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The original was posted on /r/japantravel by /u/Known_University2787 on 2025-04-23 18:41:53+00:00.
This is going to be incredibly long but I am mostly writing all of this up for myself to help me remember my trip. For anyone traveling to Japan that does not like to be overscheduled or is traveling with there 12 year old, maybe this will be helpful. Neither of us like to over plan anything and like to just go by feel with what we want to do. We picked a list of one or two options at most for each day and left the rest open for doing whatever we felt like.
Friday (4/4/2025) – Asakusa (4,908 steps since everyone else does this)
Our flight landed in the Haneda airport at around 4 PM. I was a little confused about how the platforms for the train system worked at first. Google maps had our train departing from platform 5/6 which was both sides which I found confusing at the time. I was tired so my brain wasn’t connecting the dots very well. A nice Japanese lady saw I looked confused and helped me out. This actually happened multiple times during the trip for me. Apparently confusion shows on my face as I was approached two other times on the trip and asked if I needed help finding something. My daughter was pretty exhausted from all of the travel so we just checked into our hotel the Kanzashi Tokyo Asakusa and she didn’t go back out. The hotel is in a great location within easy walking distance to Senso-Ji. It isn’t extremely close to train stations but I liked how walkable it made everything else we were doing. I grabbed some food from, friend chicken and a container of mixed fruit, from the nearby Lawsons for my daughter and I got ramen to go from Ryuten a small little ramen shop close to the hotel. Inside while I waited for my food I talked with a nice lady with a cute dog, luckily her English was better than my Japanese. Honestly, all the Japanese I worked on completely dropped out of my head for this trip. I get super nervous and the harder I grabbed for it the further away it was. Sigh.
Saturday (4/5/2025) – Asakusa (12,051 steps)
Saturday morning we woke up and walked to the 7-11 to grab some cash from the ATM. This ends up being something I had to do way too often. I would grab 10,000 yen and think, this should cover me, but it never did. I needed way more cash than I thought I would for this trip. We stopped at a cute coffee shop called Feb’s Coffee and Scones across the street from the 7-11. I got a latte for me and a Sakura scone for the kiddo. The coffee was great and my daughter loved the scone. From there we walked to Senso-Ji and tried a bunch of random food. You could really feel how much busier it gets as the day goes on. By 11 AM it was a madhouse. I would say the favorite thing I tried was the melonpan. My kiddo tried the matcha ice cream, I took a lick of it and thought it tasted terrible. She really liked it though. It was starting to get really crowded and we had already been walking around for a couple of hours so we headed to Sumida Park along the river. I loved it there, its is a beautiful park and it’s a people watchers dream. There were tons of kimono photo shoots, wedding photo shoots and people everywhere. We sat at the outdoor chairs at Tully’s Coffee which was shaded by cherry trees in full bloom and just chilled for an hour. It was nice and calm after the huge pack of people from Senso-Ji temple and Nakamise street market. My daughter really wanted to try out a Japanese McDonalds so we went there for lunch. Gotta say, pretty much like any other McDonalds, which honestly was good for her. She was feeling a bit overloaded from all the people so a bit of normalcy worked out. On the way back we tried a crepe from Marion Crepes. We got the strawberry and vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce which was pretty good. There were a bunch of street performers in this area as well which was really fun. The kiddo was feeling pretty tired from being out since the morning so we headed back to the hotel to chill until we went back out later. We hung out the hotel for a bit and then headed out later that night for Wagyu. It was the one big splurge dinner I had planned for the trip. We went to Panga Asakusa which is a yakiniku restaurant on the 4th floor of a building that overlooks the river. It is a really cool atmosphere and the food was quite good. For what it is I think the price is quite fair but I would say for me in the end I am just not that fancy and I wouldn’t go back. I enjoyed the experience talking to the little old lady at the cheap ramen shop more. I just felt out of place in a fancy restaurant.
