Wednesday, October 1

Up early for Japanese Customs at 7:30. On the bus and rolling for the overland Tour at 8:30. There are 38 of us plus Cathy from the Shore Excursion staff. Jill is also on this tour. Our guide is Hama who will be with us on the whole tour, although the bus drivers and assistant guides (young women in smart uniforms complete with little hats) will change for each city.

The weather was absolutely perfect, bright blue sky, no clouds, and a very comfortable temperature. Our first stop was at Jodogahama Beach (“hama” means beautiful beach). The beach itself is mainly large pebbles, but it is ruly beautiful with large rock formations just off-shore. Next brief stop was at a very interesting place called Seatopia Naado which was a combination tourist information center, grocery and flower store, then we were off over the mountains to Morioka.

After a spectacular view of the city and surrounding mountains from the Mt. Iwayama Observation Deck, we visited the Nambu Family Garden. The Nambu family were aristocrats under the Tokugawa Shogunate. The family is long gone, but the garden has been preserved. I only went part way into the garden as my walker does not do well on gravel paths (the same situation obtained at several other places on the tour). Japanese gardens are not about flowers, but about trees and shrubs and water features to represent nature. The shapes and colors of the plants and their foliage as well as their spatial arrangements are what make them pleasing and restful.

After a nice buffet lunch, we boarded the bullet train (Shinkansen) for Tokyo. The trip took only about 2.5 hours, and “bullet train” is a real, live description of how it goes! Very fast! The scenery included lots of mountains both east and west of us as we traveled through small cities and rice paddies in various stages of growth. The younger rice fields were a bright green with a touch of yellow while the ripe ones were almost a golden color. Fields where the rice had been harvested and the straw collected to be dried were, of course, dry ad dirt-colored.

When we got to Tokyo (at rush hour), it turned out that we had to tote our own luggage to the waiting bus. This should not have been a problem, but it turned out that the buses are not allowed to park near the train station! I only had my purse and an overnight bag, so could load them only my walker pretty easily. Hama took off at a good clip and we were soon strung out in quite a long line with me getting farther and farther behind with every minute. Cathy stayed with me, and the assistant guide for Tokyo hung back to keep beckoning us on. The actual hike was about a mile from where we got off the train to the bus. Since I was so far behind, I didn’t feel like I could stop to rest, and by the time I got to the bus, needless to say I was in pretty sad shape physically and pretty irate to boot. Fortunately, the rest of the folks on the tour were not upset with me for being so slow as many of them were also worn out by the unexpected hike. This was the only bad part of the whole tour. All the rest, before and after, was excellent.

We stayed at the Keio Plaza Hotel which was very posh. Spacious rooms, lovely decor, and elegant bathrooms. After a nice dinner, a few folks went out for walks, but most of us collapsed.

Japanese toilets...what can I say! I’m sorry that it didn’t occur to me to take a photo of one. You have to be a cross between a civil engineer, hydraulic engineer, and computer scientist to work one...even to figure out how to flush one! Heaven forbid if you want to turn off the music (as I found in one restaurant facility) or on/off the heated seat or any of the other features! In the Keio Plaza, the flush mechanism wasn’t even on the toilet itself, but was discretely located over on the side of the marble counter! Of course there were instructions for each of the buttons (located on a little side arm down at seat level) in Japanese along with one inscrutable word in English...not much help there.

Thursday, October 2

Bags in the hall by 7:00 a.m. and downstairs to a breakfast buffet featuring both American style and Japanese style dishes. Japanese style breakfast is pretty much the same as Japanese style dinner...rice and lots of different vegetables and meats, mainly seafood. Guess which style I chose.

The first stop of the day was at the Meiji Jingu (Shinto) Shrine. Again there were gravel paths along with slopes, so I opted to sit in a nice plaza with tables and chairs and enjoy the perfect weather. There was a Forest of Life Museum there (not open at the time) which had a wonderful inscription over the gate: “We must take care of this shining road. Our forests of both land and sea assure our very lives.”

Our next stop was the observation deck on the 45th floor of the Tokyo Metropolitan Building. This is a fairly new building, and the view was amazing! Even given the hazy atmosphere, most of the city was visible. After that we went on to another Shinto shrine that is very popular with the Japanese.

