse for wear, and we had become spoiled by our tiny, traditional digs earlier in the trek. Still, those bigger places DID pack us some pretty amazing lunches to stuff into our packs! This has to be the best trail lunch I’ve ever had.

True to form, we did not take the rest day built into the mileage schedule we were given, adding an extra day of hiking so that we could complete the entire Nakahechi route across the Kii Peninsula, a piece of southern Japan that lies between the East China Sea on the west to the Pacific Ocean on the east.

We ended at one of the most picturesque shrines of all, Nachi Taisha, and its backdrop, Nachi-taki waterfall, the nation’s highest.

(Alas, the shrine itself was wrapped up amid a massive restoration, so the left photo below was taken of a travel agency poster!)

After a long hike, it’s typical to feel a sense of satisfaction, and we did, but in many ways, I just wanted to keep on walking. The Kumano Kodo was easily one of the most peaceful, calming treks I’ve ever done, and I’d love to find a similar experience somewhere else in the world. Meanwhile, it was absolutely pouring rain at the end of the trail (and had been for hours, so we were soaked to the bone), and we had to figure out logistics for that night and then get back to Osaka, putting a rather abrupt end to all that dreaminess!

More on our three city stays another time.