Journey in Japan 2013 

Misti and I have traveled to Japan several times but our 2013 trip was different. Our previous visits were short, usually combined with visiting another country, and mostly to well-traveled tourist areas like Tokyo and Kyoto.

This trip was unique because we wanted to visit more remote parts of Japan that aren’t often visited by Westerners or even by Japanese tourists.  We wanted to see the “real Japan” away from tourists, and we found it.  Our then fourteen year old grandson, Ben, accompanied us.  Ben was studying Japanese in school, his mother Hiromi is from Oita, Japan, and he welcomed an opportunity to put his language skills to use. 

We decided to focus our journey on Northern Honshu, above Tokyo, and also Hokkaido.  While Honshu (which means “main province”) is the largest and most populated of Japan’s four islands, the part we explored is called Tohoku and is sparsely populated, especially after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.  Honshu has a population of more than 100 million, or three-fourths of Japan’s total population of 130 million.  The Tohoku region’s population is only 9 million spread over a very large area.  

We also visited Hokkaido (which means “Northern Sea Route”), the northernmost island known for spectacular scenery, excellent skiing, harsh winters and the 1972 winter Olympics.  The most northeastern tip of Hokkaido is very close to Russia.

We spent the first three nights in Tokyo staying at the Prince Park Tower Hotel, one of Tokyo’s best hotels which Misti managed to snag on Hotels.com for a bargain basement price.  Ben, of course, had his own room- a very luxurious one at that.  For the entire three week trip Ben always had his own room, which he loved.

For our short stay in Tokyo we did as much sightseeing as possible using taxis and the wonderful train system. Misti and I had been to Tokyo several times previously but it was a first time for Ben.  Tokyo is a world class city with a greater metro area population almost the size of California. It covers 5,200 square miles, has twice the population density of Bangladesh and, in 2013, had the largest metropolitan economy in the world at about two trillion dollars.    

After several days in Tokyo, we rented a Prius, which our daughter-in-law Hiromi had booked from the US.  While I had driven in Japan before, I had never driven in Tokyo, and was concerned about finding our way out of the city.  Hiromi had requested a GPS in English (and Japanese) without which we’d probably still be driving around the streets of Tokyo. The GPS was great and enabled us to find our way on the entire trip.  It helped us find hotels and restaurants and, with Ben’s able navigation, we breezed our way through remote parts of Northern Honshu and Hokkaido. 

In addition to the GPS, Hiromi got us a personal Wi-Fi which gave us wireless service everywhere at a cost of less than ten dollars a day.  Misti of course had her iPad and, with full-time wireless and two iPhones, we could pretty much go anywhere and find anything even without English speakers.  

Driving in Japan is easy.  The roads are excellent, marked in both Japanese and English, the drivers are courteous and obey the speed limit and we rarely saw police on the road.  Road rage isn’t part of the Japanese culture.  The toll roads are expensive but worth the cost when it’s necessary to travel a long distance in a limited time.  Driving is on the left side of the road but that becomes automatic after the first day.

Leaving central Tokyo headed north was quite an experience: it took better than an hour, migrating from one highway to the next, always following our trusty GPS instructions.  Ben quickly mastered the GPS and whenever it decided to pop into Japanese he was able to put it back to English.  Having a tech-savvy teen on board is a great advantage.  We were headed for the Tohoku Expressway which would take us to our first stop, Nikko (means Sunshine), a major destination for Japanese tourists because of it’s many famous shrines.

Before leaving California Misti had tried to make a hotel reservation in Nikko but everything was booked.  As we were driving there she went onto her iPad and got us the last rooms in sort of a mountain chalet.  A tiny room with no amenities and not cheap, but at least we had a room.  

The next day we visited several shrines, saw a Japanese wedding at one, went to Lake Chuzenji, took the tram to the top, had our first meal ordered through a vending machine and were on our way north to explore unknown destinations.

When we chose Northern Honshu to begin our trip, we first studied a map to determine a route.  The distance from Tokyo to the northern tip of Honshu, where the Pacific Ocean meets the Sea of Japan, is roughly four hundred miles and the width is about seventy-five miles.  Main roads ran up both coasts with crossovers through the mountains every hundred or so miles.  We had a choice of taking the smaller, back roads which are slower, more scenic and free, or the excellent highways which are fast, never crowded, free of cops but very expensive.  We decided to use both.  Interesting note: this is the first and only auto trip we’ve taken in any country where the highway tolls exceeded the amount we spent for gas (thank you gas miserly Prius).

