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The original was posted on /r/japantravel by /u/tangentize on 2024-02-18 01:35:42.

I still have Japan on the brain after my husband and I came back last month from our honeymoon, so I figured sharing a trip report could give me a place to put down my thoughts and would be useful for others planning too. I lurked a lot on here and r/JapanTravelTips, which were both extremely essential resources leading up to our trip.

For this trip, it was our first time to Japan. We definitely wanted to go snowboarding, but otherwise we’re both really into anime/video games, tea, food (but I guess who isn’t into food), and nature, so those influenced what the rest of our activities were. We’re not really into nightlife/bars these days, so you won’t see much of that here.

I’ll give an itinerary overview of our trip for those just looking for the basics, and then get into details for any highlights/lowlights (spoilers for lowlights: flight cancellation, getting sick)

(starred items (*) are transportation/activities that were booked ahead of time, besides the obvious of flights/accommodations)

Day 0 (Thurs, 1/18): Tokyo [Asakusa]

  • Arrive in Haneda at night
  • Senso-ji (night version)
  • Check into our hotel in Asakusa and crash (Asakusa Kokono Club Hotel)

Day 1 (Fri, 1/19): Tokyo [Asakusa / Ginza / Nihonbashi / Akihabara]

  • Senso-ji (day version) + surrounding Asakusa side streets
  • Breakfast: toast (February Cafe)
  • Snack: Mister Donut
  • Knife shopping along Kappabashi
  • Snack: Daigakuimo Chibaya
  • Lunch: conveyor belt sushi (Hinatomaru)
  • Tea: Jugetsudo Tea Shop & Cafe in Ginza
  • Pokemon Cafe/Center* in Nihonbashi
  • Akihabara sightseeing + shopping (Kanda shrine, Animate, Mandarake, arcades, etc.)
  • Snack: Magikarp taiyaki (Kurikoan Akihabara)
  • Dinner: 7-11 tamago sando

Day 2 (Sat, 1/20): Tokyo > Kawaguchiko

  • Breakfast: Quick stop at bakery
  • Pokemon Center Tokyo DX (again)
  • Lunch: ekiben from stand in Tokyo Station
  • Bus* from Tokyo Station to Kawaguchiko Station
  • Check into ryokan (Ubuya)
  • Dinner: ryokan kaiseki
  • Winter fireworks + onsen

Day 3 (Sun, 1/21): Kawaguchiko

  • Breakfast: ryokan provided
  • Kawaguchi Asama Shrine
  • Lunch: Houtou Fudou North Main Shop
  • Oshino Hakkai
  • Dinner: ryokan kaiseki
  • Winter fireworks (again)

Day 4 (Mon, 1/22): Kawaguchiko > Nozawa Onsen

  • Breakfast: ryokan provided
  • Bus* from Kawaguchiko Station to Tokyo Station
  • Lunch: onigiri and strawberry sando from Tokyo Station, Fujiyama cookies from Kawaguchiko
  • Shinkansen* + bus from Tokyo Station to Nozawa Onsen
  • Check into inn (Residence Yasushi)
  • Dinner: oden (En)

Days 5 - 8 (Tues-Fri, 1/23-1/26): Nozawa Onsen

These days were all pretty similar, so I’m condensing them, but main callouts

  • Pick up rental snowboards at Nozawa Sports Thanx*
  • Snowboarding at Nozawa Onsen Snow Resort (took one rest day due to sickness & bad winds closing down most of the trails)
  • Exploring the cute village
  • Private onsen at inn
  • Friday dinner: Kamakura Village* in Iiyama (snow huts!)

Day 9 (Sat, 1/27): Nozawa Onsen > Tokyo

  • Breakfast: inn provided
  • Bus + Shinkansen* + subway to Shinjuku Station
  • Drop luggage off at hotel (Yuen Shinjuku)
  • Lunch: ramen (Ramen Hosenka)
  • Snack: strawberry custard crepe (Pearl Lady)
  • LisAni!LIVE* at Nippon Budokan (anime music concert, we went primarily for Yuki Kajiura/FictionJunction + LiSA)
  • Dinner: FamilyMart Famichiki

Day 10 (Sun, 1/28): Tokyo [Shibuya]

  • Meiji Jingu
  • Brunch: Winter Festival in Yoyogi Park
  • Shopping along Omotesando
  • Snack: Higuma Doughnuts
  • Tea: Sakurai Japanese Tea Experience* in Aoyama
  • Shopping in Shibuya Parco (Nintendo Store mainly)
  • Shibuya Crossing
  • Shibuya Sky at sunset*
  • Snack: strawberry daifuku from a pop-up spot in Shibuya Scramble Square
  • Dinner: Jujutsu Kaisen Pop-Up Cafe* at BOX cafe&space GEMS Shibuya

Day 11 (Mon, 1/29): Tokyo [Kichijoji / Nakano Broadway / Shinjuku / Nishiazabu]

