Two weeks in Japan

(plus a bonus day in Shanghai)

4.16.2019 - 4.27.2019

I just spent two weeks traveling in Tokyo and Kyoto and thought a writeup would make a good first blog post. This was something of a “senior trip” since I’ll be starting work next month. The main goals of the trip were properly take our time to explore, find good cheap food, and generally appreciate the small things that are different about Japan. The writeup will be structured as such.

I don’t like traveling with a lot of gear so all I brought on this trip was my D800 with the Nikon 35mm f/1.8G and a GoPro. Maybe twice I wished I had something wider but 35mm really is the sweet spot for me, probably my favorite weird body/lens combo ever is still the D3 with the crop sensor version of the Nikon 35mm f/1.8G. A lot of images I shot with that combo in high school went into my photojournalism portfolio.

Travel

Here’s how we traveled:

Fly into Narita via Air China with a 22 hour layover in Pudong
Narita Express to get to and from the airport
Airbnb in Ebisu
Walk or use the 3-day unlimited metro pass for tourists
Nozomi Shinkansen to Kyoto

This worked pretty well for us. Everyone speaks English well enough to reserve train seats and buy tickets, and the metro ticket machines all have international language options. We walked anywhere from 6-10 miles a day but Tokyo actually feels relatively walkable.

We were fortunate enough to have one of my friend’s parents bring us around in Shanghai. They took us on a Huangpujiang river cruise as well as Chenghuangmiao to have xiaolongbao before we continued on for Tokyo. Shoutout to them for making me want to properly explore Shanghai and the rest of China soon.

Once we got to Tokyo we decided to explore progressively farther from our Airbnb in Ebisu. We spend most of our time in Shibuya/Harajuku, Tsukiji/Ginza, and Ueno (to look for the celebrity shiba inu Marutaro) but also went to Akihabara, Bunkyo, Meguro, and Ochanomizu for some specific things.

Yebisu Garden Place, right by our Airbnb.

Tsukiji.

12 story Uniqlo in Ginza.

Nijubashi Bridge at the Imperial Palace.

Ueno Park.

tokyobike store in Yanaka. I spent the entire trip looking for a pair of Moonstars but they were sold out in the entire city. I ended up finding some Shoes Like Pottery, which are rebranded Moonstars, for not much more.

Yuyake Dandan staircase. The guidebook said there were a lot of cats here but we only saw one sad-looking stray who was scared of people. Possibly the biggest disappointment of the trip.

Shinkansen to Kyoto.

Monkey Park Iwatayama. A colony of Japanese macaques lives here. These guys just hang out on the mesh and wait to be fed. You can buy packets of either apples, bananas, or peanuts for 150 yen to feed them. On the way down the mountain these two monkeys were having an apparently very enjoyable grooming session.

Arashiyama bamboo forest.

Gion.

Nara. Feeding deer was for sure a highlight of the trip. You buy packs of wafers from vendors around the park to feed the deer and instantly get swarmed. You’d think they would be super polite since they’ve learned to bow after you feed them but I was bit and headbutted a few times by some overly eager deer. Super cute and kind of derpy and totally worth the trip out from Tokyo.

Fushimi Inari torii. The crowds thin out as you keep going up the mountain so if you want a picture alone with the torii you gotta work for it.

Yoyogi Park. Cherry blossoms were in bloom AND we saw like three shiba inus here.

Food

Food was surprisingly cheap and unsurprisingly delicious. One problem we did encounter into was that vegetables seemed impossible to find, as most meals consisted of rice or noodles, a protein, and pickles. Produce that we did see in grocery stores was pretty expensive.

Coco Ichibanya tonkatsu curry with vegetables, everywhere. ~1000 yen. Super satisfying but I feel like Japanese curry is hard to get wrong.

Afuri ramen (yuzu shio), Ebisu. ~1000 yen. Soup was nice and light, yuzu was not overwhelming, chashu was more grilled than braised but pretty tender. I usually don’t get shio ramen but glad I did here.

