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Friends and festivals

Will our friends’ advice

suffice to make our raw plans

any more than half-baked?

Well then, it’s decided. The first flight and the first hotel are booked. It’s also clear that we can’t afford an agency to do all our bookings so it’s a plea for help. We are very lucky that my daughter-in-law studied Japanese, is based in Hong Kong and has lots of friends who are knowledgeable about Japan. She very kindly emailed them our outline schedule and to my amazement – these are high powered businesswomen – we had wonderfully detailed and informative responses including, and I quote, “my dorky walking map of Kyoto” which is quite the most useful thing I have ever been sent. Real insider knowledge set out clearly on a series of maps we can follow when we get there. So it was onto the tablet straight away with those. It also helped us to resolve a travel issue that was proving very perplexing.

Hiroshima is an important place to visit for anyone with an interest in history – my wife, or anyone with an excessive sense of guilt – me. But it’s a very long way to travel and if we do include Hiroshima we have to drop some other Murakami or garden locations. Do we not go from Kyoto to Nara for the day? Do we miss out on the wonderful sounding Naoshima Art Island which we’d seen in a leaflet from JNTO and was highly recommended by one of our experts above. On balance and with a memory of a glazed look from an admittedly very young lady in the tourist office when asked whether she would make the long journey – it’s a no for Hiroshima. I know there will be a little regret at not standing in the peace garden to reflect – especially with Garden of the Evening Mists’ Japanese war in Malaya setting fresh in our memories – but apart from the peace park the Japan Guide lists the next three attractions as a garden (not one of Japan’s top three), a concrete reconstruction of the nuked castle and downtown. On balance it looks like the right decision.

My daughter-in-law had always said that festivals in Japan were manic, wonderful occasions and as luck would have it I discovered in the trusty japan-guide.com that Takayama has its Spring Festival on 14-15 April when we had planned to be in Tokyo but hey it’s not far so a quick schedule shuffle and the Takayama festival is on the itinerary. After all japan-guide.com says:

“Takayama is considered one of Japan’s best festivals”.

The citizens of Takayama are greedy in that they have another festival in October but given the proximity to the Northern Japan Alps maybe spring is the better option.

With my excited enthusiasm of course I’d only done a boy look at the guide. Later I discovered the hard way what it told me quite plainly had I bothered to read it:

“The festival gets especially crowded if one or both festival days fall on a weekend or national holiday. As a result, hotels in central Takayama get booked out many months in advance of the festival.”

Never in my life have I clicked on booking site hotel flags with increasing lack of concern to their proximity to the centre of town to find every single one with the legend “SOLD OUT”. Ooops! Ooops! Ooops! Spread the net to 20 miles from Takayama and a room is available. I’m usually sceptical of the exhortation “only one left book now” but in this instance my click is very firm. Who knows what the Pension Green Lake will be like? It’s not far from the festival, it has a bed, it’ll accept my booking. Tripadvisor had two high starred good reviews – but in Japanese and Google translate didn’t help much. However it’s only an hour from Shirakawa Mura the UNESCO World Heritage Site with its steep sloped, thatched-roofed houses which we want to visit anyway and we can get to Takayama.

It’ll do.

We’re there for two nights – it had better do.

Getting ready

Reality bites

Can we achieve our

ideal itinerary

or will there be cuts?

So, despite realising we had selected the busiest and most expensive time to visit Japan, I went online and found a number of likely recipients to advise on and quote for our trip. I emailed the draft itinerary to three specialist Japan tour companies and to the Japan National Tourism Organization’s office in London. I asked them to take a look to see whether they thought our plan was do-able at all and if so what sort of budget we’d be looking at. All were extremely helpful – three were extremely doubtful. The JNTO advice came free and offered me the chance of going in to discuss it. The tour operators all suggested the budget we’d tentatively set ourselves was about half of what was required. They also warned us that we had opted to travel at the most expensive and busy time and that making bookings at all would be difficult and where possible, expensive. I had mentioned that I was aware of this in my covering letter but that because of work commitments, this was sadly the only period this year when we are free to travel.

We had some Avios (Airmiles as was) which would cover the flights to Tokyo with British Airways. So we picked our dates, clicked confirm and Bingo! Stage one the flight out was booked. Except not – the checkout basket kept asking me for credit card details and a significant sum of money. So we abandoned that bit until I could call Avios next day to check it. We continued refining the trip so that we could include as many of the Murakami places, the gardens, ukiyo-e galleries and general tourist sites as possible. I had managed to make it to Kamakura and Nikko on my previous visits – Nikko most notably with overnight ryokan style accommodation in a school staff dormitory, callisthenics with the pupils to a nationally broadcast radio routine at six in the morning as the sun rose followed by a miso soup and pickles breakfast. And yes I still want to go back.

