I went to to Japan in March last year, and it turned out to be the most unforgettable trip so far in my life. Why? As a start, I arrived in Narita less than 24 hours after the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan. I then had to take the train to Kyoto via Tokyo only hours after they restored public transport at reduced capacity, and experienced a lower magnitude earthquake while in Kyoto.

The greatest concern of them all was the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. I was in constant contact with family and friends via email and Twitter, trying my best to convince them that the situation wasn’t as apocalyptic as how the media portrayed it. The incidents at Sendai and Fukushima were beyond devastating by any scale, but at the same time, other parts of Japan lived on with their daily life and did their best to help via donations and lots of other means. To witness the great Japanese spirit and sense of community in person was a humbling experience.

I ended up visiting Kyoto, Osaka, Nara, Kanazawa, Miyajima, Hiroshima, Okayama, Himeji, Tokyo, and Ise. My favourites were Okayama for its chillaxing vibe, and Kanazawa for its snow-covered town. Here are some pictures from the last three days of the trip, I lost the rest of them because my laptop was stolen during transit in Kuala Lumpur (here’s the person who now has my stolen MacBook).

Best food? Ramen at Kyoto Station, extra eggs, a must.

I also loved this Yamazaki Pan chocolate bread I bought every day at Lawson.

Definitely going back there!

jazz, art, design: +1

As a huge fan of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli (think of an older distant Japanese cousin of Pixar), I had always wanted to visit _the_ Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, Japan, and I finally made it there nearing the end of my Japan trip this year.

We took JR Chuo Rapid line from Tokyo station to Mitaka station, then followed by a ride on the museum’s bus which took us directly to the entrance of the museum. Ghibli Museum was not your typical museum with exhibits that you could only look from a distance. There, the visitors were encouraged to explore everything throughout the museum.

The view right after getting off the bus. You can see the giant soldier robot from Castle in the Sky on the rooftop.

These animation cels were used as tickets to watch Studio Ghibli’s short films, exclusively screened at the museum’s Saturn Theater. They were showing Pan Dane to Tamago Hime at that time.

The best part of the museum for me was the Preproduction Room display, specially the imageboard sketch drawing desk. I also enjoyed spotting references to Porco Rosso, my most favourite Studio Ghibli film of them all. The food at Straw Hat Cafe was surprisingly delicious and quite filling.

Actually, we almost didn’t make it to the museum. Following the earthquakes and the nuclear power plant incident, we cancelled our plan to stay in Tokyo for the second half of the trip, i.e. no Ghibli Museum visit.

Four days before the end of the trip, we were supposed to return to Kyoto from Hiroshima. But then we thought, what the heck, let’s go to Tokyo for a day just to visit the Ghibli Museum. So we did, we took the shinkansen all the way from Hiroshima to Tokyo early in the morning, visited the museum in Mitaka, then caught the last shinkansen from Tokyo to Kyoto. It was worth it.

What I liked the most about nine hours was its simplistic and really well done interior design in such a limited space, the fact that I had one of the best sleeps of my life ever, right there inside one of those capsules, was secondary.

I’m one of those people who have a thing about proper spacing in a simplistic design, so being there at nine hours was like being in a mini sanctuary for me. Everything was properly designed, the signs, the lockers, the mini lounge, the colours, the elevators, the doors, the capsules, the water bottles, the sleeping jumpsuits, the showers, the tiles, and even the toilets. I took dozens of pictures of the little details of this place, but as luck played out, I lost pretty much all of them when my laptop was stolen :(.

And here are a few that survived. Let’s start with the inside of the capsule.

My favourite feature of the capsule was the ambient light that could be configured on the black panel. The light gradually turned dark when I was ready to go to sleep, and gradually turned bright moments before my wake up time.

The corridor with the capsules on the left. The cyan lighting did give the impression that a drone from the Borg collective was going to show up from the other end.

The reception area in the morning, notice the graphic signs on the floor. Various graphical signs were scattered on the floor and on the wall of nine hours. Those signs were cleverly designed that they were descriptive enough without any textual explanation.

Minimalism and simplicity at work!

It took a total of 8 hours from Melbourne to KL + 8 hours transit in KL + 7 hours from KL to Narita + 3 hours from Narita to Tokyo + 4 hours from Tokyo to Kyoto = 30 hours all the way through, but we eventually made it to Japan!

