I am not Japanese. #
In grade 2, I wrote a story about a ninja who found a dragon’s egg and raised it. It was, by all accounts, a formative work. Some of my classmates apparently concluded from this that I was Japanese.
I am not Japanese. I’m about as white as it gets. But in 1988, Japan was the source of everything I loved - Transformers, Nintendo, giant robots, and ninjas. The cool things, the interesting things, the things that felt like they came from somewhere that understood what an eight year old actually wanted from the world. I was obsessed, in the way that only a kid in grade 2 can be obsessed, completely and without irony.
I’ve wanted to go ever since.
Actually, It’s Not That Bad #
A few years ago, we took the kids to Mexico. On the way home, we asked them where they wanted to go next.
They both immediately and enthusiastically said Japan.
We laughed. We said absolutely not. I told them I’d love to take them to Japan but to be realistic. There was no possible way I could ever take them to Japan. Maybe it’s something they could aspire to when they were older and started travelling. We went home and I mentioned it to a coworker mostly as a funny story about kids having no concept of money.
My coworker did not find it as funny as I did. As fate would have it, turns out they were a bit of a seasoned traveller to Japan.
“Actually,” they said, “it’s not that bad.” And then proceeded to dismantle every assumption I’d made. Go right after cherry blossom season - quieter, cheaper. Book two smaller rooms instead of one large one. Stay twice as long as you’d think - it’s the flights that cost you, not the country itself. And eat the food at 7-11. No, seriously. YOU HAVE TO GO TO 7-11.
I was not convinced. After my kids had mentioned they wanted to go to Japan I’d rushed to a travel site and all of my concerns were validated. When I went back and plugged in all of the tips my coworker had given me, I realized it was actually doable.
We started looking at dates. And nearly booked during Golden Week.
If you don’t know what Golden Week is - and we didn’t - it’s a cluster of Japanese national holidays in late April and early May where essentially the entire country goes on vacation at the same time. Prices surge, everything books solid, and the crowds make an already busy country feel genuinely overwhelming. It is, by most accounts, the worst possible time for a first-time foreign visitor to arrive.
We found out just in time. And that near miss is more or less where The Japlan was born - not out of enthusiasm, but out of the dawning realization that we had absolutely no idea what we were doing and we needed to fix that immediately.
Spoiler Alert: We Did Not Crash #
First, you have to get there. Japan is not a short flight from southwestern Ontario - we’re talking three flights each direction, a connection through Toronto Pearson, another through O’Hare in Chicago, and then a fourteen hour haul to Haneda. Each leg was researched in advance. All of them. I had a working theory about which gate our O’Hare flight would leave from, based on historical data for that specific route. I mapped the terminal layouts. I knew where the lounges were relative to our probable gates.
This level of preparation has a name in our family. I fondly refer to it as The Japlan.
The Japlan is a 73 page Word document - though to be fair, the cover page and table of contents account for four of those pages, so realistically it’s closer to 69 pages of actual content. I want to be precise about this.
While creating this monstrosity of a document, I told my family that I was Japlanning. It covers every day of the trip - from the Uber ride from our house to the airport, all flight information, where we’re staying, what we’re seeing, how to get there, QR codes for tickets, transit directions (including helpful tidbits like which door on the bus to use in Kyoto), restaurant reservations, and yes, annotated maps of every airport we’d travel through. It is, objectively, overkill. It is also the reason we never once stood on a street corner in Japan wondering what to do next. Everything was structured around must-haves and nice-to-haves, which meant that when something fell through - and things always fall through - we knew exactly what to do instead.
We’d also given some thought to the luggage situation before we left. Everyone could have checked a bag, but we opted instead to pack our less essential items into a medium suitcase and nest that inside a larger one - one checked bag total, everything important in carry-ons. With two flight changes and the general anxiety of international travel, we weren’t about to trust our most critical items to the checked baggage system.
There was also the small matter of my specific situation. I do not fit into the traditional Japanese clothing size matrix. If my luggage had gone missing, finding replacement clothes for a somewhat typical middle-aged Canadian dad in Tokyo would have consumed a meaningful portion of both our trip and our remaining budget.
