Bree makes a paper monster that hides a couple of inside jokes for Zelda players. If you knock the monster in the head, his upper body folds backwards to reveal an inner cavity. This holds a piece of paper that says, “Monster guts”. Once you’ve defeated the monster, you can open the little paper treasure chest behind him. Inside the chest are two slips of paper: the first slip says, “Korok Seed”, and the second slip says, “Your inventory is full”.
It’s a nice afternoon, so we (Jan, Angela, Bree) decide to try going for a walk along the new, partially-completed Loop Trail through the nearby Arboretum park. The new path is nice, but the completed portion turns out to be very short, and we’re soon blocked by a giant fence. Oh, well. We walk around a nearby area of the park for a while, exploring a number of new trails and structures that have been put in over the last few years.
As her sisters did before her, Bree has to make a geometric structure out of rolled-up newspaper that’s big enough for her to climb inside. Bree makes it big enough to accommodate Mojo, too.
Jan, Liya, and Bree leave for a spring break vacation in Japan. Anya’s high school generally follows the same schedule as her sisters’ school, but unfortunately Anya’s spring break isn’t at the same time, so she has to stay home. Angela stays with her.
In addition to the stories about the trip here, Jan also posted a number of photos as a Facebook album, including some 360° photos.
We (Jan, Liya, and Bree) land at Narita Airport in the mid-afternoon, then take the train to Shinjuku and check into our hotel. We’re all exhausted from the long trip and the time difference, but manage to stay up and have dinner at the hotel’s Peak Lounge, which has a nice view over the nighttime skyline.
As expected, Bree’s up very early — 3:00 am? Liya and Jan managed to sleep in until 5:00. On previous trips to Japan with the girls, we’ve learned that there’s a great playground across the hotel in Shinjuku Central Park. The park opens at 6:00 am, so we’re there when it opens. Sadly, we find that the huge play structure that was a highlight of the park has been dismantled. The park still has a fun slide and some other playground equipment, so the girls play for a while, then we go on a long walk around the park.
We have breakfast at the hotel restaurant, but Jan feels absolutely terrible, so he goes back to bed for a couple of hours. He feels better when he wakes up. We walk to Shinjuku Station so we can purchase rail passes for the coming week, then make our planned trip for the day to the Shibuya district. We check out the recently-opened Hikarie shopping mall, but it’s not that interesting, so we head for where the girls really want to go: the Seibu Loft store, with its many levels of cool stuff. The girls pick out cute pencil cases (pictured) and bento box lunch boxes. We have lunch around the corner at a pizza restaurant.
In the evening, we’re in the mood for yakitori — charcoal-grilled food on skewers. The hotel concierge recommended a place called Toriya right around the corner from the hotel, and when we get there, it smells fantastic. Unfortunately, it’s small collection of tables are all reserved for the evening. We’ll have to try it next time we’re here! So we take a cab ride to the reliable, if less exciting, Akiyoshi restaurant. Bree falls asleep during the ride, and fades in and out during the meal. She revives long enough to enjoy our favorite item on the menu: grilled rice balls. She falls asleep again on the cab ride home.
We go to Harajuku Station to meet our friends the Shinoharas. The last time we were in town, we met with Toshikazu, but his wife Ayako had to stay at home with their son Riu, who was sick. So this is the first time we’re seeing Ayako in a long time, and the first time we’re meeting Riu. The Shinoharas also have some relatives visiting Tokyo for the day, so we meet them as well. It’s a beautiful day for a walk into Yoyogi Park, although when we try to find someplace to sit down, the nice weather also means all the benches are taken.
We say goodbye to the Shinohara’s relatives, then walk with Toshikazu, Ayako, and Riu to a cozy restaurant called Mimet. While waiting for our food, Liya borrows some of Riu’s origami paper, and folds an intricate geometric shape for him. After lunch, we say goodbye and go back to the hotel.
In the evening, we go to Omotesando for dinner at the Brazilian steakhouse, Barbacoa. The girls are exhausted again, so it’s another cab ride back to the hotel.
Bree and Liya want to hang out in the hotel this morning, so Jan goes out on his own. His goal is a nearby art museum — but he’s overlooked the fact that the museum’s closed on Mondays. He ends up walking around Shinjuku, ending with a walk through Shinjuku Gyoen park.
Back at the hotel, we have lunch at the hotel’s “delicatessen”, which actually has some very fancy desserts.