Marutake tamago, Tsukiji. 100 yen. No tamago will ever compare to this, I think I went back at least twice to use up our coins.

Kogane udon, Ebisu. ~1200 yen. I don’t understand udon as well as I do ramen but this was great on a cold, rainy day. The tempura set udon is some 200 yen more than the shrimp tempura udon but you get much more (squid, chicken, and shrimp tempura).

Unagi Hashimoto, Bunkyo. 3300 yen. This place has one Michelin star and is well deserved. The unagi is incredibly melty, the sauce is minimal, and the rice is great. We talked to the owner’s wife and she said the restaurant has been in the Hashimoto family for 6 generations now.

Pork Cutlet Yamabe, Ueno. 900 yen. Cheap, crispy, juicy tonkatsu.

Cafe & Pancake Gram, Harajuku. 950 yen. I’m not actually sure what the correct order of words is in the name, some translations say Gram & Pancake Cafe or other combinations. Anyway we came here for their apparently web-famous jiggly pancakes–to be accurate we came here for jiggly cheesecakes that we confused with pancakes as the jiggly cheesecakes are found in Osaka. The process to actually get these pancakes is slightly ridiculous. The cafe only makes 60 servings of the pancakes each day, 20 servings at each serving time of 11 AM, 3 PM, and 6 PM. You have to come line up one hour before the serving time to try to get a pancake ticket, then return at the serving time with your ticket to redeem it for real food. Pretty good pancakes though, got Instagram food = worth.

Musoshin, Gion, Kyoto. ~1000 yen I think. Came here by way of Reddit. The tonkotsu broth here is unbelievably creamy and luxurious yet avoids being overwhelmingly fatty. For some reason their rice is also delicious (get the fried chicken combo). I didn’t see any Japanese people eating there and one of the workers spoke really good English which made me wary at first, but the ramen was super and is my new standard for tonkotsu ramen.

Wakakusa Curry, Nara. 1050 yen. Kind of a weird but good curry. It came with a ton of sliced onions that I mixed in, and combined with the breaded tonkatsu it ended up tasting like onion rings.

Genki Sushi Uobei, Shibuya. 109 yen per plate. Conveyor belt sushi is the future. Order sushi on a tablet at your seat and it is delivered on the conveyor belt in front of you. You can also get ramen, udon, fried chicken, or desserts. We each spent about 1000 yen and left stuffed.

Butayaro, Ochanomizu. 700 yen for a large. This is possibly the best value and most satisfying meal we had, challenged only by Hakodate Ramen Shiokan. We spent our last day basically looking for reasons to come back here. Their menu is basically four things: pork bowl (butadon), side egg, side vegetable, and beer. The place is near the Ochanomizu metro station on the third floor of a tiny building but definitely come here if you’re anywhere close by.

Hakodate Ramen Shiokan, Ebisu. 1000 yen. My favorite ramen of the trip. They give you a huge amount of food: extra noodles, three big pieces of pork, shrimp wontons, egg, menma, spinach, and naruto. They also have very good tsukemen, pork bowl, and gyoza.

Dishonorable mention: あづま, Ginza ~1000 yen. We thought we should try yoshoku and it was not great.

Other things

The taxis in Japan are fantastic. They are mostly Toyota Crowns with these super sweet fender-mounted mirrors.

There are also a ton of tiny space-efficient cars that look like a cross between a minivan and a hatchback.

I didn’t see a ton of sports cars but did spot an Enzo in Shibuya, an old GTR in Ebisu (not sure the model), and a few air-cooled 911s.

I guess this section is really just about cars.

Some other things we noticed:

People stand on the left or right in different cities. In Tokyo we got used to standing/walking on the left, but in Kyoto everything was switched back to the right like in the US.
Food felt a lot cheaper because we never had to tip. In many places we also paid before we got our food so we ate a lot faster without having to hang around waiting for the check.
Despite the apparent technology everywhere, most things feel oddly old/retro. The combination is kind of Black Mirror-y.
Buttons on electronics are always really big.