Hama, our guide, did a marvelous job of explaining things to us from historical data to modern day stuff. At one point, she even gave us a lesson in the three kinds of Japanese writing. No wonder Japanese children have to work so hard in school...they learn two different alphabets along with thousands of ideograms! I can now read the signs for “entrance” and “exit,” but that’s about it. Fortunately they also use a number of readily understandable pictures for things in public places. I’m sure I would have enjoyed my tour of Japan even more if I could have read the signs of the places we passed.

We had a wonderful Teppanyaki lunch. The chefs here do not “perform” all the whirling knives and flaming onion tower tricks that the chefs in American Japanese steak house restaurants do. Here they just get right down to it and cook!

Then we boarded the bullet train again for Kyoto. We zipped by Mt. Fuji en route, but it was too hazy at this time of year for a good view. Arriving at Kyoto, we were checked in to the Righa Royal Hotel Kyoto. This was an equally lovely hotel, and even more Japanese in flavor with shoji screens at the windows of the rooms. After a fine buffet dinner, again some went out for walks and some (including me) just made an early night of it.

Friday, October 3

Bags in the hall by 7:30...hooray, and extra half hour! Another buffet breakfast and off we went.

We toured the Sanjusangen-do Buddhist Temple. Photos weren’t allowed inside. This is a photo of a gardener in the courtyard very carefully trimming a tree twig by twig. The temple is a Japanese National Treasure. It was established in 1164, burned, was reconstructed in 1266 and has remained unchanged with only four renovations since. In a few places you can see some of the original ceiling decorations up among the enormous beams of the roof. It contains 1000 gilded standing statues of the Buddhist deity Kannon carved of Japanese cypress and one very large statue of Kannon in the center of a long hall. There are also 33 other statues of guardian deities. Of the latter, I found the Thunder God and the Wind God most impressive. Mos t of the others were variations on the theme of fierce and/or grim which, I suppose, is appropriate for guardian deities.

Next was the Garden of the Heian Jingu Shrine. Again, I didn’t go in very far on the gravel paths, but spent some time perusing the souvenir stalls outside and watching the tourists. Everywhere we went there were lots and lots of Japanese tourists, and lots of school-age groups.

Just before lunch we had a too short visit to an amazing Japanese arts and crafts store called the Kyoto Handicrafts Center where we all could have easily spent the whole afternoon. Lunch was at a nearby hotel and fully lived up to the rest of the meals on this tour.

After lunch our first stop was at Nijo Castle. This was built in 1603 as the official Kyoto residence of the first Tokugawa Shogun, Ieyasu. More gravel. Jill and I stayed around the main gate area and people-watched. One of the people we watched (and spoke to) was one of our table mates who was on a one day tour from the ship in Kobe. The massive gates and stone work of the moat walls were spectacular.

Our last stop was the Golden Pavilion at the Rokuon-ji Temple. I did walk around in these gardens a little as the gravel wasn’t as deep as elsewhere, but I didn’t actually get back in far enough to see the Golden Pavilion as there were lots of steps also.

Our bus then took us about 1.5 hours through Osaka and on to Kobe. A goodly portion of the roadway seemed to be elevated, and the multi-level interchanges with sweeping curves are as, or perhaps more, complex than anything I’ve ever seen anywhere. There was great excitement on the bus when we finally spotted the ship in the distance about 5:30 p.m. The vast majority of us headed straight for our cabins with the intention of calling room service and falling into our own beds!

Saturday, October 4

This was mostly a lost day for me as I spent a great deal of it asleep! In the afternoon I did go ashore to the shops in the Terminal to spend the last of my yen. Then I went to the spa for a facial and massage before dinner.

A couple of general thoughts about Japan...or at least what I saw of it. It is a country of spectacular scenery...mountains everywhere...mostly volcanic. I quickly gave up counting the tunnels we went through, and I can’t imagine how they keep them in repair in this earthquake prone country. It is also extremely neat and tidy. I saw exactly one piece of litter during the entire five days which is somewhat surprising given the general dearth of trash cans in most places. The people are extremely friendly and helpful and, of course, polite. Another thing that we all noticed was how quiet the cities are. I never heard a horn honk and only once or twice heard a siren on an emergency vehicle. My guess is that the Japanese substitute politeness and patience for honking and road rage. U.S. drivers should take lessons.