In the mid-afternoon, we take the subway to Ginza to go shopping at the Itoya stationery store. This was the girl’s must-visit request for Tokyo. Sadly, shortly after arriving at the store, Bree announces that her stomach doesn’t feel good. She thinks she might be hungry, so we stop for a nibble at the store’s cafe, but she doesn’t feel great. Liya meanwhile spends a long time making selections from the store’s immense collection of pens and pencils.
After Itoya, we meet up with Chie, a Japanese conversation partner of Jan’s from many years ago (shortly after he moved to Seattle). Chie recently joined Facebook and reconnected with Jan. It turns out she runs a bar in Ginza, and has invited us to come see it. Chie takes us out to cool restaurant called Gompachi, where Bree promptly passes out next to Jan. Liya’s wide awake, though, and bravely tries all the Japanese food that comes out.
After dinner, we go to “Eve”, the bar Chie manages. The place is fairly small, mostly Japanese businessmen. Since she runs the place, there’s no problem having the girls come inside. One of the regular customers is a company CEO who likes to do close-up magic tricks as a hobby. He comes over to our table and does a series of card tricks, some of which are pretty impressive.
In the morning we leave Tokyo for the first of four days of traveling. We take an express train, then two successively smaller train lines to get to the historic post town of Narai. The last train is so small that the one conductor running it is also the ticket inspector who checks tickets when you get off the train. At our stop, the only train door to open is the one by the conductor’s booth. They spin around in their chair, then begin checking train tickets as the departing passengers file past.
Narai is one of several towns along the historic Nakasendo walking route between Kyoto and Tokyo. It was one of two main trails between those cities in Japan’s feudal era. As the country modernized, train tracks and a highway were run along the Nakasendo, so most of its historic route is no longer very picturesque. But in a few places, the trains and roads go through tunnels beneath mountain passes. In those areas, the old trail is still preserved. Some of the towns in those areas have tried to maintain their historic appearance, the better to attract tourists.
Our walk today is across a pass between the towns of Narai and Yabuhara. It’s not a particularly long or difficult walk, maybe 5–6 miles, although the trail does climb fairly steadily. Despite an ominous weather forecast for the next two days, we have perfect weather this afternoon. Spring is just coming to this mountainous section of Japan called Nagano Prefecture. In Tokyo, the cherry blossom season has already finished, but here in Nagano, cherry blossom season is just beginning.
We have some nice views along the way, stopping at a mountain hut and a small shrine at the pass summit. Along the way, there are bell posts where you’re supposed to ring bells to keep away bears. When a bear bell comes in sight, Liya and Bree race ahead to be the first to ring it.
We finish our walk at the sleepy town of Yabuhara, then catch another small train to our stop for the night, Kiso-Fukushima. We’re glad to find that our hotel, Tsutaya Urara, is right across from the station — we’re kind of tired from all the train travel and walking. The hotel is a nice, old style inn, complete with Japanese tatami rooms, male and female communal baths, and a course menu dinner.
These types of dinners tend to feature lots of exotic food, so Jan ordered ahead to get a menu that featured more beef than fish (the town isn’t far from Kobe and its famed cows), and to request cooked fish instead of raw fish courses for the girls. Liya and Bree try everything. Bree’s not quite sure about a whole fish that’s been skewered in such a way that it looks like it’s still swimming, then roasted, but she gamely tries it, and admits it’s not too bad.
When we return to our room, the inn staff has laid out futons for us. These turn out to have fluffy cloud-like top futons. We all crawl into bed and pass out instantly.
We each wake up occasionally during the night due to rain pounding on the window. This doesn’t bode well for our second day of walking. When we get up, we discuss giving up on the walk, but decide to wait until after breakfast to make our decision.
Breakfast turns out to be huge! It comes in two large bento boxes, each with many dishes, plus a big simmer bowl of vegetable soup, a bowl of miso soup, a bowl of rice, a large amount of extra rice, and green tea. The girls love it.
After breakfast the rain seems to be holding off, so we decide to try head to the start of today’s trail and see how it goes. We take the train to Nagiso, then a bus to the historic post town of Tsumago. A tour bus or two has just let off its passengers, so the main walking street has plenty of people strolling down it. The town’s very picturesque, with beautiful old buildings, a number of streams, and cherry blossoms.
We walk out of town and towards the pass to the next town. Today’s trail is much more heavily traveled, so we’re rarely out of sight of people for more than a few minutes. There are plenty of bear bells again, which Liya and Bree ring happily. There’s a spot of drizzle at one point, but for the most part the weather’s just overcast, with some occasional sunbreaks. We eventually reach the summit of the pass, and cross over from Nagano Prefecture into neighboring Gifu Prefecture. From there, it’s downhill to the next post town of Magome.