At Starbucks, nervously reading the news about the tsunami and the earthquakes before deciding to continue the flight to Japan at the very last minute.

Arrived at Narita airport at 12 noon local time. There were piles of sleeping bags (with Japan Airlines logo) and mineral water bottles at several spots in the terminal.

After immigration, I took the elevator down to the baggage claim area. There were several cordoned off areas with wet newspapers on the floor and water leaking from the ceiling. Damages from the earthquakes?

At the arrival hall, I saw more people stranded due to flight delays and cancellations. The situation was quite calm, the airport staffs were awesomely helpful.

Queuing for the JR train to Tokyo. I was glad to find out that they let people enter the train station in batches to avoid overcrowding the platforms.

Ken Watanabe look-alike was very helpful, translating the the announcements over the PA system into English, apparently the train was delayed by an hour and would run slower than its normal speed.

The crowded train. I was lucky to get on a direct train to Tokyo as several people got stuck at Chiba station trying to get on the Tokyo-bound train to no avail.

The queue at JR ticket office at Tokyo station was rather long, but the shinkansen service between Tokyo and Kyoto was operating as normal. Took a couple of hours of power nap on the bullet train.

Finally arrived at Kyoto station and had a bowl of ramen for dinner. It was weird how it felt like returning home instead of starting my holiday, the most mentally tiring 30 hours ever.

It’s now been a week since I arrived in Japan. We’re fine in Kyoto, it’s about 500km+ to the west of Tokyo. We’re getting used to the earthquake news on TV at night and even experienced a 2 magnitude scale tremor from the Shizuoka earthquake (no injury, no damage) 3 days ago.

The Sendai tsunami was a tragedy, my heart is with those who are affected. The Fukushima nuclear power plant incident was disastrous, but if you’re outside of Japan, please don’t buy everything you read in the media. The last 7 days proved how much The Age over-sensationalize the news about Japan, so, wanted: a decent Australian news website to replace The Age on my daily readings list.

As for myself, I took several semesters of Japanese classes in the past. I’m a huge fan of Japanese TV shows Iron Chef, TV Champion, and Takeshi’s Castle. I’ve always been impressed with Japanese culture, specially their politeness and sense of collectivism. To me, visiting Japan was a lifelong dream.

My brother and me, near Kaizoji Temple, Kamakura.

What impressed me the most was that their trains were always on time. I was there for 2 weeks and not even once my train was late. That’s amazing compared to our local train operator in Melbourne, Connex, the symbol of incompetence. I can’t remember the last time a Connex train arrived and left on time.

I was also impressed by a number of smart things I saw in Japan, things that made me stop and think “Hmm, we should have that.” Things like foldable wooden rubbish bin, blood donation bus parked near busy stations, maps with orientation to where you’re standing, stackable bicycle parkings… just to name a few.

The top 5 favourite places I visited…

1. Jufukuji Temple, Kamakura – the most peaceful place I’ve ever been.
2. Korakuen Garden, Okayama – it was very relaxing to walk around the garden.
3. Kaiyukan, Osaka – where else would you see 2 whale sharks?
4. Meiji Jingu, Tokyo – a nice shrine in a busy city.
5. Umeda Sky Building, Osaka – see Osaka at night from 173m high.

And the most memorable experiences?

• Looking at mount Fuji during our Shinkansen ride from Osaka to Tokyo.
  I was amazed for several minutes, mount Fuji was majestic. I wondered if someday I could ever return to Japan and climb the mountain to watch the sunrise from up there.
• Exploring Kamakura.
  I felt very much at peace while walking around Kamakura, a nice little town with many temples. I couldn’t help thinking that it would be a nice place to live a retired life (in reality, I have to stick with Perth though).
• Walking from Bentencho Station to Kaiyukan.
  It looked quite close on the map but it turned out to be a very long walk. We had to rely on the sun to tell the direction since all signs were in Japanese and the buildings looked similar on each side of the station. It was such a huge relief when we saw the Kaiyukan building from afar.

For more pictures from the trip, check out my Japan Trip 2009 album on Picasa.

