There are few places in the world you can’t wait to go back to even before you’ve left and Japan is certainly one of them for us. The Land of the Rising Sun (cliché, we know, but there’s really something magical about being one of the first people to wake up in the new day) managed to win us over as soon as we stepped foot at Haneda Airport and it still has its grip on our hearts long after we left.
We found ourselves consistently using the word ‘amazing’ to describe our trip so we decided to put together a list of the things that impressed us the most. We’ll start with the highlights that made us fall in love with the country and will dive deeper into some of the destinations we visited later on.
Amazing places
We had 9 days to explore Japan so we stuck to the classics – Tokyo, Kyoto, Himeji, Osaka and Nara were our places of choice for an intro to Japan. If you’re thinking that’s just barely scratching the surface, you’re absolutely right, but hey - we had to start somewhere 😊
The top of our list have to be Nara and Tokyo. History and modernity, nature and concrete, tranquility and crowds - these two destinations alone encompass so much of what fascinated us about Japan.
Amazing architecture
The old temples and castles in combination with sky scrapers and the odd looking but quite functional houses are all well worth seeing. Europe, where we’ve undoubtedly travelled the most, has a ton of great buildings itself and each country has its own slightly unique flavour. However things aren’t shockingly different from one country to the other. What’s more, when travelling to the US or Australia for example you don’t necessarily get the feeling you’re too far away from home. Not the case in Japan – you know from the moment you look outside that you’ve gone to a completely different world and it’s so exciting to explore it.
Amazing animals
The harmony in Japan seems to exist not only among people but between humans and animals too. One of the most memorable experiences we had was visiting Nara and feeding deer cookies to the many, many friendly deer in the area around the main temples. The proximity to what we normally consider to be a wild animal and the shockingly good manners they had was astonishing!
We already have a wish list for our next visit including a cat island, fox island, monkey spa, and buying a ton of cat-related items (did we mention we love cats? :)) and we can only hope they’re all as polite as the deer.
(not so) Amazing technology
Vending machines are everywhere and the toilet tech is astonishing, but other than that Japan doesn’t seem to have embraced automation as much as we’d expected. There were no robots to guide you on the streets or serve you drinks in bars, and worst of all – card payments are rarely accepted. How strange for the country that launched the first high speed trains in the world all the way back in the 1960s!
Amazing food
We expected this one, but still – OMG, the food! The fish and beef are exceptional of course, but there are also a ton of other things that are a must try. The black sesame ice-cream is one of a kind and you can’t really get the same taste elsewhere in the world. The sweet red beans filled fish taiyaki made fresh is out of this world and in our humble opinion better than its Korean counterpart, the bungeo-ppang. The hot octopus filled Takoyaki was worth waiting for, the cabbage omelette Okonomiyaki, the tiny octopus on a stick filled with egg yolk… you get the vibe.
One very odd thing is that cheese is almost completely missing from the menu. What’s up with that? With more than 1.3m cows living (and admittedly, being slaughtered) in Japan we would expect a ton of interesting cheeses to be made.
Amazing atmosphere
Our favourite thing about Japan by far has to be the culture. It is so different to anywhere we’d been before – the way everything is so well organized, the attention to detail that was evident throughout, the general feeling that everything has its place and everyone has their purpose created a unique atmosphere of calmness we’d never experienced anywhere else in the world. For us, coming from not just anywhere but the Balkans, people standing in line to board metro trains during rush hour is truly a sight to behold and indicative of a deeply rooted love for order and a society where care for others and smooth coexistence is held in high regard.