Magome town is packed with tourists, far more than any of the other towns we’ve come through. We find a nice cafe called Kappe at the edge of town that has good reviews online, so stop there for a lunch of teriyaki chicken sandwiches. Bree has been begging for soft serve ice cream for the last two days, so after lunch Jan finally gets her an ice cream cone.
When we reach the end of the trail, we’re hoping to find a taxi to take us to Nakatsugawa Station so we can catch a train, but there are no taxis in sight, nor much of anything really. The next bus isn’t for nearly an hour, which means we’ll miss the next train, which means which we’ll miss a connection to an express train to Kobe. Jan’s a little grumpy about this, and resigned to spending most of the rest of the day in transit, when a small van drives up and asks if we want a ride to Nakatsugawa Station. “Uh, yes, please.” The driver is an enterprising private taxi driver poaching customers from the bus route, which is fine by us. He gets us to the station much faster than the bus, for a fare that’s equal to the bus fare, in plenty of time to catch the train we want. For the rest of the trip, we refer back to this man as our “taxi angel”.
We get to the city of Kobe in the late afternoon. We’re in the mood for gyoza (Japanese dumplings), and find a restaurant near the hotel that makes them, but the place turns out to be mediocre overall. Oh, well. After dinner, we go on an extended hunt for a 7-Eleven, since the chain’s establishments are the most reliable locations for ATMs that handle our bank’s cards.
On the way back, we walk through a large shopping mall where Liya gets a dessert crepe. The mall has an odd wavy escalator that goes up/flat/up/flat/up. The girls love this.
On the way out of the shopping mall, we walk past a large mural with cute cartoon characters on it. Jan finds the captions amusing, and reads them to Liya and Bree. We’re all charmed by these characters, so walk around a bit to see if we can find a store selling them. Why, yes, we can! There are so many cute character goods on offer, Liya and Bree take a long time picking something out.
Before heading back to the hotel, we stop at the nearby harborside ferris wheel for a ride. The Kobe harbor looks quite nice at night. Back in the hotel, the girls discover that the extra “spare bed” set up for one of them is a really nice futon in a tiny tatami area off the main bedroom. They argue for a long time about who should get it. Eventually, they agree to a coin toss, which Bree wins.
In the morning, we take a series of trains to the tiny train station at Tadanoumi. We’re on our way to a small island called Ōkunoshima, better known these days as “Bunny Island”. There’s not much on the island, but some decades ago, a population of feral rabbits took hold, and now there are about a 1,000 rabbits on the island. A cheap hotel has been established on the island to cater to the tourists that come to see the bunnies.
When we get off the train, Jan figures he’ll have to use Google Maps to find the ferry terminal, but we can just follow the foreign tourists getting off the train too — everyone’s going to Bunny Island. At the ferry terminal, we make sure to purchase some small bags of rabbit food, as there is no food for sale on the island. After the short 15-minute ride to the island, we board a bus that will take us the short distance to the hotel. On the bus, we meet a nice British couple visiting Bunny Island for the 3rd time. They have bags and bags of rabbit food, cabbages, carrots, and other vegetables. We remark at how much food they have. “Oh, our luggage is full of it too”, they say, pointing to their huge suitcase and two backpacks.
We see bunnies on the way into the hotel — they’re scattered everywhere — and as soon as we’ve checked in, we head out to walk around the island. Bunnies are sleeping and hopping all around us. The cutest are the little bunny kits. Liya and Bree are delighted. We slowly make our way on the hour-long walk around the island, stopping constantly to feed bunnies. In some places, bunnies come running to meet us.
Dinner is at the hotel’s so-so buffet, followed by more bunny watching and bunny feeding.
As soon as Liya wakes up, she looks out the window. “The bunnies are awake!” Bree’s disappointed we have to eat breakfast before she and Liya can go outside to be with the bunnies again. Jan’s eyeing the ferry schedule, trying to figure out which ferry we’ll catch. This entails some negotiation over just how much longer we’re going to stay and watch rabbits. We settle on the 10:30 ferry, and slowly walk over to the ferry dock. The British couple from yesterday is kind enough to give us a huge carrot to feed the bunnies. Bree uses this as a lure for some bunny kits.
We finally bid goodbye to Bunny Island, then ride the short ferry back to the mainland. From there we take trains to Hiroshima. We check in around lunchtime, so after dropping off our bags, we walk to the indoor/outdoor shopping mall next door in search of a restaurant. A huge “RESTAURANTS” sign beckons us up 8 flights of escalators. We settle on a tonkatsu (fried pork cutlet) restaurant.
