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The original was posted on /r/japantravel by /u/SarahSeraphim on 2024-10-17 08:48:32+00:00.
Hello all, just wanted to share some highlights of our past year/this year's trip to Japan. This was a couples trip for me and my husband. It was a pretty spontaneous one but overall it has its scary points and its great points.
Initial planning was done after we secured our flight tickets around Sep 2023. Here is our google map with pins:
The tips shared by redditor phillsar86 was what inspired us to travel during this period :
Tokyo (22-25 December 2023)
We've been to Japan a few times now but we always find reasons to return to Tokyo. We booked tickets for Warner Bros Studio Tour, Harry Potter via Klook for 1pm and spent the entire afternoon there. Even though the timing is 1pm, you can actually go in 1 hour ahead of time, just take note that in winter the cloakroom takes a good 45mins of queuing to store your coats and things. There was also a rest stop in between that sold butterbeer. I would say it is comparable in taste to the one at USJ.
For those who are interested in culture, definitely check out the Kabukiza Theater. In the basement, there will be pop up shops where you can browse a lot of merchandises and you can also purchase goshuin for the Kabuki Inari Shrine here. We bought a single act ticket via the Kabukiza website and had a great first experience, there's also english audio guides that you can purchase to complement the show. Definitely also make sure you dressed appropriately, a semi-formal is advised.
We decided to go to some Christmas markets during this time, one of it being Tokyo Christmas Market. Even though we purchased tickets from KKday for a 5.30pm slot, the queue to enter was crazy and snaked around twice. The shops only accepted cash or PayPay and most of the menu items were listed in Katakana. I had a hard time guessing some of the menu items, like mulled wine was "グリューワイン" (Glühwein) and only guessed it was some kind of wine lol. Another one we tried to visit was Yokohama Christmas Market but it ended up being too crowded for us. We ended up spending more time in the red brick building, shopping until we were tired.
For this trip, we ended up visiting Eorzea Cafe Akihabara twice to finish our stamp card. If you complete a stamp card, you will obtain a ceramic plate of your choice. We're both fans of Final Fantasy XIV so we had a great time. We even won the first prize lottery, which was the first time for us. We ended up coming back one more time just to redeem our prize as we were informed the redemption ticket was only limited for 2 months and instead of the usual honey toast, we were presented with a cream cake that we had a hard time finishing due to the amount of cream it contained haha.
For fun, we reserved a KFC christmas bucket. This one took me about a month or so to arrange. I had a long back and forth discussion with Bridgejpn and finally we arranged for them to help reserve on our behalf and pickup was in Ginza. We underestimated the size of the bucket. It was easily closed to 2kg in weight so I canceled my plans to visit Jimbocho for that day and instead brought it back to our hotel room. Even though it was just usual KFC, the hotel room smelt incredible so we ended up spending our afternoon just eating KFC with some chuuhai and beer from the conbini store lol.
*Kusatsu Onsen (26th December 2023)
We spent the entire afternoon exploring Kusatsu Onsen, trying the color changing pudding and having lunch at Kusatsu Yubatake Manten which was serving up a special snow crab kamameshi set meal and went for the Yumomi Show which is famous in Kusatsu (I still hear Choina Choina in my head :D ) In the evening our prearranged driver, took us to our accommodations in Matsumoto, dinner was hotpot with amazing Shinshu beef.
*Matsumoto (27-29th December 2023)
This part of the trip was specially arranged by husband via tour agency specialising in bespoke itineraries and arrangements. Instead of a usual hotel, our accommodations was a Villa called Satoyama Villa Den with prearranged meal plans that included a little bit of osechi ryouri (new year food) . During the day, we visited Matsumoto Castle, Ishii Brewery and Daio Wasabi Farm and had a full day onsen at Myojinkan. We really enjoyed our time in Matsumoto and on clear days, it was nice to see the surrounding mountains covered with snow caps. Matsumoto is one of the best places to visit if you're in the Nagano region, just bear in mind that a lot of shops will close around this time of the year, for example the entire Nawate Street was closed by 28th December and the only thing open was a Taiyaki shop. There were popup shops selling things for new year like decorations or materials to make Kadomatsu, which is a door decoration and a lot of the temples were setting up mini stalls for Hatsumode.
Hakuba ( 29-31st December 2023)
Hakuba was back to free and easy travel for us. We quickly realised how popular Hakuba was during december when we snatched the last and only room available at Hakuba Shakespeare Hotel (booked in mid September. The snow was also not ideal, it was muddy and rained a few times. We booked an entire day at Hakuba Snow School for beginners but in honesty, we should have booked half a day instead as we didn't realise how heavy skii gear were and how tiring the sport was. Although we booked skii gear (from a place called Rhythm) for 2 days, we ended up only using it for one day and instead decided to spend the next day exploring Iwatake Mountain. Returning the skii gear was easy, as our hotel was affilated with the equipment shop so when we checked out, we just left the gear in our hotel in a designated spot and didn't have to travel into town to return it.
Because of how close it was to New Years', we reserved some restaurants to eat at. The first restaurant was called Miyama Genghis Khan where they served lamb and mutton bbq and it was so good! We had counter seats and one of the chef was kind enough to watch our bbq so that we didn't overcook the meat. The second restaurant was nearby to Miyama Genghis, called tomatito and we were really glad as on new years eve it was reservations only. They had amazing homemade umeshu, that I ordered 2-3 times and also had things like cheese with miso and wasabi from azumino, which is an amazing combination. We ended up taking a Margherita Pizza to go and returned to our hotel room to watch the annual Kohaku Uta Gassen, which is a new year television special. Personally all the performances were amazing but we enjoyed Yoasobi and Ado's performances the most. We were blessed because at 12am it started snowing and from our hotel room we could also view the fireworks go off at the resort nearby to welcome the new year!
Nagano (1st January 2024)
Hatsumode day at Zenkoji Temple. This day was especially busy with a lot of people out and about near Zenkoji Temple. The street leading up to the temple had pop up stalls selling things like candied strawberries (which I have a weakness for) and goshuin purchases took a long time to queue.
Earthquake (1st January 2024)
So the earthquake took us by surprise. At around 4pm everyone's phone in unison started blaring out the alert for earthquake. Nagano was hit with a 5.5 and after that there were periodic tiny aftershocks. We were never unfortunate to encounter one before so we were unsure about what to do. Originally, the plan was to make our way to Nagano Station around 8pm as we had scheduled a Shinkansen to return to Tokyo however as I was able to understand basic Japanese, I quickly overheard a lot of conversation about Shinkansen basically suspended or canceled. We quickly made our way back to the Station to a large crowd gathered outside and with my basic understanding I was able to grasp the station personnel was asking us to go in and just step into any unreserved carriage for any shinkansen on the platform heading to Tokyo. The only one available was an Asama heading to Tokyo so we quickly boarded and found 2 seats. This ended up being the best decision as we ended up stuck onboard for 5 hours as the train slowly inched itself to Tokyo and we checked into our hotel at midnight. The whole entire night we had trouble sleeping and kept the tv on, with the news repeatedly displaying tsunami warning.
Tokyo (Last day, 2nd January 2024)
We didn't sleep well but we were determined not to waste our final day in Japan. Even though it was a tuesday (which was labeled as closing day) and it was still Hatsumode, we took a gamble and traveled to Saitama to Musashino Reiwa Shrine and Kadokawa Museum. We were super lucky as both turn out to be open and we spent the afternoon, while it was raining, inside the museum. In the late afternoon, we returned to Akihbara to buy lucky bags and found out ...
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