Over thousands of years, the human species has strived, endured difficulties, fought wars, progressed and ended up creating some rather beautiful and interesting civilizations arounds the world. Japan is without any doubt one of those shining examples that has overcome numerous natural and manmade disasters and obstacles and today stands as a role model for the entire world.

My real interest in Japan started around 4-5 years ago. A stable job and lots of after-work hours gave me an opportunity to read more about the world. In the end, I had this plan to visit two countries soon. One was Israel, thanks to its splendid religious and historical attractions and the second was Japan. I knew for a fact that Japan was more than Sony, Anmie and all the other success stories it is known for. There was this mystery that I wanted to uncover. Israel happened in 2014 and finally this year, the dream of Japan was realized! No matter how much I write in the coming weeks about Japan, I am sure I will not be tired of it. Perhaps, someday I will be back. But until then, I need to make sure I make a note of my splendid journey across the main island.

I will cover the first part talking about the preparation and logistics. Let me start by saying that I checked so many awesome blogs written by travelers around the world. Indeed, I am going to cite them wherever I take the liberty of following their advice/itineraries. See, this is the best thing about this generation. People take time and share their experiences, in the end helping some absolute strangers such as me!

One thing to note, my observations are from the perspective of an Indian male who has spent majority of his life in Delhi and the past decade outside India, partly in UK and USA.

Research and Planning

Japan may be approximately the size of Montana in terms of geographical area, but it is 10 times denser than US when it comes to its rich cultural heritage. Though our trip was for 11 days, it might leave me bitter if I start counting the number of places we couldn’t visit. It’s sensible to select a few good places and leave some space for you to immerse yourself. We restricted ourselves to Tokyo and Kyoto and their surrounding areas and I feel very contended! Besides Lonely Planet and a few other travel guides I borrowed from the local library, I heavily relied on internet. You see, it’s fairly easy. Just do a simple search based on the number of days you plan to spend. For example, I used to google all the time for ’10 day trip to Japan’! This was perhaps the first blog I ever came across related to Japan and the fact the blogger is a vegetarian only made it even more meaningful for me. These are the simple steps I would follow next time I go on another trip:

1. Determine the number of days you want to spend.
2. Figure out what places of your interest you can comfortably cover within these days. As I mentioned above, you can start looking for fixed length itinerary ideas.
3. Once you determine the places you want to (and can) visit, individually research on each of these places. I will be writing about how such itineraries (such as one for Hiroshima) helped me tremendously.

I would strongly suggest for some basic planning. Language barrier and other constraints might make it difficult to rely on ‘spur of the moment’ calls. Again, it’s your call!

Expenses

Let me begin with saying, traveling around Japan is not the same as traveling around some other East or South Asian country when it comes to expenses. Don’t want to go into the macro economics of the country, but you need to be comfortable with the cost. At the end of my trip, I have no hesitation in saying that every penny spent during the trip was worth it! If one compares, the overall cost of living in Japan is ~14% higher than that of US(average of all cities). To put it in a different way if you were to be living in SF like me, you won’t feel much difference when you are paying for food etc. Of course the Airbnb was affordable in Japan!

To begin with, I will broadly categorize the expected expenses in the following categories:

• Airfare
• Accommodations
• Transportation
• Food
• Site admission tickets
• Gifts

Airfare

Be on the lookout for tickets at least 5-6 months in advance. Japan is connected to almost all the major US cities. In fact when I had a layover in Narita on my way back from India, I saw a flight from Narita direct to Houston! (PS: May be I underestimating the importance of Houston). An Economy fare for something 3-4 months from the current date should cost around $1600 for a direct flight between SF and Tokyo. NYC-SFO would be something around the same price range. We got lucky with a multi-city itinerary SFO<->TYO<->DEL costing around $1500 in the month of October. Of course, you could find a better deal with a non-direct flight or using your frequent flyer miles.

Accommodations

My favorite part. The day we decided we are going to travel to Japan, I had Airbnb as my first preference. Japan is inundated with Hotels. But I clearly had no idea and with a somewhat decent hotel costing at least $125 per night in a good locality in Tokyo, it totally messed up my budget. In the end we found great places in Tokyo and Kyoto.

The train stations in Tokyo can be tricky. If it’s a major station such as Tokyo, Shinjuku or Shibuya, expect to walk a lot! These stations are like megacities with multiple railway networks operating. Shinkansen, JR and Tokyo Metro, you will find them all under one roof. A good friend of mine had suggested two things:

• Try to stay closer to train station (preferably JR, I will tell you later why)
• Choose your base city in a given region and do day trips instead of dragging your luggage everywhere you go!

Keeping this in mind, we chose Tokyo and Kyoto as our base camps!

Tokyo: I checked a lot on Airbnb for a good accommodation with a decent price tag. Good thing with Japan, there is no dearth of such places. We ended up in a place called TAKADANOBABA. It was literally a 3 minutes’ walk to the station(exactly as advertised). We paid around $75 per night(x7) and let me say this, considering the comfort and the location, it was totally worth it!

Kyoto: For Kyoto, I took a bit of a risk. I booked my accommodation just around 2 weeks before my trip which really limited the options in the price range I was looking for. However, the risk totally paid off! Our accommodation was in the Kamigyo Ward, around 30 minutes bus ride from Kyoto central station. The only time we had a problem was riding the bus to this place for the first time, with all our luggage! I felt sorry for the inconvenience we caused to other passengers, but then people are too nice out there and understood our situation. We ended up paying around the same, $75(X4). It was a step above in terms of the space compared to the one in Tokyo.

All in all, we spent $1000 on accommodation. No doubt, we could have managed something lower than this, but I really wanted to experience a decent and comfortable stay! Also, I only looked for entire houses. One could save a lot by going for a shared or private room.