HM to Japan

supernae

My fiancee and I decided on Japan as our honeymoon spot of choice. We are complete nerds, and aren't beach people, so it just seemed like a logical choice.

How would you spend a honeymoon in Japan?

We're thinking one week in Tokyo to check out the arcades and take in the more modern culture, and one week in Kyoto to relax and explore the temples. I've also heard a midnight hike up Mt. Fuji is beautiful if you can get to the top to watch the sunrise

mandybear7

I just paged a girl on my month board- she just got back from 3 weeks in Japan. Hopefully she'll respond here to help you!

l337Jacqui

here i am!!!!!

oh my goodness, where do i begin...

japan was the best place EVER to go to. i miss it so incredibly much. we went for 3 weeks, and it was FANTASTIC! and! we kept a blog while we were there of the entire thing!!! so the blog will probably help you out a lot here is the link to the first entry (and there are lots of pictures!!!):

http://tinyurl.com/2cla5ht

then just scroll down to the bottom and click on "newer post" to read the next day, and so on

i could literally talk about japan forever hahaha...it was such an amazing place to go!!! you will ADORE it. if you have any questions, PLEASE feel free to ask me! you can send me e-mails to jtont02@gmail.com anytime!!!

supernae

oh. my. gosh. 

I'm on "Tuesday March 30th" and your trip sounds SO amazing....from the tradional japanese wedding, to the studio ghibli museum, to the CRAZY vending machines! Ah! love it! I noticed the game that's being played in the last picture is Taiko no Tatsujin. That's a fun one

Did yall have a travel agent help you pick out where to go and make an itenerary?

also...

Was the language barrier hard to overcome or is it generally easy to find someone who understood english?

I'm definately bookmarking your blog, and, if you don't mind, saving your email address for whenever our wedding gets closer (11/11/11 is a long ways away /sigh!/) Don't delete an email from supernae@gmail.com if you get one in the future! Now I'm off to read the rest! It looks like you had so much fun! The pictures are beautiful!  

l337Jacqui

thanks so much! we just got back a week ago, so i'm still not out of the "post-japan depression" hahaha...i really do miss it SO much. if we could move there, i would in a heartbeat! you will fall even more in love once you get there

to answer your questions:

1) we didn't use a travel agent at all for planning it. the only thing we used a travel agent for was getting the 14-day japan rail pass (didn't need the rail pass for the first week in tokyo as there arent that many JR lines running through there. we used a suica card for train rides in tokyo. it's basically like a debit card that it automatically deducts amounts off it when you get to your destinations. we liked it a lot!) and the studio ghibli museum tickets since you have to get those in advance too. we bought our plane tickets last october, and i planned the whole thing out just by researching like crazy!!! also, these trip advisor forums were SUPER helpful in my planning:

http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowForum-g294232-i525-Japan.html

2) to be honest, i thought there was going to be a LOT more english. luckily, the trains pretty much all have it, and at hotel check-ins they have typically one person who speaks decent english, so you should be good there but as for restaurants/stores, nope. hardly any english. they all talk to you full out in japanese though as if you could understand them. so, they treat you like everyone else, which is nice, but at the same time, we did a lot of smiling, nodding, and saying "arigato!" (which means "thank you" but you probably already knew that!). i learned a few things before leaving though, but only things like "please", "thank you", "sorry", "excuse me", and "where's the bathroom?" haha...

a few random things i can think of off the top of my head:

- for your stay in tokyo, i really recommend the sunroute plaza shinjuku. it was a small-ish room (you saw the pics lol), but really nice, and the location seriously could not be better. a super short walk to the shinjuku station which was SO nice because that station is SUCH a huge hub. it's bigger than a lot of the train stations, so it was really easy to get places, and even easier to get home. and! we booked for a full week at the sunroute plaza and we got 30% off through travelocity. it was also only about a 35-40 minute walk to the big shibuya crossing and only like a 20 minute walk to harajuku. we dont mind walking, and we think walking is better than taking the trains sometimes anyways cause you can see so much more! haha

- if you are flying into the narita airport, and your hotel ends up being close to a major train station (like how ours was), i HIGHLY recommend getting the NEX/suica card deal:

http://www.jreast.co.jp/e/suica-nex/

(and dont bother with the green cars, it's just extra money spent for nothing special). you get this at the JR office at the narita airport, and it saves you a lot of money with getting the suica card right then and there. then you hop on the narita express train (also known as NEX) from the airport, and it takes you to tokyo. it's about an hour and 20 minute ride, but there's not really a lot of options. you could take a limobus though, which takes you straight to your hotel (if it's on their list of hotels it stops at), but a limobus could also get stuck in traffic, so we opted out of the limobus. OH! and i just remembered!!! they are building a track for a faster train that goes straight from the narita airport to tokyo in like 37 minutes!!!! the poster at the airport said 2010, so it should be in service by the time you go!

- for train rides, http://www.hyperdia.com/ is going to be your best friend. we made sure we always had internet in our hotels (except the hot spring hotel towards the end of our trip for one night) because we looked at this website literally everyday. it has ALL train schedules, and what trains you need to take to get to the stations you need to get to. it was PERFECT.

