Finally Mt Fuji

Our last week in Japan and boy was it a good one - we stayed in a fantastic Ryokan in Isawa-Onsen that certainly pushed the culinary boat out! Mt Fuji was cool to see even outside of cherry blossom season, and the Teamlab experience in Toyko was a blast.

Monday 23rd June: Nagano to Isawa-Onsen

A very rainy start to the morning as we headed to the Nagano Art Museum to visit the Toshio Suzuki and Ghibli Exhibition: an exhibition about the Studio Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki. The first half of the exhibition was about his childhood life and career journey through to Studio Ghibli, and the second half was dedicated to Studio Ghibli films themselves. It was super cool to read (via translate) some of the backstory behind those epic films, and we even got a photo with Totoro himself!

With the rain still pouring we made our way to Nagano station to catch our trains to Isawa-Onsen. All sat down and ready to go we heard our first announcement that the train would be slightly delayed… this eventually became a 3 hour delay due to flooding on our line out of Nagano, which scuppered any possible routes through to Isawa-Onsen! Well, the silver lining is that most tourists won’t have experienced such a unique occurrence with Japanese trains…! Eventually the train left and we managed to reroute ourselves, however our Ryokan check-in time was 3pm to 6pm and we had no way to contact the hotel to tell them of our delay! Eventually we arrived at the nearby station and managed to arrange a taxi to our Ryokan.

Fortunately the Ryokan staff was extremely hospitable and understanding when we arrived and promptly checked us in, explained the hotel to us, and showed us our room. We were staying in a proper Japanese style room which was so exciting to see. We changed into yakatas and rushed down to make our scheduled dinner time, and were treated to an amazing set meal with several courses! The highlights were a delicious hotpot and scrumptious sashimi, and we even ate sea urchin and a whole small fish! An amazing experience to finish a very rollercoaster day!

Tuesday 24th: Mount Fuji

A lovely night sleep in our beautiful Japanese-style room - it was luxury to have an early morning onsen swim before our fancy brekkie with multiple courses! Never did I think I’d eat octopus or a hot pot for breakfast but sure enough it was all as delicious as last night’s dinner.

We had planned our stop here to visit Mount Fuji-San. Despite the rainy weather we still wanted to go and check it out and we are so glad we did. It was lovely and quiet for the most part and, despite a little bit of rain, it was mostly just a grey day. We didn’t get the quintessential shot with a full view of the mountain, but the summit did peak out as we got to Oishi Park and the beautiful flowers really added to it. She showed for about 45 minutes in total and it was stunning. We don’t think it was snow topped but it was still really lovely watching the clouds clear and then cover back up again! We were still too early to do any hikes up the mountain (they open July 1st) but we had a lovely time strolling around Lake Kawaguchiko, finding the statues of the 7 gods and the different shrines which came with them.

After a lovely day, we got the scenic bus back to Isawa-Onsen and then strolled through the town and back to our Onsen. We were grateful for previously booking into one of the private onsens for a lovely chill out before another delicious set meal in the restaurant. No wine pairing this time, but a beer and a cocktail to wash down our yummy dinner. I’ll let the pictures do the talking but it was so delicious!

Wednesday 25th: Isawa-Onsen to Tokyo

After another yummy brekkie with multiple courses, we took the onsen shuttle to the train station. The sun was back with a vengeance and the wet air made it so humid, so we dropped our big bags to be stored until our train arrived.

We explored the town and found a lovely little temple to complete my temple goshuin book. The lady who gave us the goshuin was lovely and a fellow worshipper gave us the story of the temple and explained how they used cormorants to go fishing in the river. It was a perfect temple to finish on.

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We found a pretty entertaining drain cover in the town and had a lovely walk around a park with an old style house in it. Unfortunately the house wasn’t open but we did enjoy spotting yabbies in the little stream/moat around the house. There were heaps of them when we got looking, ranging from a couple of cm all the way to 10-15cm. En route we noticed a small fruit factory with a shop and popped in for possibly the most delicious peach and peach ice cream we’ve ever had! We then headed back towards the train station and got some noodles in a restaurant. These were the spiciest noodles I think I have ever had so not the most delicious but it did mean the taiyaki which we had when we got to the station was delicious! This was our last big train of the trip as we were heading back to Tokyo for 2 nights before flying to Vancouver.

We thankfully had a stress-free journey and we knew exactly where we were staying as we headed back to Ueno east. We went out and explored an area of Ueno we hadn’t been to before and enjoyed a new experience where they cooked okonomiyaki and monjayaki that was cooked directly in front of us. It was delicious and we have never seen someone move/use the cooking tools as fast as they did to chop the cabbage/pork meat!

Thursday 26th: Tokyo

Our last full day in Japan! Can’t believe our 5 weeks are up. We headed to the imperial palace to view the gardens and hopefully the castle but we didn’t realise you could only get into the palace at certain times of the day and we were right in the middle of the time. It did mean though that we got to see the emperor come back in on his horse and cart which was pretty epic.

The gardens were thankfully still open, so we really enjoyed walking around the gardens and seeing the markers for the old buildings. Our favourite part was the Lily garden and waterfall which was beautiful. We filled up for lunch on some more delicious soufflé pancakes before making the most of the tax free shopping at the Hoka Shop. We also called into the Anime gallery to get our final nerd fill and see an original Totoro animation frame worth $300,000!.

We spent our last meal in Japan in the same way we spent our first meal: Chanko Nabe!! This time we had graduated from the small lunchtime portion to a full sumo worthy sharer bowl! Delicious as before, super glad we ended with it! To round off the night we headed over to the Teamlab World exhibition - an immersive interactive experience of sound and light. In one section we wobbled statues, in another we jumped between platforms, both filled with pretty colours and galactic sounds. The highlights were wading through water for a full sensory experience, seeing the moving orchid garden hanging from the ceiling, and colouring in a jazzy frog before digitising it and releasing it into a digital ecosystem projected on all surfaces of the room. An incredible day to end our stint in Japan!

Well, that was our last full day in Japan. We had an amazing 5 weeks in Japan and feel like we could spend the same again exploring even more, but alas our time had come to an end. We’d thoroughly recommend Japan to anyone, and hopefully our blog posts give you some idea of what you can get up to! Only two more posts left in our Six Months of Travel: our visit to Canada to catch up with our good kiwi friends Fran and Dev.