If you want to check out the original images at 1024×768, please visit the photoset page on Flickr.

At the the shrine, people bought a wooden tablet and wrote their prayers on it, they then hung the tablet on a wooden plank along with the other tablets. While with Wish site, people submitted their wishes, which would then go to a moderation queue before appearing on the site.

The similarity is mainly on the idea of making a prayer/wish, with a certain degree of anonymity, and it is then available for others to see. What was interesting to me is the way they handled ‘inappropriate’ content. They filtered out most of the ‘spams’ by making it a non-free process (most people wouldn’t spend 500 Yen just to spam). They also put a piece of paper with an explanation of how the process works, and that’s where I noticed this sentence “Please write down your prayers, in a faithful spirit of respect and devotion.”

That sentence highlights the main difference between our visitors. The shrine visitors made the prayers mostly with a good intention. While Wish site had to face the evil spammers and  angry people on the Internet, besides the real wishers who simply want make a wish. The long walk from the main shrine to the entrance gave me a lot of time to think of how I should improve the way Wish works, the site has stayed too simple for the past 3 years, it’s time for some improvements. Stay tuned!

Some pictures from the shrine…

A couple reading the prayers. This is similar to browsing the wishes at Wish.

A text based prayer with a simple timestamp. We got that at Wish.

Some people like to draw. We got it too, though most picture submissions weren’t original content from the submitter, so this part hasn’t worked well at all.

I didn’t spot this until I returned to Melbourne. Is that kennysia.com on the second tablet from the top? He did go to Japan in April. For the uninitiated, Kenny Sia is Malaysia’s most popular blogger.

I spotted the first QR Code in Melbourne in July last year. Telstra has been campaigning the use of QR Code, mostly on their products and ads. There have been few magazines using QR Code to link to some pages on their own sites. I’m predicting that this technology will become much more mainstream in Australia within the next 2-3 years, providing steady adoption of smart phones with QR Code support.

During my trip to Japan few weeks ago, I was amazed to find out that QR Code was used everywhere (not literally _everywhere_ of course). I started taking pictures and videos of those QR Codes to the amusement of the locals, something that’s very common to them was very new to me.

Here’s a nice example. On one morning, I was walking to Ikebukuro Station via the underground pass, and I noticed a new Disney poster on the wall.

Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Stitch. Notice the eyes and noses of each character are still visible within the QR Codes.

And here’s the weird scene I witnessed in the evening…

I saw passers by stopping in front of the poster, scanning the codes using their mobile phones. It was so weird for me, but I’m sure, again, it’s very common to them. At that point, I wondered if I would see a similar scene in Melbourne within the next few years.

And a few more…

McDonald’s placed QR Codes on the soft drink cup, burger wrapper, and paper bag amongst other things.

Snack food packaging.

Building guide.

T-shirt tag.

A poster at a mall. Ever thought that one day you would see a large garble of black and white dots just so you can scan it with your mobile phone?

On a magazine.

Ok, I’ll stop here, you’ve got the idea. The above pictures and video are only a few examples where QR Codes were used as links to web pages, but bear in mind that it can be used for many things other than for storing URLs, like nutritional info of a sandwich.

I’m excited to see more uses of QR Code in Australia. Who knows, maybe someday I’ll see one on a coffee cup at a cafe in Melbourne.

I traveled to Japan from Melbourne with my brother. We visited Tokyo, Kamakura, Yokohama, Osaka, Nara, Kyoto, and Okayama within 2 weeks. We chose Tokyo and Osaka as our ‘homebases’, i.e. we booked accommodations at those two cities and traveled to the other places by train. We canceled our plans to visit Nikko and Nagoya because the travel time was too long for a day trip.

What do you need to prepare?