Sunday (4/6/2025) – Asakusa (12,306 steps)
We started the day with a plan to go to Ueno park and the Tokyo National Museum but the kiddo wasn’t feeling up to it. I think it took her longer than me to get over the jet lag. Instead we decided to walk to Senso-Ji, get some coffee and then peruse all of the stores in the area. She really wanted to try Taiyaki which is a little fish shaped cake with a filling. She got the custard and I tried the red bean paste. She really liked the custard, the red bean paste was interesting, it is quite sweet but it has the texture of beans which threw me off quite a bit. I am so used to savory bean paste that I had a hard time not thinking it was all wrong. Not bad though but the custard was better. After that we looked around Nakamise but on a Sunday at noon it was super busy. Honestly for me it was fun to walk and look around but it reminded me of all the same tourist trap stuff we have back at home. Cheap trinkets and themed clothing which isn’t something I would buy. For dinner we went to Sushiro which is a chain conveyor belt sushi chain. It was tons of fun and the kiddo really enjoyed it. I know it’s a bit of a gimmick but it was really fun and I would recommend it for anyone with kids especially. My daughter is 12 and she loved being able to scroll through the menu, pick a random sushi and have it show up on the belt. After Sushiro we walked over to Tokyo Skytree and went up to the first deck (my daughter is scared of heights so this was a bid step for her). We purposefully went at night because she wanted to see it all lit up. It was pretty busy even at night but I liked getting to see the tower lit up and the view of the city at night is great. We didn’t really spend a lot of time up there though. Standing around looking at the same thing isn’t her jam so once we had been there for like 20 minutes she had seen all she wanted to see and we headed back down (I also think the height made her nervous). We did the Sumida River Walk to get to Sushiro and Skytree and back and that was great, if you are in the area its worth the walk.
Final Asakusa thoughts:
I loved Asakusa and I would say the two days we were there were the perfect amount of time. It is extremely touristy, which was fun for the start of the trip, but there is a lack of authenticity to it that feels like any other tourist trap area. If we had stayed in Asakusa I would want to start taking day trips out to other areas for new experiences. Senso-Ji is a must see but I would not go during peak hours. We went early in the morning and it was really nice, once the crowds hit though we spent more time fighting the crowds than enjoying Senso-Ji. It’s also great at night, for me even better than the day. There is almost no one around and it’s lit up very nicely. Going up to the top of Skytree for me was take it or leave it, the view from the outside lit up at night was enough and I think I would have rather spent more time walking around the city at night then waiting in long lines to see it from the top of Skytree.
Monday – Asakusa to Osaka (6,989 steps)
Monday was a travel day so I didn’t have a lot planned. We grabbed Mr. Donut at the train station, my daughter was bummed because in the pictures they had Pokemon themed donuts but when we arrived the only special donuts were matcha themed. We took the Shinkansen to Osaka which my daughter loved. I am very glad I watched videos on how the tickets work as it is a little confusing and different than how the Pasmo I had been using worked. We did paper tickets from the self-serve kiosks and did non reserved seating. The non-reserved car was much less full than the reserved car and we got a window seat on the Mt. Fuji side of the train. Unfortunately, it was too cloudy to see Mt. Fuji when we went by. We checked into the Henn Na Hotel Osaka, the one with the robot dinosaurs at checkout. My daughter had been super excited for this. She thought it was really cool, but she was a little bummed the hotel room itself was not dinosaur themed. We spent the little time left we had for the day looking at the clothing stores near our hotel. My daughter was in love with all of the street clothing. She wanted pizza for some random reason so we went to Pizza Catharsix Factory for dinner. It was really good but while we were there some (I assume tik tok) food influencers showed up to shoot a video. It was actually really entertaining to watch and the guy making pizza kept looking over at me embarrassed while the guy and girl made the video. The girl actually did a costume change for some reason halfway through. It was kind of like dinner and a show. After dinner we walked to Dotonbori which is an absolute mad house. It had the heaviest crowds of anywhere I have ever seen but unlike Kyoto later in the trip it seems more able to handle the volume of people. We tried a bunch of random street food,...
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