I mentioned O’Hare specifically because I’d never been there before, and our original itinerary gave me cause for concern. The plan was a 747 from Pearson to O’Hare, followed by a 42 minute layover before a Dreamliner to Haneda. Forty two minutes. In an airport widely considered to be one of the busiest in North America, one that I’ve never been to before, connecting to a fourteen hour international flight.
I called United and waited on hold for almost two hours. While on hold, I concocted wild stories in my mind about how everyone else had noticed this egregious error, and were all on hold waiting to change their flights just like I was. I can have quite the imagination when plans go sideways.
When someone finally picked up, I asked the customer service representative, as directly as I could, whether this was actually going to work. She assured me that 42 minutes was the minimum viable standard for a connection and that it could absolutely be done. I asked her to be honest with me. She eventually conceded that the stars would need to align perfectly.
They rebooked us on an earlier flight out of Toronto. Two and a half hour layover in Chicago. Problem solved.
The change to an earlier flight did come with one catch - the new flight was on a 737 Max 8 - otherwise known as the airplane that seemed to crash every other day a few years back. My wife, ever supportive, promised me that if we went down, she would never let me live it down.
It goes without saying, but - we did not crash. I will admit I gripped the armrests a bit tighter on takeoff and landing - thankfully, my kids didn’t notice.
Now That’s Something Everyone Can Enjoy #
Second, you have to wait until everyone is ready.
We have two daughters. My oldest is into art - specifically anime and manga, which made Japan an obvious destination for her. My youngest is into cosmetics, specifically the kind you can’t easily buy in North America, and Asia has cornered the market on those in her opinion.
My wife wanted temples, shrines, and castles. She was outnumbered on almost every other front and she knew it, so she staked her claim early and we honoured it.
As for me: giant robots, model kits, and a grade 2 obsession that never fully went away.
The Japlan reflected all of this. Akihabara was mandatory - multiple days, no negotiation. The cat temple in Tokyo was on the list the moment we found out it existed. Tamiya HQ was non-negotiable for reasons I’ll get into later. Fushimi Inari, conveyor belt sushi, matcha in Uji - all must-haves. As many temples, shrines and castles as we could reasonably fit without anyone staging a mutiny. Studio Ghibli, sumo, and at least one life-size giant robot were ambitious additions - Japan rewards ambition.
We’d learned our lesson from Iceland. In 2018 we went with no real plan beyond “northern lights might be cool,” and the jet lag hit so hard that I spent two hours in my hotel room watching a documentary about a man trying to build the world’s longest continuous working model train track. It was fine. It was not what I’d flown across the Atlantic for.
Japan was going to be different. We were going to min-max this vacation. We were going to have options.
Japan had something for all of us. This is not a coincidence - Japan is very good at having something for everyone. But we also waited until the kids were old enough to remember it, and old enough to survive a fourteen hour flight without it becoming a humanitarian incident. They survived it. Barely.
I Liked the Band Before They Were Popular #
We also wanted to go before it got trendy, which I recognize is exactly what someone who also went to Iceland in 2018 would say.
For the record: we went to Iceland in 2018 to see the northern lights. Not because of Game of Thrones. We were accused of following the pack on that one too, which I found deeply unfair. Spoiler alert: we never saw the northern lights. My wife claims that she saw them briefly in the distance, if you squint really hard and stare at the same spot for 3-4 minutes. So yes, we never saw the northern lights.
It’s safe to say Japan is having a moment right now. The influencer surge is ridiculous, the tourism numbers are staggering, and everywhere we went there were people with cameras trying to recreate photos they’d seen online. We were aware we were part of the wave whether we wanted to be or not. What I can say is that we’d been talking about this trip for years before it became a trend, and we tried to approach it with the kind of intention that the country deserves. This sounds very hipster-ish when I read it back to myself - but it’s true.
To our credit - we did our homework. We learned basic phrases. My wife was convinced I kept greeting people hi over and over again, not realizing that I was actually saying yes in Japanese. We practiced chopsticks - most of us, anyway. We coached the kids on temple etiquette before every single visit.
Two Weeks is Not Enough #
A week in Tokyo. A week based in Kyoto, with two or three day trips into Osaka. Two weeks total, six flights across three legs each direction, and on the way home - shinkansen from Kyoto to Tokyo, then straight onto a fourteen hour flight - twenty four consecutive hours in transit.
The getting there and back suuuuucked. It was completely worth it.
This is the part where I tell you about it.