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tokyo - january 2019
Japan in winter. This is a long anticipated trip, a rail tour starting in Tokyo and then south and east. The depth of winter seems like an odd time to choose, but the weather then is supposed to...
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hakone
Time to move on to experience a little of rural Japan. Cloase to Tokyo is the hot-springs area of Hakone. We arrived there via the high speed Shinkansen and then two little local trains, taking us...
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hiroshima and nagasaki
Now a prosperous modern city resting on the ashes of the fallen, Hiroshima carefully reminds us of the horrors of war, and stands as a champion for peace. The memorial museum lets the personal...
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kyoto
So from the farthest point on our trip we retraced our route as far as Kyoto. The station features a vast concourse matching Grand Central or Milan in scale, a futurist edifice designed by...
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japan - conclusions
So what will we remember about this whistlestop tour of Japan? Admittedly we only skimmed the surface but we saw a lot in two sun-filled weeks, in which we travelled 1600 miles by train, over 100...
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back to japan 1 - tokyo
FLYING IN EARLY we hit the rush hour on the metro to Ginza and it seems very familiar: jammed in tight, silent, eyes locked on phones where space permits: but different too: uniformity of black...
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back to japan 2 - hokkaido
SO IT'S OFF to the snowy north. The shinkansen whisks us via a long tunnel to the island of Hokkaido. First stop Hakodate, once the main port linking the north to the main island of Honshu. It feels...
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back to japan 3 - fukuoka
LEAVING the north behind we boarded a plane with about 200 school students, all in that formal midshipman's uniform, and obediently lining up in columns, boys to the left, girls to the right. At...
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back to japan 4 - osaka
(or as I occasionally called it, Ocado!) This is the heart of a megalopolis of 19 million people, taking in Kyoto and about twenty other cities of the coastal plain, and it shows: huge retail and...
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back to japan 5 - kyoto
At the other end of the megalopolis lies Kyoto, the capital of Japan for a thousand years. Surrounded by hills, it is self contained and full of history. This was a revisit as we liked it so much...
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back to japan 6 - kanazawa
NEXT DAY it's off to the north coast past the wide grey expanse of Lake Biwa; past snow dusted mountains under mists that make them look like a traditional scroll painting. First impressions of...
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