Our 18 days trip to the Chubu and Kanto regions of Japan has been our longest vacation ever as a family, and my seventh trip to the country now. As is my tradition every time we travel, I’d do a final retrospective post about the trip, of the things that we saw and experience, what went well, what didn’t, and the key takeaways for us to remember the next trip.
This trip took months of planning and research leading up to the trip, from bookings to various places of visitation, the train timings, the very periodic buses that operate in the less built-up cities, and what to actually do in each place. Perhaps as a consequence of the amount of work and time it took for us to nail down everything we could, the missus felt a little burnt out [she did most of the planning for this 2023 trip], and we both felt that this would be our last trip to Japan for a while. It’s just a crazy amount of work to plan for a Japan itinerary! Funnily, now that we’re successfully completed 18 days in the country, I actually feel invigorated that I mused to the wife while we were boarding the Airbus A380 that perhaps we could consider coming back to Japan in December 2024. The wife had that look of horror at the thought of repeating again this entire planning process next year, but I assured her that this time, I’d do the planning haha!
Perhaps the biggest change in this trip compared to last year was that our ang mo bud could not join us. As in, we’re Asians here and as interesting as Japan is, it’s not exactly a completely foreign culture from the perspective of this part of Asia. There were a number of running jokes among our friends on social media this couple of months at year-end: e.g. “Like who among us is not in Japan – do report in”, and “Half of Singapore is right now in Japan.” Last year, we did enjoy sharing our already accumulated experiences visiting the country with our ang mo friend, and there’s also Peter who really enjoyed his company too.
Comparing between our 2019, 2022 and 2023 trips to Japan, I reckon the 2019 trip was still the most visually stunning one we experienced. I mean, c’mon, it was Hokkaido! Still, this 2023 trip had a fair share of high-points where we saw spectacular things. E.g. the Winter Illumination at Enoshima Island, the Snow Monkeys, TeamLab Planets, and the many opportunities we had to see Mt. Fuji in wonderfully clear weather.
Ironically, even though our 2022 itinerary was finally less complex than this 2023 one, we ended up having to skip or cancel more visitation places in 2022. This was because of inclement weather, including on two significant days where we made the trouble to travel a fair bit to the place only to find it inaccessible. We didn’t have such difficulties this time round in Dec 2023 – the weather held. And the couple of places we did drop were because we just felt a little tired at spots and wanted to head back to the hotel to rest.
Unlike last year where we saw relatively small crowds at many popular tourist places, this year the people from that country up north are all back, ever since travel regulations were lifted and their citizens were free to travel. Readers of our blog here will know that I find selected mannerisms they display annoying. Specifically the shrill voices they routinely speak in, and that they seemed to not care (or do not know) that they often draw attention to themselves by speaking loudly everywhere they are. In a sense, we weren’t visiting the tourist hotspots this trip, so we were spared off having to squeeze in with the largest concentrations of human beings. But looking at the photos shared by others of places like Arashiyama Bamboo Forest, Fushimi-Inari, or the Universal Studios in Osaka and Disneyland in Tokyo, we were glad that we’d already done Kyoto thoroughly in 2010 and then again in 2022, and we weren’t visiting any of those tourist hotspots in Osaka and Tokyo.
We kept our snow activity days this trip to just two. We’re not big on snow activities normally, and our two kids are contended to do the simple stuff: like snowball fights and sledding down gentle slopes. So, two day were sufficient, and the activities we had were varied: a snowshoe hike, playing in three feet of snow, and lots of sledding. And on Day 16 in Shiga Kogen at -10°C, the daughter was quipping: “I’m ready to go back to Singapore. I love hot weather. I love sweating.”
The large increases in the prices of JR Passes this year also got us thinking very hard about whether we should be getting JR Passes this trip. We did a careful cost analysis once our broad itinerary had been worked out. And no matter the permutations we tried, we could not work out a situation where there would be significant cost savings if we purchased the regional passes for the places we were going to this time. That was truly a bummer. We had to spend time researching where we could buy tickets for the various trips we were visiting, and find out which train was offering the best value for money. I doubt if the prices of JR Passes are going to come down at all, so this kind of planning looks like it’d be the norm from now on.
Unlike our 2019 and 2022 trips, we also opted out of included breakfasts in all of our hotel stays. Sure, hotel breakfasts are convenient, but given the not particularly short periods we were staying in the cities of Kawaguchiko, Tokyo and Matsumoto, we knew that we’d tire of hotel breakfasts fast. Excluding that amenity from our reservations saved us a fair bit of money. And we largely bought bread items and pastries from convenience stores every night for a quick breakfast each following morning, then head out for the day’s activities. Aside from that by the end of the trip, we’d completely, fully, exhausted every option we cared for at the bakery sections of Lawsons, Family Mart, and 7-11, we were able to save a not trivial amount of time each morning. As in, it takes just 5 minutes at most for the kids to gobble down a bun for breakfast. It would take far longer for them to dress up, head down to the hotel restaurant, find a table, get food, eat the food, and return the tray. And when we had as packed an itinerary as this trip, every minute counted!
Talking about food, we, again, ate more international than Japanese food this trip. We did our usual ticking of check-box dining places like Ippudo Ramen, Saboten, MOS Burger, and McDonald’s, and for the rest of meals, ate at Saizeriya and similar family-type restaurants with drink bar options many times. The one thing we didn’t get to try this time was conveyor belt sushi. The missus did try to find us one such place for our Day 17 lunch in Ueno. But we gave up on that idea after one look at that restaurant’s lunch time queue already formed before opening hour at 11AM.
Lastly, I’m still amazed at the number of public pianos found in Japan cities! Unlike last year’s trip, we weren’t deliberately trying to find public pianos. But we encountered three just by walking past them in our explorations, and we weren’t even trying. We found an upright in Shibuya Mark City, a baby grand in Matsumoto Station, and another upright in Keisei Ueno Station. I played on the first and third, and would had loved to play the baby grand too were it not for the fact that we only saw the piano on our last day in Matsumoto and when we were just about to depart Matsumoto Station on our train ride to Nagano.
So, what should we do for our December 2024 trip? We were initially intending for a 15-16 day in South Korea and have prepared a very general itinerary for such a trip. But after this successful 18 days in the Chubu-Kanto region, I’m for exploring (yet) another Japan vacation next year. Perhaps to the Kyushu region, or Hiroshima-Okayama stretch, or further-up north of Tokyo. Before that, there’s also the June vacation to think about. So, while this is the last post in this series, there’d be more family travel posts to come soon – in a few months!