lol this is incredible. I googled my username, wondering what kind of stuff from the past I could dig up and found this thread... I can't believe people revived it.
I indeed made it out, and am here to give you all a detailed trip report nearly 20 years later,
with photos!
I took a lot more of course, but most were just the usual shots of buildings and streets, nothing very interesting.
To give some context, my best friend at the time were huge anime nerds and had spent high school taking Japanese classes and learning about the culture. I'm Japanese by descent but never grew up knowing much about my heritage (3rd generation, parents very westernized). For both of us, it was a kind of pilgrimage, not to mention a trip to celebrate graduating high school. We stayed for the first few days with my uncle's friend Glen, who lived in a small house in the mountains of Zushi, Kanagawa. He ran
an English cafe out of his home, which was located beside a little shrine and a graveyard (He said he was able to rent it for cheap because of this). Glen provided us with a soft landing to our arrival in Japan, showing us how things worked and taking us on a day trip to Kamakura. We then set off on our own for Tokyo, where we stayed in Taito at the Taito Ryokan, which is basically a little hostel inside a Showa or Taisho era house. It's still there today and I always get a kick when I happen to walk by it during my subsequent visits to Tokyo.
This trip was filled with the most incredible memories, but one of my favorites came on the first night of Tokyo when we, reassured by the information from this very post, bought our first drinks from the convenience store (beer for my friend, lemon chu-hi for me), and hit the streets late at night to explore around our accommodations. Of course we had no smart phones or gps, so everything felt a lot bigger and more mysterious then--we didn't really know what was close by or what to expect. We were tipsy from both the drinks and the elation of
actually being in Tokyo, and we turned a corner and came face-to-face with the grandeur of Sensoji Temple, completely empty after dark. I don't think I'd ever seen anything so impressive before in my life. I will never forget sitting on those huge stone steps beneath that massive lantern, sipping our drinks and talking about how cool it is to be in Japan.
We toured Tokyo for a week and saw the usual sights--Shibuya crossing, Shinjuku, Harajuku, Akihabara... The best part was just exploring without much aim, wandering and talking about whatever stuff we cared about back then at 18. Then we took the bullet train to Kyoto.
I still remember how different that city felt from Tokyo, and how much calmer I felt there. It was definitely not the Kyoto of today, with packed tourist crowds. We went to Kiyomizu and there was hardly anyone there. Of course, it was also the rainy season. Some of the hardest rain I'd ever experienced up until that point. My shoes got soaked and I wasn't able to get them dry until I put them into a coin dryer. I remember us seeking shelter from a downpour under the eaves of Nanzenji temple, and the way those huge wooden beams smelled in the humid summer air. One of my favorite memories in Kyoto was when we caught a bus to go back to the city center, but after 30 minutes or so we realized we were actually heading up into the mountains. We got off at this misty bus stop straight out of a Miyazaki movie, with not a soul around. We were the only patrons inside a riverside restaurant where we ate noodles with a view of the rushing river below, and then walked around the mountain road seeing what we could find. Stumbled upon a couple of temples (after the fact concluded they were Jingo Ji and Saimyoji) and explored on our own. The only others we encountered up there were the people who ran the temples. It was a lesson that the best travel experiences often don't come from planning, but from mistakes made.
And to that point, during the last part of the trip, we received word from Glen that one of his friends and colleagues had a son who was our age, living in Kyoto and training to be a Buddhist monk. Arrangements were made for us to stay at the temple his grandparents managed. I was nervous to deviate from our plan but I'm glad my friend convinced me. We had our own guest house at the temple, and Tomo (the son/monk in the training) came over with his buddies who were all studying to become monks and took us out for a Japanese teenage boy experience in Kyoto. We all ended up going to the sento together, then returning to the guest house to eat snacks and converse in broken English and broken Japanese. I'm curious what became of all those guys, and whether Tomo took over the temple (Zuiunin).
After Kyoto, we returned to Tokyo and to Glen's place for a couple more days to wrap up the trip, and got to visit the high school where Glen worked as an English teacher. I remember how uninterested his students were in a couple of American teenagers lol
I was high off that trip for months, dreaming about the next time I'd get to visit Japan. I don't think it's an understatement to say the experience changed my life. I've been to Japan over 10 times now, spent over a year cumulatively there as a tourist and on working holiday, and have been to Hokkaido and all the way down to Yakushima. I see myself returning to visit the country until I'm physically unable.
Again, check out some photos of the trip here:
(http://imgur.com/a/KfZx1pa)
And if you'd like to see photos of my recent trips to Japan I share photography on
Instagram.