- there is like, literally no crime in japan. being used to the way america is, we were shy to walk around at night at first. but we soon got over that once we realized that literally any street or alley is totally safe. that is one of the things i REALLY loved about japan. they say to watch for pit pocketers, but even that is really low. 

- kyoto was my absolute favorite. i really, really wanted to move there. it's just...perfect. they dont have as many trains there though (pretty much subway or bus) so it was more walking (since we didnt want to bother with busses) but again, we didn't mind. 

- cash is definitely king. we exchanged like $700 at the narita airport to yen, but we also had brought a $900 international postal money order with us. it's just like a money order that you get at your local post office before you leave, and then when you are ready to cash it in japan, take to a major post office (which was hard because there were like no english speakers there lol) and they take it and give you the yen. so this way we didnt have a TON of yen on us at all times since we cashed the money order a little later. we just really thought more places would take credit card, and they dont! 

sorry that is like a TON of info haha, but i want to give you guys as much helpful info that i can! and i know it sounds like your wedding is far, but it will be here so fast!!! we got engaged on july 10th, 2008, and our wedding is july 10, 2010! i cannot believe how fast it flew by. japan was actually our "honeymoon" even though it was before the wedding haha...i've literally always wanted to go my whole life, and have been checking plane ticket prices multiple times every year, but last october when we bought them, they went all the way down to $571 EACH!!! we couldnt believe it. we took it as a HUGE sign to go, so we decided it would be our honeymoon since it was 3 weeks and going to cost a pretty penny overall lol...

definitely feel free to send me an e-mail whenever! even if it's next year! i never mind talking about my favorite place in the world  

kaesha

Japan is fantastic depending on what time of year you go! Typhoon season (June - September)= not so much fun. It's humid beyond belief! I lived in central Japan for two years, and it was an amazing time... but pp is right, English isn't spoken much there.

I'd recommend getting out of Tokyo - a few days there is all fine and good, but to confine yourself to that and Kyoto (which IS amazing) is doing a disservice to the country.

I'd do Tokyo (be sure to spend a day trip going to Nikko), Kyoto, Nara (a day trip from Kyoto) and either go south to Hiroshima & Miyajima or go north and west to the mountains (which is where I lived - in a tiny town on the Gifu/Nagano border) to Takayama and Kanazawa OR hit up the island of Shikoku and do a circular tour. There's some killer udon there.

Fuji is not exactly a pretty climb, for what it's worth. There are many other prettier mountains out there!

supernae

Jacqui: Thank you so much! You are too sweet to offer your help. I really really appreciate it. I felt like it was a sign for me as well when I checked ticket prices on a whim last week. It's only $800 to leave May 10th of this year! I was so surprised...to think, if tickets are THAT cheap right now, only weeks before the plane leaving, what if we booked them a year in advance?! I hope it will be as great of a deal as when you went! wow! 

Thank you for all of your tips and the links are really helpful, too

Kaesha: We aren't sure if we want to hit it right after the wedding sometime in mid-November to see the pretty fall colours, or wait it out for March and April to see the cherry blossoms. decisions decisons...what would you reccommend? 

When I say that we're nerds I definately mean it. We run an arcade together and we are especially fond of japanese arcade machines. While sight-seeing the temples and gardens sounds so amazing, and will definately be a big part of our trip, we really want to hang out in akiba as much as possible.  We would like to go to Okinawa. I have family that lived there and the pictures look SO beautiful...

I have a lot of research to do! Thanks for all the help!

supernae

Oh and thanks for the "cash is king" tip. Niether of us usually have it, so we would have gone in and been like "oh no!" haha

l337Jacqui

no problem!!! e-mail me whenever!

ExpatPumpkin

I also love Japan.  I spent a month in Tokyo about 10 years ago, and we took an Asian cruise for our HM.  We visited cities in China and South Korea, and the following cities in Japan:  Kyoto, Osaka, and Hiroshima.  We had a great time.  Good luck with your planning

supernae

on a completely unrelated note...OMG you have a sapphire engagement ring?!? Me too!!! That's so cool!

OH! if you're a history nerd...would you happen to know of any museums that might focus on Japan in the 1800's...or just the Bakumatsu? :^)

Osaka...perhaps we should go!

Maybe we should wait it out till March/April. That will be a hard 4 months to wait after the wedding haha!  Thanks for all the help!

kaesha

Mmm, I'm more of a Heian period gal. Something about all that poetry. The only thing I really get enthused about with the late Tokugawa period is the rise of woodblocking prints. So... I'm not going to be too helpful there!

Surprisingly enough, I didn't do a lot of museums - the best of the ones I did go to was the Tokyo Museum. It has a little bit of everything.

http://www.tnm.go.jp/en/servlet/Con?pageId=X00&processId=00

kaesha

Oh!! And thanks for the ring comment! My Mum had a sapphire ring, and her Mum did too, so it's a family tradition of ours. I'm quite partial to it!

prescott624

I lived in Japan...you will love it!! Great advice on here.  Have fun!!