While eating lunch, Bree keeps asking about where we can go in Hiroshima to buy more Sumikko Gurashi character goods. From what Jan can see online, there’s only one store in the city with a significant amount of those goods. The store is inside a Loft outlet on the 8th floor of the mall we’re in. We exit the restaurant, turn left, and the store is right there. Liya and Bree go nuts again trying to decide what to get.
In the afternoon, we go swimming in the hotel pool, which leads to an odd customer service experience. The pool, unfortunately, is a lap pool, not a splash-around-wherever-you-want pool. The three of us swim back and forth in a lane. Afterwards, as we’re walking back up our room, Bree discovers that she’s lost a hair tie Liya had lent her. She thinks she left it on her towel — which she’d thrown into the towel bin. We probably can’t get it back now. Liya’s unhappy about losing it, but it’s just a cheap elastic hair tie, and not a big deal.
Several hours later, after a dinner of shabu shabu, we’re back in the room and the room’s phone rings. Jan can’t remember the last time anyone called him on a hotel room phone — who even knows we’re here? It’s the front desk. Apparently, the hotel laundry found the hair tie Bree lost earlier today. They’d contacted the pool area, who remembered two girls visiting the pool in the afternoon. They’d worked out who the girls might be, and are now calling to see if Bree or Liya lost a hair tie. Why, yes, Jan says, they did. “Someone will be right up”, they say. Thirty seconds later, the doorbell rings. Outside are two hotel staff, one of them carefully proffering the recovered hair tie. After they leave, we guess that somewhere between 5 and 8 people have been involved in reuniting this essentially disposable object with its owner.
We head out around 9:00 am to walk to Hiroshima Peace Park, a collection of memorials to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima at the end of World War II. It’s a beautiful day for a walk, and there aren’t too many tourists out yet. We stop at the Atomic Bomb Dome, then walk across the bridge to the Peace Park itself. The museum exhibits are heartrending. After the museum, we stop and ring the bell at the Sadako Sasaki memorial.
We’ve only been out for about an hour, but Bree wants to go back to the hotel. We stop along the way at a stylish cafe whose speciality is artisanal potato chips. These meet with everyone’s approval.
In the afternoon, we walk the short distance to Hiroshima Castle. Most of the castle was destroyed by the atomic bomb, but small portions have been reconstructed, including a tower holding a museum. We have fun exploring the museum, particularly two exhibits. The first is a small area where tourists can dress up in feudal-era Japanese costumes. The second is an area where kids can play with wooden blocks that can be joined together using a variety of traditional Japanese woodworking joinery techniques. Japanese buildings were built without nails, and relied instead on complex joints. It’s fun to figure out how to fit everything together.
Since Liya likes Japanese sweets, Jan seeks out a confectionery we can visit. We try one called Takagi not far from our hotel. It has an attached cafe, so we sit down and Jan does his best to order something. Liya selects a bean jam bun with matcha green tea. She loves it. “Why did we wait until the last day to do this?” she asks.
At dinnertime we walk to a small but popular Korean-style yakiniku (grilled meat) restaurant. Bree prefers the kalbi meat, Liya likes the kalbi and roast; neither like the salted tongue. Jan concludes that, if you can get past the texture, the taste is actually pretty good.
The hotel’s buffet breakfast isn’t interesting in any way, and we don’t want to waste our last breakfast on it. We go out of the hotel and stop at the nearby St. Mark’s Cafe, which serves a variety of French toast options. We all get the chocobanana French toast, and we all agree it’s awesome.
We have just enough time in the morning to squeeze in one last tourist activity: a visit to the Shukkeien garden. It’s a perfect morning for a slow walk around the garden, and the girls have a great time exploring all the paths, bridges, and stepping stones. We discover a small box where one can deposit a coin to get fish food, so Liya and Bree happily feed the koi. Angela calls while we’re there, and we do a quick video call from within the garden. We’ll be home soon enough.
We make it back to the hotel in time to catch our bus at the bus center next door. This takes us to Hiroshima Airport, where we make some final purchases of Japanese candy to bring home. We fly to Narita (Tokyo) Airport, then connect to our flight back home. Jan and Bree enjoy passing some of the time by watching, “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them”.
At the airport, there are couple of funny moments when we go through the Global Entry line at Immigration. There’s a fingerprint scanner, and the scanner has trouble reading Bree’s fingerprints because her fingers are so small. The machine takes a photo of each of us. Bree’s photo ends up being a photo of Jan: he’s standing behind Bree, trying to lift Bree up into the camera’s line of sight, when the shutter goes off. The Customs agent does a double-take when he sees Jan’s photo on Bree’s immigration document.