Spring break in Japan (part 1)

I am just back from an amazing spring break trip with my 16-year-old to Japan. We left on Thursday March 26th and flew back yesterday, Sunday April 5th. We visited Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka, as well as some countryside in between.

This trip had been something I (and my son!) had wanted to do for a while. He likes Nintendo, and robotics, and sushi, and Japan is known for all three. I have been to Japan before (briefly in 2005, and then also for a few days in 2013) and liked it, so I was game to return. I started planning the trip shortly after getting back from spring break last year (using Truvay Travel and their partners Windows to Japan). I think the year-long lead time was key for getting rooms in good hotels during peak season, and having reservations at some top restaurants that book up way in advance. There are risks with this of course, as you have no idea how life will unfold in a year, but spring break was going to be when it was. So we decided to go for it.

Some people have asked if every kid gets a “big” trip with mom (since kid #1 and I went to France for 10 days on a choir tour last summer), and I am not opposed to that as a tradition, but that wasn’t necessarily the thought process. I didn’t think the younger kids would do well on this trip. The long flights and the jet lag were kind of brutal. I offered my 14-year-old daughter the option to go but she wasn’t particularly enthusiastic (she’s more of a homebody) so it was the two of us. And honestly, this was probably the right call, as food was a big part of this trip, and being willing to do things like eat fish with the eyes on them wound up being a big plus!

(I know long time readers/listeners have heard me talk about this before, but the fact that I have one child who will eat things with tentacles and one child who subsists on chicken nuggets strongly suggests that this is about differences in the kids and not differences in how I parented. The kid who only eats chicken nuggets has many other wonderful qualities, but on some level, people are who they are!)

FYI: My husband took the three younger kids to visit his mom and sister in Indiana, and then they went to Texas — where he was born — and did a lot of touristy things there.

I’ll do a Substack post on what we packed for the Japan trip but it was a little challenging — the weather was highly transitional. Cold some mornings and nights. Blazing hot some days. Rain on occasion. A lot of casual touring and walking but some nice restaurants. As usual we did carry-on only — roll-board + backpack for me, in which I stuck a canvas bag that I used as a purse — and it worked fine. I was quite proud of my packing.

I’ll go day by day, and split this up into two posts.

Day 1-2. (March 26-27) These were both travel days due to the time change (Japan is 13 hours ahead of eastern time). We took a car service to Newark Airport on Thursday the 26th. We left very early due to all the histrionics about TSA lines. My husband — who likes to get to the airport right as planes are boarding — actually suggested I move the car earlier, so I was particularly on high alert. I spent the entire 24 hours prior to leaving refreshing Reddit threads about security lines at Newark, since the airport had stopped posting updates. I am not happy about the level of anxiety this induced in me, but it is what it is. Then when we got there we breezed through in about 2 minutes (Pre-Check). So, there was time for a leisurely breakfast! I joined Reddit just to post a picture of the sign showing 2 minute waits (and only about 8 minutes for the regular line).

(Fun fact: my husband and the three kids missed their Saturday flight from PHL to Indiana. It was not TSA related, however. They left in what should have been enough time but then there was an accident en route to the airport and they got stuck behind it for an hour. So they were rerouted through Charlotte instead of flying direct and it was a long day for them.)

My son and I then had about an hour to sit at the gate before getting on a 13.5 hour flight (yep, United flies direct from Newark to Tokyo! That’s why we flew out of Newark instead of Philly). The flight path goes arching west over the US/Canada/Arctic, then down near the Aleutian Islands and down on to Japan. It was just a little longer than the Hawaii flight last year but felt very different as I had only one kid who was completely capable of entertaining himself. I watched some TV, read (Dave Barry Does Japan — an early 90s classic), and tried to sleep, but since the flight was in the air around 12:45 pm and landed at the equivalent of 2:15 a.m., and they turn on the lights about 90 minutes before landing, there was really only a period of 2 hours where I was tired and it would have been possible to sleep. And I don’t sleep well on planes. But we made it and then after some confusion with Japanese immigration/customs (you have to fill out forms and I couldn’t find the forms in the paper version, and my phone was not connecting immediately to let me do it electronically…) we met our driver. Narita is a ways from Tokyo and it was rush hour, so this drive took 2 hours. We dozed in the car, but needless to say by the time I got to the hotel I was kind of a wreck. We went up to our lovely room at the Aoyama Grand, and crashed around 7 p.m. I popped awake at midnight, then went back to sleep, in and out, until 3 a.m. or so, and that was it for sleep.

