Some background/context…
Please remember that this was my first proper international trip. Oh, sure, I’ve been to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls and a few cruise stops in Mexico, but that’s like spending a few hours in Chicago’s airport an claiming you’ve been to Illinois.
This trip was daunting for me because I’m not an adventurous person. When I travel, I try to carry my comfort zone with me in the form of a pillow, digital clock, and snacks from home. Ever since 2018, I’ve had unexpected anxiety attacks that lay me flat with hours of nausea at inconvenient times.
If our friend Adam hadn’t invited us to tag along for the first 2 weeks of his month-long journey in Japan, I probably would have never ventured out there. Knowing myself, I anticipated that I’d find Japan difficult, so I wisely planned accordingly:
- We’d stick to the most Westerner-friendly areas, starting with Disney and staying in the Tokyo area the entire time. The goal was to enjoy the trip enough that we’d consider returning someday.
- We’d schedule activities extremely conservatively. A maximum of 1 activity per day, with nearly 1/3 of our days being blocked out as “Flex”
- We booked ZERO dinner reservations pre-trip. And the only tickets we pre-purchased were to the extremely popular Teamlabs experience. We didn’t even buy our Disney tickets ahead because our hotel guaranteed us same-day purchasing power.
- We’d minimize hotel switching. We had a lot of luggage and wanted to be able to settle in, so we booked 3 hotels total.
Highlights
- Best way we spent money: The lay-flat seats on the plane were heavenly (thank you, Zipair!). An unpleasant flight was turned into a truly delightful experience.
- My favorite souvenir: The 6 pieces of clothing I bought. Japanese fashion felt like it was pulled out of my Pinterest-fueled dreams and I currently have 30 tabs open trying to buy more because it was incredible.
- Best meal: Every mushroom soup I ate. I think I had 3-4 different variations and they were all incredible.
- Best snack: White grape gummy candy. Grapes are a big deal in Japan and they’ve figured out how to achieve true grape flavor (versus the fake grape taste we have in America). It’s a deliciously pure taste. However, the uncut grapes in white cake were not as yummy.
- Favorite non-Disney activity: Either the Shinjuku Cat Café or pouring over hundreds of gashapon vending machines every day.
- Best Disney moment: Our first day at DisneySea was simply magical. That was the day I found the easiest to live in the moment. Riding “Journey to the Center of the Earth” without Ron riding it solo first was a big risk for me because drops make me nauseous. I was delighted that the drop was manageable AND the line was short enough that we could immediately walk on again.
- Smartest thing I packed: I bought a stick-on credit card holder for my phone and it was AMAZING for constantly tapping my Pasmo card in train stations.
- Favorite cultural difference: There are lockers everywhere! Even the tiny art museum we visited had them. Because they’re at every train station, you can stash your backpack or your heavy shopping bags while you walk around the city. There are also bag holders next to restaurant tables so you don’t have to put your purse on the floor. I also loved:
- Never tipping!
- Shower heads that can be brought into the tub, so I could wash my hair during my bubble bath.
- Free slippers and pjs at every hotel.
- Huge umbrella stands with keys (free!) so you can remember which clear brolly with a white handle is yours.
- Full cosplay at Disney during the Halloween season.
One of my favorite things we did was a Souvenir Scavenger Hunt. I asked my friends to tell me their favorite anime/Pokémon/Nintendo/Miyazaki characters and I tried to find stickers/postcards/easily mailable merch for them. It gave me a fantastic excuse to closely study every gashapon vending machine we passed. It gave our unstructured trip some much needed direction every day.
The weather was gorgeous, leaning towards overly warm (75 degrees) and humid most days. The 3 rainy days we had were some of my favorite because it was cooler. There’s much less indoor A/C than the US, which makes train stations particularly stuffy. Going during the summer would have been unbearable and while I’m sure the cherry blossoms in April are incredible, the landscape was already so pretty that I didn’t regret our timing. In fact, I’d probably opt for November next time.
Our 2 luxury hotels (Disney’s MiraCosta and the Hotel Chinzanso) were both incredible. I’d never pay over $225/night for a fancy hotel without it offering something extremely special beyond pretty decor or a view. The Chinzanso’s foggy gardens were haunting and breathtaking. The MiraCosta truly felt like you were living in Venice (I could rhapsodize about the indoor pool for hours!), but the real selling point was the immediate park access. Better yet: The Oceano restaurant gave us an excellent view of the “Sea of Dreams” waterfront show.
Lowlights
Obviously, being able to afford this trip, plus travel in such a luxurious way, was a huge privilege. If any of my Facebook friends rolled their eyes when they read my complaints about being stressed, wishing they could swap places with me, I can understand that. However, my intention was to be honest about my experience because I feel our culture overly romanticizes travel. We had a great time in Japan, but here’s where we struggled:
- Worst way we spent money: I don’t regret any purchase over $15 that we made, but we did prepay around $40 for a 3rd checked bag that we didn’t use, which was unfortunate.
