A family affair

I've been up and down the main tourist stretch of Japan once before. It was time to do it all over again, and for a change of pace my parents came along for the ride.

I'm massively lucky to have parents who love to travel, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now, or have the same outlook about see the world, otherwise. We always did some sort of European holiday when I was little, and then me being the youngest kid in the family meant I got taken a bit farther afield when all my older brothers went off to uni (I'm also probably quite lucky to have a family I can travel with - I know some people whose worst nightmares would include ten straight days with their parents). So there's not a lot that phases them when it comes to international travel.

Having said that Japan is always going to be at the peak of the world's 'tricky first visit' countries. I'm not going to break down everything we did - there's some fairly standard itineraries on Lonely Planet or Tripadvisor that are a good guide for a first visit, covering Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Miyajima in two weeks. But it was interesting seeing Japan through fresh eyes while seeing how far my veteran (ha!) experience was actually useful.

For once thing traveling as a group is a big change. On my own I'd just strap on the walking boots and mission a city hike, but using the subways and buses just made more sense, if for no other reason than saving our lives from the ridiculous heatwave Japan had in late May. We are British, we need tea breaks. Not going to lie, even with me planning each day out tour-guide style I still managed to get us lost at least three or four times, defeated by Japanese subway maps. Google's useless in Japan a good 75% of the time, you can't always just search for 'best bus from a to b', and each city has its own unique horrors - Tokyo is almost too well connected, you can't see the forest for the (subway shaped) trees. Kyoto has the opposite - a much simpler layout but it's harder to connect the dots. Most of the trains go out from the city but there's not a lot going around the outside. Long story short, if you're going to the main tourist sights don't try and be clever and try shortcuts, just do what everyone else is doing. Also some of the subway stations cover HUGE underground areas. You might want the convenient 'exit 7' for your hotel, but can you find convenient exit 7? No you bloody well can not. Half the time I just give up and come up for air wherever I can.

Going to restaurants is another big gauge of being Japan-happy. At this point I'm fairly comfortable going into a place that has no English menu. Not because I know what I'm doing or can read it all, I'm just a big enough nerd to have checked the menu online and practiced the Japanese name of the one dish I know I want in advance. But people do come to Japan with mental images of trays of fish guts and dancing squid, so with three people you want a bit more time to check out the options. But thankfully Japan has those lovely places with big rubber replicas of the food in the window, there's no shame in just pointing and saying 'that one', I still do it. Chain restaurants like Jonathan's are worth trying as well, with big menus, English translations and food pictures. I'm not sure if a hamburger covered in gravy counts as traditional Japanese food but it does the trick after a long day.

We did find a few awesome food though, in Kyoto especially. Teishokuya Soto looks like a real hipster joint, all bare concrete and cool kids queueing up outside. But the food was amazing, big trays with a main, rice, soup and different pickles and sides, about 1000 yen (£7) with a beer. And a little new restaurant called Cumin's had amazing curry, somewhere between Indian and Japanese spicing. And of course there's okonomiyaki, which we had Hiroshima style with a side of seafood. I think my mum took a little bit of convincing from my description of this weird pancakey mess, but once the big pile of sizzling goodness was in front of us the whole thing vanished in a few blinks. The fact that we're a big foodie family in a place with no shortage of amazing things to try definitely makes things more exciting - in ten or so days I think we did almost every style of Japanese cuisine in some shape or form.

Comfort and safety is another learning experience. It does take a little bit of convincing to get people to realise that yes, Japan really is ridiculously safe. The only places I've stayed in with locked doors are city hotels, and I think the only times I've ever worried about my wallet were in some of the gnarlier nightlife neighbourhoods of Tokyo. Sadly nine times out of ten that you worry about your possessions it's around other foreigners, not the locals. After a few days in Tokyo we went to Senso-Ji and ended up in the middle of a huge Shinto celebration, groups of daytime-beer drunk people dressed in something between pyjamas and nappies carrying ornate shrines down the streets, surrounded by groups of more drunk people chanting, singing and clapping. It's one of the craziest things I've seen in Japan. Say one thing about the Japanese - they do commit. If a place calls for respectful silence they're totally in, and if an event asks for rowdiness they'll take it to the next level. Anyway, about halfway through the day my dad said 'Any other country I'd be worried about my wallet being pinched, but here I'm not even thinking about it'.

No matter how long you've been here, even in a place as full of photo opportunities as Japan you really can have too much of a good thing. It's totally possible to get 'shrined out' - a lot of the sights here don't involve much interaction. You just look, meander, admire, say 'oh yes that's nice'. So after two or three incredible temple complexes you start to go a bit snowblind. The one rainy day we had was a nice change of pace, a forced excuse to sit in a little French-style bakery and do rounds of pastries. If I was going to do my token attempt at tour-planning again I'd definitely aim to include more of less. You don't need to fill every minute of every day with one sight after another, missing the general life that's going on around you.

We had a few funny sightseeing fails along the way. A day bus trip out toward Fuji was a bit of a washout - the flower show only had a few blooms left, and a fog bank hid the entirety Fuji until pretty almost the end of the day. With the groups of Chinese, Thai and Western tourists wandering around a misty field it all looked like the worst concept for an episode of the Twilight Zone ever written. Definitely one of those 'you have to laugh' experiences, but we've all had enough rainy days at the English seaside to put up with it.

By the end of the trip I think my parents got more involved Japan in two weeks than some people I've met who've been here for two or three years. finding random things in Tokyo like a dance festival in a park that I don't think I'd have even known was happening. It's a country that definitely rewards people willing to get involved and wander down random side streets to see what's there, and now really feels like the best time to visit.

#travel #japan #Workaway #japanese