Day 3. (March 28) After coffee, a shower, and breakfast (western, though I did eat miso soup and pickled carrots) I felt much better. We met our first guide and did some general touring of Tokyo. First stop: seeing cherry blossoms! We completely lucked out on timing as the cherry blossoms were in full bloom for most of our time in Japan. While they do normally bloom in late March/early April, there is no guarantee that they wouldn’t have peaked early or started late. We saw the Imperial Palace grounds, as all tours of Japan seem to need to do (I wound up there twice on my last trip to Japan…) We saw the fish market, toured some neighborhoods of Tokyo, saw a landscape garden, and ate lunch at a local favorite place near a sumo school. While there, we saw several very large gentlemen in kimonos get out of a taxi! We went to Skytree and to a design showcase of various robotics things that my son was really into, and then to the Senso-ji Temple historic area. We then went back to the room to take a nap, and met our evening guide to go try various sakes (for me) and sushi, and pork skewers and all sorts of other things on a “Tokyo food tour.” Sadly, we were pretty obviously crashing, so he delivered us back to our hotel early without much craziness.

Day 4. (March 29 Sunday) I was up again in the middle of the night but managed to go back to sleep to 4 a.m. or so. An improvement! We met our guide (a different one) at 9 again and went to see the Meiji shrine, and then to Takeshita Street, a narrow and very commercial street with lots of youth-focused stores. Think fancy stickers, a “dollar store” type place where everything was 100 yen (now about 63 cents!), strawberry snacks, and cafes where you cuddle with various animals: capybaras, owls, puppies, cats and of course mini pigs, which is what we did. The pigs were cute  — they basically sat on our laps and fell asleep! We then ate lunch and went to the Shibuya crossing, which was a surprise trip highlight for me. This is one of the world’s busiest pedestrian scrambles — where all traffic stops and you can cross in any direction. For about a minute every few minutes it’s a giant party in the street. It’s become a “thing” so lots of people are filming themselves, or taking pictures, or basically just talking and laughing as they cross. You kind of have to be there to understand it, which is somewhat the point — it’s an experience. We went up to the train station to watch it from above. Then we went to an art exhibit of Motoi Sorayama’s works — the idea was robotics for my kid, and it was visually stunning, though honestly, it was mostly sexy robots (my old fogey opinion: why, exactly, do female robots need giant breasts? They aren’t feeding baby robots…), but a few other things, like robot sharks (I enjoyed this) and robot T-Rexes. We did a little stationery shopping (including a shop I know I visited in 2013!) and then it was back to the hotel. We had dinner that night at a famous Teppanyaki place called Mon Cher Ton Ton. I liken this to a very upscale Benihana. They cook in front of you. It was so, so good. We successfully got ourselves back in a cab to the hotel, so phew!

Day 5. (March 30, Monday) We checked out of the Aoyama Grand (a lovely place — we had a lot of room for Tokyo!) after another night that ended early. While the two previous mornings breakfast had been on the 4th floor of our building, this morning it was up on the 20th floor and we could look over the city (our room was on the 19th floor so it had a view too). My son had some pretty incredible looking French toast with like a creme brûlée crust on it. Wow. We met our guide and driver and drove what turned out to be 2.5 hours to Hakone. The end of March and beginning of April are peak travel seasons in Japan — both because of the cherry blossoms and because everyone graduates or starts new jobs right around April 1st. Lots of Japanese people vacation during this time, and Hakone is popular since it’s near Tokyo, and so the traffic was ridiculous. I think we were theoretically supposed to do various things like go on the lake, go on this cable car thing to see volcanic activity, and see Mt. Fuji, but it was too cloudy to see Mt. Fuji (as it turns out to be approximately 290 days a year…) and with the traffic we moved so slowly it was hard to get places. So instead we focused on the Open-Air museum, which was mostly a sculpture park, but there was also a whole building of Picassos, which was kind of random for feeling like we were in the middle of nowhere. I liked the (pictured) indoor stain glass tower. The landscape was very beautiful. We also saw the famous Lake Ashi and Hakone Shrine, where the orange gate seems to float on the water. That looked stunning too, but needless to say the line to take a picture by that gate was winding around up to the road.

The good news is we made our 4:07 p.m. train to Kyoto. My son was really excited about taking the Shinkansen (bullet trains) and we got to do that twice on our trip. We zoomed along to Kyoto, where we met another driver who took us to our hotel, Sowaka. This hotel was a trip highlight for us, partly because it was so different from the high-rise one in Tokyo — more of a traditional guest house. We had tatami mats on our floor, and beds low to the ground. It was beautiful, with gardens visible through most of the hotel windows.

We didn’t stay long in our room though as we turned right around to go to Enboca. This is apparently a very hot restaurant in Kyoto, mostly known for…pizza! My 3 tomato pizza had no cheese — perfect for me — and we had an appetizer of roast veggies that were cooked in the pizza oven and perfectly salted. I may never have tasted vegetables so good before in my life. In the car ride on the way there we went down a street with the most magnificent cherry trees lit by lanterns — a good sign for pretty things yet to come.

This post is already long so I’ll do a second half later in the week with actual cherry blossom pictures!