1. Flight Ticket
   We bought cheap(er) tickets from Jetstar, the budget airline subsidiary of Qantas. Their planes were rather small, so if you’re tall, you will have neither much leg room nor comfortable head rest. I highly recommend lots of stretching during the 10-hour+ flight and bringing a neck pillow (trust me, you won’t regret it).
   If you’re traveling from Melbourne, a ticket to Tokyo Narita Airport is cheaper than to Osaka Kansai Airport. Though bear in mind that Narita Airport is about an hour away from Tokyo via Keisei Line.
2. Accommodation
   You will need to provide proof of your flight ticket purchase when you book your hotel. We booked ours from International Tourism Center of Japan (ITCJ), I think it’s safer to have a third party record of your bookings. My requirements for the accommodations were (1) not expensive but not shabby, (2) private toilet, and (3) laundry facility. We stayed at Grand House Chang Tee Hotel at Ikebukuro, about 20 minutes away from downtown Tokyo via Yamanote Line, and at Hotel Kinki (Kinki is another name for Kansai, a region in Japan), very near to the heart of Osaka. You can also book for a Ryokan via ITCJ web site if you want to experience staying at a traditional Japanese Inn.
3. Japan Rail Pass
   You will need to provide proof of your flight ticket purchase and accommodation booking when you purchase the Exchange Order for the Pass. Japan Rail Pass is your ticket to use train and bus services operated by the Japan Railways Group which cover 99.9% of your traveling needs as a tourist in Japan. Please note that you can only purchase the Exchange Order from outside of Japan only. The Exchange Order would then be exchanged for the Pass upon arrival at the airport. We purchased ours from H.I.S. Travel (Melbourne office location). Another thing you need to know is that public transport in Japan is expensive and you actually save money by using the Japan Rail Pass.
4. Visa
   Check if you need a visa to enter Japan. Australia is one of the countries which have visa exemption arrangements with Japan, so Australian passport holders don’t need a visa, yay :). My brother had to apply for visa at the Consulate-General of Japan in Melbourne. He got it within a couple of days after submitting the application, about a month prior to the trip.
5. Universal Adapter
   Japan uses 100V electricity voltage while Australia uses 240V, and they also use different socket to Australia (check out world electricity standards). Most of modern gadgets handle 100-240V. I brought my mobile phone, camera, Nintendo DS, and electric shaver chargers during the trip and I could use them in Japan without any problem. And for the socket, I purchased a universal travel adapter online, they’re cheap and useful for your future travels. Don’t bother buying the adapters from Dick Smith (Korjo brand), they’re too expensive, only work for a specific country, and the adapter for Japan doesn’t have the ground for Australian plug.
6. Japanese Yen
   We arrived at Narita Airport after 9pm and all money changers were already closed, and obviously all the banks were also closed once we reached Ikebukuro at 11pm. I managed to get some Japanese Yen in Melbourne before the trip, and brought some Australian Dollars with me which I then exchanged in Tokyo. Surprisingly the exchange rate was better in Australia at that time, I still have no idea why. I also compared the Melbourne CBD’s money changers’ exchange rates, my conclusion: the one at Bourke St (right behind the tram stop) was a rip-off, while the one on Swanston St near Collins St offered the best rate.
   Tip: the Japanese pronounce Yen as ‘en’.
7. Medicine
   Some pharmacies in Japan (don’t get confused over there, when you see a sign that says ‘drug’, that’s the pharmacy) do have English speaking staffs. But I don’t want to get anything lost in translation when it comes to health so I brought some Panadols and Travelans with me.

Frequently Asked Questions:

• Q: Do I need to know Japanese language?
  A: Not really. I reckon anyone could easily travel around Japan knowing just…
  1. Gomen nasai, nihongo wa dekimasen.
     I’m sorry, I can’t speak Japanese.
  2. Sumimasen.
     Excuse me.
  3. Arigato gozaimasu.
     Thank you.

  You can easily find tourists information center or JR offices at the train stations in Tokyo and Osaka where most of the staffs do speak English. While at the restaurants, sign language worked wonder for us, just point to the picture, indicate how many servings, and pay.

• Q: Do I need to bring a Japanese dictionary?
  A: No. Leave it at home.
• Q: How much does food cost?
  A: It depends where you eat. An average meal costs between 500 Yen (at train stations) to 1000 Yen (at the malls). Snacks cost 100-400 Yen.
• Q: Do I need to bring guide books like Lonely Planet Japan?
  A: I brought mine. Even though I found some information about Japan in the book to be quite interesting, I reckoned it’s too thick and heavy, and the maps (the main reason why I purchased the book in the first place) weren’t accurate. I ended up asking for English maps at the tourist information center at each city we visited.

Hope that helps, and if you have any further question, please leave a comment.