Japan Revisited: Back to the familiar (Part One)
I first travelled to Japan in 2002. I loved it there and called Osaka home for 10 years.
Since then, my return visits have been entirely personal — always accompanied by Mrs Jim, my native Japanese wife, boss and opinionated food critic. We stay in Osaka for the food, enjoying the odd excursion to her nearby hometown of Kobe to meet friends and eat. Whether our motivation for returning is the friendship or the food remains moot.
What is not in doubt, however, is her firmly held belief that Japanese flavours do not properly exist outside Japan. After years of investigation, I’m nearly persuaded, but we plan to keep testing the hypothesis, with Osaka as the control.
I enjoy returning to places around the world because I don’t believe you can really know a place by simply visiting it once. Accordingly, I have never been much of a country counter. Instead, I love the familiarity that comes with revisiting, and the way it opens up further routes for even deeper exploration. Once you’re no longer concentrating on how to get around, or visiting the famous sites, you can pay more attention to what lies deeper.
A different kind of return
This trip was different from my yearly Osaka outings. It was the first time in years that I was travelling around Japan in my professional capacity, looking again at familiar places and exploring some new ones with a travel consultant’s eye. The plan was to travel across Japan, starting in Tokyo and eventually ending, naturally, back home in Osaka.
My companion for the familiarisation odyssey was my colleague Liv, a Japan first-timer, adventurous by nature and lovely company throughout. She was excited to learn, and I was equally excited to show her a country I had spent so many years getting to know.
More than that, I wanted Japan to captivate her in the same way it has me for the past quarter of a century.
WHAT IS IT ABOUT JAPAN, THEN?
On arrival, I realised how modern Japan can, at first glance, look remarkably familiar to a Western visitor. There's a McDonald’s, a Starbucks and a convenience store on the corner. But I knew there was always that promise of the exotic. You might turn a corner and find a group of locals wearing tabi shoes and headbands, chanting as they haul a massive portable shrine through the streets.
That tension between the familiar and the unexpected is part of what has kept me fascinated by Japan for more than two decades. There is always another layer, another custom, another little contradiction that makes you want to understand it better.
But perhaps part of the appeal is that you never quite get it. And maybe you shouldn’t. If you ever solved the enigma completely, perhaps some of the wonder would disappear.
Making room for Japan
The route had been deliberately designed to show Liv some of Japan’s best-known places. That inevitably meant visiting places that were popular, and for operational reasons our journey also coincided with the Silver Week holidays — a rare occurrence where public holidays coincide to give a full week of time off for locals — when domestic travel was particularly busy.
Asakusa, Hakone and Miyajima were packed with both domestic and international visitors, and I started to worry the crowds were getting between Liv and the Japan I wanted her to see. I found myself mentally redrawing the route and wondering whether I should somehow be steering us towards somewhere quieter.
Eventually I stopped trying quite so hard to curate her first encounter with Japan.
We still had the route, the waypoints and the things we wanted to see, but we began wandering more freely between them.
It did, and Japan still shone through.
I became less concerned with joining everything up by the most efficient possible route and trusted Japan to reveal itself around the crowds and between the people.
It did, and Japan still shone through.
BETWEEN THE WAYPOINTS
Our first morning in Tokyo gave us an early example. We had a little spare time, so we headed to Tsukiji fish market, convinced there must be another meal to discover, one that existed somewhere between breakfast and brunch.
Tsukiji was reassuringly lively. People wanted their fare, and so did we. We wandered, stopped when something looked good, ate, moved on and changed direction whenever we felt like it.
A crab leg sashimi and an umeboshi later, we moved on, sated for at least the next 45 minutes.
The rest of the day was spent inspecting hotels around the city. There is something unkind about looking at beds and bedrooms all afternoon when you are profoundly jet-lagged and not allowed to sleep in any of them.
As the trip unfolded, the crowds became less of something to avoid and more of something to work around.
Kyoto was one place where changing the rhythm made an enormous difference. Japan’s former imperial capital contains an extraordinary concentration of temples, shrines, gardens and historic neighbourhoods, and unsurprisingly — it's also one of the places where the country’s tourism boom is most visible.
Rather than trying to visit every major sight in the middle of the day, we approached them at different times. We visited Kiyomizu-dera in the evening, Arashiyama before breakfast and Fushimi Inari later in the day, after much of the daytime rush had ebbed away.
None of them were empty, nor should anyone expect them to be. But they had room to breathe.
You can’t manufacture an empty Kyoto. You can, however, be rather more intelligent about when you meet it.
The time in between was just as important. Sometimes we wandered between waypoints with no particular route to follow. At other times, we were in a class or activity, or under the supervision of a local guide who could add the context we would otherwise have missed.
And occasionally, because this was still a work trip, we had to go and look at more bedroom layouts.
Overview
After a 6-month backpacking trip around South East Asia turned into 12 years, Jim eventually settled in Japan's gastronomic capital, Osaka, a base from which he continued his travels around Japan, China, South Korea and Taiwan. Arriving back in the UK, perfectly trained for a career in adventure travel as an Asia Specialist…
After a 6-month backpacking trip around South East Asia turned into 12 years, Jim eventually settled in Japan's gastronomic capital, Osaka, a base from which he continued his travels around Japan, China, South Korea and Taiwan. Arriving back in the UK, perfectly trained for a career in adventure travel as an Asia Specialist, Jim now has over 10 years of experience putting together itineraries for single- and multi-country trips to destinations he continues to love and explore.