After observing, commenting on and demonstrating practical activities, we did finish relatively early in the school in Nikko and managed to take lunch at a restaurant on Lake Chuzenji which consisted of some of the most delicious freshly caught trout I’ve ever eaten – hope they’ve still got some and haven’t overfished the lake. So that’s another must for the list – to go back and see how much it’s changed – as if I can really remember.

Websites are wonderful things but looking at hotels on them can be very confusing. Booking.com and Agoda.com have settings where you can set prices in GBP and not have to have the calculator to hand. But the very good Japan based sites Rakuten and Jalan only show prices in ¥ per person per night and JapanIcan.com kept freezing on me so I gave up on that. However that first Sunday afternoon we had decided on the E Hotel in Shinjuku for our first two nights in Japan so that at least we had something booked. And at £60 per night for both of us it led us to believe the whole thing might be a reality not just a possibility. We folded the map, put away the guidebooks and shut down the laptop in an optimistic frame of mind.

Next morning did bring something of a shock however when my call to Avios confirmed that while our accumulated miles would indeed buy the tickets to Tokyo they wouldn’t cover the taxes. On reflection and after my initial indignation, this is an understandable Avios policy since fuel surcharges, airport fees and government taxes change all too frequently. So what we’d seen as a free flight is now going to cost us £343.75 each just for taxes. Ah well, as always for most of us there’s no way of avoiding taxes.

Getting ready

Planning a dream trip

Long planned, will this year

see a dream trip to Japan

be reality?

Ever since I was lucky enough to make trips to China and Japan in the late seventies and early eighties, I’ve dreamed about going back – especially to Japan. Those trips were work – a party from the Inner London Education Authority was invited by the Ministries of Education in Beijing and Tokyo to run a series of lectures and workshops for teachers. They worked us hard and I think we gave them value for money but there was only a very little time for sightseeing. But what I did manage to see of Japan in particular gave me a lasting hunger to return.

Then discovering more of Japan through its literature provided a way of staving off the hunger. An earlier Japan was evoked in novels by Kobo Abe, Akutagawa, Kawabata and Tanizaki who each brought the country to life through superb description and the painting of atmosphere. In the sixties there was a cult following for Yukio Mishima who gave completely new insights into a different Japan. And then I discovered Murakami (Haruki that is) and the desire to visit and explore grew stronger with every new book. The twin wishes to return to Japan myself and to share my excitement for the country with Dee who is equally hooked, have grown steadily. Time, budget and circumstances have contrived against it until now.

Somehow this year I will celebrate a major milestone birthday – my biblical span is up. I can’t really believe it but my birth certificate has inscribed in that beautiful, long-lost functionary script my date of birth in July 1943. So it must be true. We’ll actually be in Japan for Dee’s birthday but perhaps I’ll join in early and, who knows, just carry on until the due date.

Our Murakami pursuit will take us on a Wild Sheep Chase and a right old Dance, Dance, Dance in Hokkaido in the north, extensive forays into Tokyo and several other parts of Honshu and down to Shikoku to pursue Kafka, Nakata and Johnnie Walker from Kafka on the Shore. In addition to this we were both in the process of reading Tan Twan Eng’s Booker candidate Garden of the Evening Mists and an existing interest in Japanese gardens, reawakened on a recent visit to Tatton Park, became even stronger. So a lovely gift of a few years ago 1001 Gardens You Must Visit Before You Die came off the shelf and the itinerary expanded to include at least three of the country’s most highly regarded gardens: Kenrokuen at Kanazawa on the western China Sea coast; Korakuen in Okayama overlooking the Inland Sea and Ritsurin Koen in Takamatsu on Shikoku Island. Well at least we’d intended to go to Takamatsu since Kafka on the Shore is largely set there.

Early in 2013 it became clear that a space in our work schedules would permit a sensible length trip to Japan in April and May. It would also afford us an opportunity of visiting my son and daughter-in-law who are living in Hong Kong. We had been working for some time on an itinerary that would take in many of the locations we knew through reading – especially those of Murakami. We needed a month to do it justice. We’d picked the most expensive time to travel since we include Golden Week in our dates with no less than five national holidays and the time when all Japanese go travelling. It’s also of course smack in the middle of hanami – the cherry blossom viewing season.

Ah well, best bite the bullet (train) and see what can be done.

Then the other day walking to meet some fellow Watford supporters for a City ‘Orns monthly drinks and dinner I came across this in the middle of Bloomsbury!

IMAG0137 — Cherry trees are blooming in Bloomsbury
March 2013

Who needs to go to Japan?