There are seven prefectures in Northern Honshu, Tochigi, Fukushima, Yamagata, Akita, Miyagi, Iwate and Aomori.  We knew there were areas along the Pacific Coast that were still closed as a result of the 2011 tsunami and resultant radiation leaks from the Fukushima nuclear power plant.  While we were curious to see this area, we didn’t want to take any chance of being exposed to radiation.  We had no information as to where the contaminated areas were and which roads to avoid and of course any warning signs would be in Japanese.

There are five or six principal cities in Northern Honshu plus a multitude of small towns and lake areas worth visiting. Using Lonely Planet, we made a rough plan to visit the main cities and spend time on both coasts, which meant crossing the mountains several times.  After leaving Nikko, in the central prefecture of Tochigi, we headed west to spend the night in Niigata on the Sea of Japan, a large city with a population of over 800,000.  

The next day we decided we wanted to see the Pacific Coast because we were curious about the aftermath of the tsunami.  We backtracked across the mountains headed for Sendai on the Pacific but only got as far as Koriyama in Fukushima Prefecture.  We spent the night in a somewhat nondescript businessman’s hotel and learned quickly about the Japanese hotel experience which is very different than the US or other countries.  

We were traveling without reservations because we usually didn’t know where we’d be stopping for the night.  We learned that many of the cities and especially the smaller towns don’t have many hotels and the few hotels are often filled with traveling Japanese businessmen.  We also learned that you pay by the person not the room, that hotels were generally more expensive than comparable ones in the US and that the rooms were usually small with basic amenities.  But they were always clean and quite functional.

The following morning we headed toward the coast with the objective of reaching Sendai, the capital city of Miyagi province with a population of about one million.  We reached the coast road near the city of Iwaki and headed north.  Sendai was only a distance of 150 miles, about a three hour drive, or so we thought.  

As we traveled north along the coast we saw the destruction caused by the tsunami with piles of wrecked cars, trucks, motorcycles, boats and damaged buildings. Since the coast is hilly, the destruction followed the terrain.  Structures on hills were protected from the sea and suffered no damage while those open to bays were totally destroyed.  It was creepy seeing the extensive destruction and realizing how many people were killed when the giant tsunami swept inland.

We continued toward Sendai when we came to a military roadblock with tanks and soldiers blocking the highway.  Lots of signs but all in Japanese which we couldn’t read. The soldiers were amazed that we had gotten that far since there were no other cars going that way. While we couldn’t understand what they were saying, it was very clear that we had to turn around.  

We meandered through some of the side streets in towns which were totally deserted and had the eerie feeling that we were in a movie about the end of the world.  Empty restaurants with tables set and waiting for customers, deserted stores and houses and no cars or people anywhere; very creepy.  We started thinking that maybe there was radiation in the vicinity from any nuclear power plant leak, and that’s when we decided to get the hell out of there.  Since we didn’t glow the next day and felt fine we assumed we didn’t have any nuclear contamination.

We got to Sendai later that evening, found a nice hotel and then had our first minor misfortune, with the Prius getting a blowout because I didn’t see a low concrete curb.  We were lucky finding a Toyota dealer around the corner and marveled at how efficient and polite they were in getting us a tire and having the car ready the following morning.  All that with Ben using our smart phone for translating from English to Japanese.

After two nights in Sendai, our plan was to take six days to drive to Aomori, the apple capital of Japan, located at the northern tip of the island.  Because it would be too difficult and costly to bring the rental car across the Tsugaru Strait by ferry, we planned to return the car in Aomori and take the high speed train under the world’s longest undersea tunnel to Hakodate in Hokkaido where we had reserved a second Prius.  That plan worked fine without any hitches.

After leaving Sendai we made overnight stops in Tono, famous for its mythical creatures called Kappa, Kakunodate, noted for its perfectly preserved samurai houses and cherry blossoms, Hirosaki, a lovely castle town where we had a very memorable dinner with a husband and wife singing and playing old Japanese instruments and Towada Lake a lovely resort area in beautiful Towada National Park.  We then spent one night in Aomori where we returned our trusty Prius and the next day boarded the JR (Japan Railways) Shinkansen super Hakucho for a two-hour ride to Hakodate in Hokkaido.  