  • Breakfast: onigiri at Kichijoji Station (Omusubi Gombei)
  • Inokashira Park
  • Ghibli Museum*
  • Snack: pastry at Dans Dix Ans in Kichijoji
  • Lunch: udon (Ibuki Udon)
  • Shopping at Nakano Broadway
  • ARTNIA Square Enix Cafe in Shinjuku
  • Dinner: omakase sushi (Nishiazabu Taku*)

Day 12 (Tues, 1/30): Tokyo [Shinjuku / Ikebukuro / Marunouchi / Odaiba]

  • Rooftop onsen at hotel
  • Breakfast: French toast (Cafe Aaliya)
  • Shopping at Sunshine City in Ikebukuro (Pokemon Center Mega Tokyo and Ghibli store mainly)
  • Shopping in Marunouchi (Ippodo Tea mainly)
  • Lunch: ramen (Ippudo Marunouchi)
  • Gundam Base Tokyo & Unicorn Gundam Statue
  • Snack: sweet potato taiyaki (Naruto Taiyaki Honpo)
  • Final shopping at Haneda to get rid of physical yen and Suica balance

Planning Process

Figured I’d share this since it comes up a lot for how to even approach coming up with an itinerary, but I’ll try not to repeat what I’ve seen typically mentioned.

For me specifically, I’ll be upfront and say that my full-time job is a researcher, and considering I’ve wanted to go to Japan for a loooong time now (and had a trip planned in fall 2020 but had to cancel it), I researched a ton for this trip. I’ll admit it was probably overplanning, but I enjoyed it, though I’d definitely tone it down the next time we go now that I’ve got most of my initial must-dos out of the way.

A lot of comments around here also say they found their favorite parts of their trip through meandering or by accident. That all sounds very romantic, but I have terrible luck and didn’t want to leave it up to chance. There were multiple things that ended up on our itinerary that were very unlikely we were going to accidentally stumble upon unless I did the research ahead of time (e.g. Winter Festival in Yoyogi Park, JJK pop-up cafe, LisAni concert).

We still had open time in our schedule, but it was more like (and especially in Tokyo) “here’s the 10-15 things we marked as interesting in the area, do we want to do/eat any of these?” I’m definitely not saying that the more free-flow plans don’t work, they just don’t work for us (I have too much FOMO/had very specific things I wanted to do in Japan, and my husband doesn’t like aimlessly meandering in a city, he’s very goal-oriented, haha).

There were also a lot of things in our schedule that needed prior knowledge of the reservation process and being on top of things. Again, I kind of get a thrill from the process of getting those almost-unobtainable things if I care enough (convention/concert tickets fall into that category for example, or some achievements in video games), so this was something I was fine doing. It mostly meant marking my calendar for dates/times to be aware of, along with keeping notes about the process that I had read about. Happy to answer any questions here for things needing reservations on our itinerary, but there’s so many guides out there already for a lot of them.

TRIP DETAILS

Day 0 (or really Day -1):

We were supposed to leave Tuesday afternoon out of Seattle and arrive in Tokyo Wednesday night. That is until some drunk idiot bit a flight attendant on the flight from Tokyo to Seattle and the plane had to turn around, which meant we now had no plane. Yes, I’m still salty about this.

This basically threw out our original first day plans and left us in limbo of what was going to happen for 24h. I’ll spare the details on dealing with ANA, but this night was me basically panicking in an airport hotel, woo. (Side note: I had attempted to use the Timeshifter app that had been recommended here for reducing jetlag, but unfortunately this change erased those efforts so I can’t give a proper review there.)

The silver lining on this day was that I was able to re-book our Pokemon Cafe reservation which we were going to miss, and pushed it to the next day because there happened to be exactly one open time slot when I checked the website. (Thanks random person who actually canceled! I was also able to cancel my original reservation in the system, so hopefully someone else benefited from that.)

(new) Day 0: Seattle > Tokyo [Asakusa]

Once the ANA counter at the airport opened at noon, we finally were able to sort out everything and got ourselves on that day’s flight out to Haneda. We arrived at around 8pm Thursday night.

  • Customs: I will say I was really surprised at how fast going through customs was; we had a <5min stop at the airport bathroom before starting that process (also this was my first realization that bidets were going to be everywhere, and they are awesome), but basically there wasn’t a line at all, and even our luggage was just spinning on the carousel waiting for us while everyone else had already moved on. Maybe we just got there at a really dead time?
  • Luggage forwarding: We used Yamato to forward our snowboarding/heavier winter gear to Nozawa, and I’d say this line had a longer wait than customs, haha. I had printed out a list of our hotels’ addresses in both English and Japanese to share with those helping us fill out the form, which streamlined the process anytime we did luggage forwarding. We then just had our two carry-on bags each (backpack and spinner)
  • IC card: We had gotten cash ahead of time from my bank before leaving Seattle, so it was easy enough to drop by the Welcome Suica vending machine and pay physical yen for a card since my husband has an Android phone. I was able t…

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