- Our moderately priced hotel near Tokyo Station had some unforeseen downsides, but it would take a whole paragraph to explain them. In hindsight, I wish we’d booked in a different area of Tokyo, but it wasn’t exactly a poor use of our money.
- Souvenir I regret not buying: More snacks! I kept fretting over suitcase space and fussed over which snacks were the best to bring home…I should have bought extras of the ones I loved and dumped a bunch of random weird ones into a bag. We ended up having extra unused space.
- Worst meal: Considering that almost every restaurant we ate at was chosen blindly, based on convenience and a guess at the menu, almost everything we ate was good. I will say that I don’t prefer dark meat chicken, especially if there are still fatty bits on it, and I’m pretty sure all the chicken I ate was dark meat.
- Worst snack: The matcha served at a local museum’s tea ceremony. Turns out that I absolutely despise the taste, which reminded me of hot briny seawater. No option for sugar or milk.
- Most skippable activity: The Imperial Gardens weren’t anything special. Tokyo has many other gardens that were more unique.
- Least helpful item I packed: A travel set of Western utensils for chopstick-only restaurants. But somehow, after 34 years of failure, Adam managed to teach me how to use chopsticks in 5 minutes and I never needed my set.
- Most challenging cultural difference: Planning meals was often a lost cause. Searching an area with Google Maps would often give us a list of Japanese names that didn’t post their menus online. After we’d pick a place, Maps often struggled to find it. It’s common in Tokyo for restaurants to be tucked away in 15 story buildings, but Maps is terrible with vertical space. If we miraculously found it, there would inevitably be a 60+ min line. Usually, we gave up hunting and settle for a random restaurant. We eventually learned to skip the planning and pick whatever place we were passing at that moment.
Did I achieve my goals?
My goals were to:
1. Savor the trip rather than trying to cram it full.
2. Enjoy it enough that I’d consider going back someday.
I definitely achieved both those goals. Despite several days when I fell prey to jetlag or was conquered by my natural tendency towards negativity, the positives significantly outshone both. Yay!
Will I go back?
Around the end of the first week I realized that I wasn’t on a vacation. Vacations are focused on relaxation and comfort. And while the luxurious hotels and airline seats helped a LOT, this trip was constantly taking me outside my comfort zone. Which is why I’m calling most of this trip an “adventure”. We were surrounded by another language, saturated in a constant stream of differences, and It. Was. Tough.
But the same things that made it tough, also made it so rewarding. As frustrating as the constant barrage of cultural differences could be, I also found most of them fascinating. This trip was mentally stimulating in a way I’ve never encountered before.
I eventually learned that Tired Evening Tahlia tended to react to cultural differences with annoyance, while Perky Morning Tahlia was more likely to react with curiosity. So I started spending evenings in a bubble bath, followed by posting photos on FB. This helped me process all the shiny pebbles of information I’d collected throughout the day and fortify me for the next.
We took things super slow and kept our schedule open and loose. As someone who craves structure, I had many moments where this felt frustratingly aimless, but we weren’t savvy enough to successfully execute a scheduled day. Plus, Ron caught a cold, which added a bit more uncertainty to our 2nd week. Sometimes we didn’t feel like we’d explored anything exciting that day, but lately, I’ve been thinking fondly of those days because they were simple and pleasant.
So yes, I would definitely like to return to Japan. Maybe 3-5 years from now, depending on how long of a trip we wanted. And I’m full of ideas on how I want Trip #2 to go.
Oh, and in case anyone wants to know if I’d ever move to Japan–that’s a big NOPE from me. I suck at learning languages and becoming fluent in Japanese is non-negotiable for anyone wanting to live in Japan. With time, I could muddle my way through conversations, but I’d never become proficient enough with the non-Latin characters.
What I’d like to try next time
- My one regret from this trip is that I wish I’d booked at least one day with a personal tour guide. I kept wanting to chat with the locals and ask questions about my surroundings, but the language-barrier made that impossible. Next time, I’m committed to giving this a try. I don’t want to see Japan without understanding more about what I’m looking at.
- Explore a location beyond Tokyo, but leave a few days at the end to shop in Tokyo.
- Spending more time independently exploring, then meeting up with Ron for dinner to swap stories.
- Schedule 3-6 pm as nap time most days to give me more evening energy. Every few days, plan on a 5 pm Room Service & Chill night.
- Next time, we probably won’t stay at any luxury resorts…probably.
- But I don’t think I’m a ryokan girl. Even in America, this introvert likes the impersonal nature of a hotel versus a B&B.
- Visit between November – February.
- Read a book about modern Japanese history beforehand, and more folklore. If anyone has recs that aren’t overly long and academic, send them my way.
To Reach the Unreachable Star 
Jan 26, 2024 @ 18:27:39
Loved the picture for “Turns out that matcha tea is not my thing”
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