It was a thrill to take the very modern and fast train through the Seikan Tunnel, the longest seabed tunnel in the world.  When we got to Hakodate, the first Japanese city whose port was opened to foreign trade in 1854, we took a taxi to the Loisir Hotel which we had booked online before we left home.  The next day we got our rental car, another white Prius with a GPS in English, and were on our way to explore Hokkaido 

We spent one night in Hakadote sampling some of the best seafood in the world, a bit pricey, and headed north with only four days left to see the rest of Hokkaido.  Our plan was to get to Sapporo on the fourth night, return the car and fly from Sapporo to Tokyo and then home.  We didn’t have enough time to drive the long distance from Sapporo back to Tokyo.

Some facts about Hokkaido: it’s the largest prefecture in Japan accounting for 20% of Japan’s land area, with only 4% of the country’s population.  It’s surrounded on all sides by water, Pacific Ocean, Sea of Japan and the Sea of Okhotsk, and is about the size of Austria.   It has two volcanic zones with many volcanoes and hot springs.  There are several national parks and excellent roads.  Hokkaido’s main attractions in the summer are its mountains and beautiful scenery.  We decided to just drive north and see what we could see.

 We had no hotel reservations, other than in Sapporo, but at this point had gotten expert at finding hotel rooms. But Hokkaido was different than Honshu in many ways.  We knew Hokkaido was most known and visited for its world class skiing, but we didn’t realize that many of the hotels would be closed in the summer.  There aren’t many tourists, Japanese or foreign, visiting this part of the country in the summer.  

We had some problems finding lodging, but with persistence and Ben’s limited Japanese we always found decent enough lodgings.  The first night we spent in Muroran on the Pacific coast, a somewhat nondescript city.  In a fierce rainstorm we were turned away at several hotels before Ben was able to get a recommendation for a hotel where we got one of the last rooms.  

The next day we drove to the ski resort of Furano, a beautiful town located in the exact center of Hokkaido and with the nickname Heso no Machi, Japanese for “navel town.”  The Furano ski resort, where we stayed, hosted the recent Snowboarding World cup.  We visited a local cheese factory, had a nice dinner at a Ghengis Khan restaurant, mingled with the other guests (we of course were the only Westerners) and left the next morning headed north to Abashiri, a seaside town on the Sea of Oshotsk.

We chose Abashiri as a next destination based on what we read about it in Lonely Planet.  It’s a small fishing village settled in the 1870’s by political prisoners including insurgent samurai.  The town is most famous for the winter drift ice floes that come down from Siberia and Kamchatka in Russia.  The ice floes attract more than 100,000 tourists between January and March.  We also visited the Museum of Northern People which highlights the Ainu, Inuit and Sami people who inhabit the subarctic regions of the world.  The exhibits were extremely well done and I would highly recommend the museum to anyone interested in these peoples.   

We were running low on time and the next day drove the fast (and expensive) expressway to Sapporo for our last two nights in Hokkaido before our flight to Tokyo.  We quickly fell in love with the city of Sapporo, it’s like a much smaller and more user-friendly version of Tokyo.  It has a population of two million making it the fourth largest city in Japan.  It’s very cosmopolitan with downtown areas and high-end stores similar to New York’s Fifth Avenue.  Many excellent restaurants and, since Hokkaido is surrounded by the sea, fantastic seafood.  We toured Hokkaido University and Ben said he’d be interested in going there for college.

We visited the site of the 1972 Winter Olympics which was the first ever held in Asia.  And of course, we also visited the Sapporo brewery known for its world famous brews.

Our trip came to an end with our flight to Narita, Tokyo’s international airport, where we stayed in the Hilton Tokyo Airport Hotel.  We were amazed at how different the Hilton Hotel and rooms were compared to the many small Japanese hotels we stayed in over the past few weeks: we were back in America without leaving Japan.

In conclusion, this was a great trip. Japan is a wonderful country with very friendly people and lots to see and do. Many great and memorable experiences and the realization that we can successfully visit and enjoy remote areas of countries without needing guides or tours.  More people should venture out on their own and recognize that the world is a fantastic place waiting to be explored and enjoyed.

Art Faibisch, 2013