I traveled to Japan and I want to talk about it!

Blogs

May 29, 2026

This post is not related to tech, like most of my others.

I traveled to Japan for 8 days, going to Tokyo and Kyoto, and I wanted to share my experience and thoughts. Most of the things I’ll talk about are not novel, but I found the whole experience pretty awesome so I want to dump about it. This is my first time being overseas. The only places I’ve traveled to outside the United States have been Panama and Costa Rica, which were both fun trips as well!

The Flights

Phew, what a doozy. About 12 hours from Denver to Tokyo, and 10 1/2 hours back. I brought my small laptop to do some light gaming and movie watching, but I ended up watching all of the 1st season of Ted Lasso on the way there through United’s in-flight entertainment. I tried to sleep as well, but there was a toddler crying and screaming for about 2 hours with the parent not really doing anything to try and stop it. People would come up and offer assistance, but she would refuse. I don’t think I’ve ever seen something like that before, and the noise is definitely something I won’t forget. I definitely thought it was a baby, but after the flight ended, I saw the kid and she must have been 2 or 3 years old. I’m sure this isn’t a new thing for seasoned travelers, but yeah, yikes.

On the flight back, we had another crying child, but this one was actually a baby, and was not near as loud. I was able to drown them out with earplugs, in part because the baby was further away from me than the toddler on the flight there. I watched Goat (the one about the goat playing basketball), and it was a cute movie. No real tension, it was fluffy (pun intended). Then I played some Pokemon HeartGold on an emulator, with a randomizer for pretty much everything in the game (types, type matchups, evolutions, trainer pokemon, wild pokemon, etc.). It was a much more peaceful flight than the first one. I’m writing this the day after, and I’m still jetlagged, but I feel fine.

Transportation

The transportation system in Tokyo (and Kyoto) had me realizing firsthand just how bad we have it in the US when it comes to getting around. Not only was it very easy to find what I wanted at any given time just by walking around (groceries, food, etc.), but if I needed to get to another part of Tokyo, it was usually less than 30 minutes away without needing a car! The subway system is impressive. I love love love that walking is the default in Tokyo, and I got way more steps in than I could ever hope to in the states, just passively by trying to get where I wanted to be. My highest step count for the last week was 21,258, and my lowest was 10,504. Just impressive.

Granted, because I was doing tourism, I got way more steps just because I needed to get to all the cool sightseeing places, but in a day-to-day situation, I’d be at least tripling the amount of steps I’d normally take in the US.

The first thing I missed coming back to the states was not being able to just hop on a train to go somewhere. I have to get in my car to go basically anywhere. There’s no way I’m going to be getting 10,000 steps per day here. I think in the future, I’d love to live somewhere as walkable as Tokyo. In the US, that limits me to very few options.

Infrastructure, Construction, etc.

On a very similar subject to the transportation system, the infrastructure had me very impressed. The subway system was well thought out, the roads were nice, the sidewalks were nice, the bathrooms were nice (I’ll miss those bidets!), everything was just nice. I could tell that tax money and fare money is going to something worthwhile.

The construction of Tokyo was really cool too, the verticality of the town was very foreign to me as a midwestern US citizen. The fact that you could have stores that are taller than they are wide, or even different stores in the same building on different floors or tucked away in alleys made it feel like a maze, but a really fun one.

There were a lot of small businesses in Tokyo and Kyoto, and I think the walkability and the way Tokyo is constructed is favorable towards small businesses in general. There’s a lot of foot traffic around these stores every day, and as a result they’re able to survive better than they would in the United States, where everything is sprawled out, and people aren’t walking around discovering new shops. I think that less walkable areas tend towards large businesses.

The Food

I really enjoyed pretty much everything I ate in Japan. I tried to make sure I was trying something new every day.

Some of my favorite things I had were:

Sushiro, the largest conveyor belt sushi chain in Japan
Lots of local Ramen and Udon places
A local arabic food place
CoCo ICHIBANYA - The largest curry chain in Japan
7-11 food, which was surprisingly fun to get, because 7-11 was always just a convenience store in the states

Places I got to see

Here’s some of the highlights for places I got to see

Ueno Park
Shibuya, and Shibuya Crossing
The Tokyo National Museum
Akihabara, probably my favorite place on the trip, because I love tech and I’ve been a fan of anime since college.
The Tokyo Imperial Palace
Nakano Broadway, a pretty cool 5-floor shopping center.
The bamboo forest in Kyoto
Arashiyama Monkey Park, where we got to see Japanese macaque monkeys.
Nijo-jo castle in Kyoto, a significant location for the Tokugawa Shogunate.
Lots and lots of shrines in Tokyo and Kyoto, it’d be hard to pick a favorite, but I liked the shrines leading up to Mt. Inari in Kyoto.

Learning the Language

About 7 years ago, I dipped my toes into learning the Japanese language, and learned Hiragana, some Katakana, and some of the basic Japanese grammar structures (particles, Japanese being a context-sensitive language, etc.). I stopped actively trying to learn Japanese a few months afterward, but some of the concepts stuck with me and that was immensely helpful when traveling. I was able to order food, and have very basic conversation with locals.

I had to revitalize some of my knowledge by doing kana drills (I used the MARU Kana app, which was cute and helpful), and checked out Tae Kim’s Japanese guide again. It’s a wonderful guide if you’re coming from English and I couldn’t recommend it more. I also downloaded the imiwa? dictionary app.

I also couldn’t have gotten through the trip without Google Translate, as most things were just too complex without a translation app.

I’ve always been generally pretty interested in learning Japanese, but I haven’t had a reason to learn it, and even now I am conflicted with learning Japanese or learning a language that is more immediately useful, such as Spanish (prominent in the US, and widely spoken) or Mandarin (I have friends who speak it and it’s very widely spoken). I’m trying to tell myself though that it’s more important that the language is interesting to me, not that the language is useful. I may blog later about my Japanese learning pursuits if I decide to continue learning the language.

Medical Tourism

I love the concept of medical tourism, going to another country to get cheaper procedures, or more unique procedures not available in your home country. It’s fun.

I can now say that I’ve done it at least once. I wanted to bring home a new pair of glasses from Japan, because I had heard that you can go to any eyeglasses store and get an eye exam included with your glasses, and that sounded fun. It all ended up being much cheaper than doing it in the states too! (~$110 for my exam, and glasses, and that’s including the fact that I have pretty bad astigmatism!)

I went on a Friday to Akihabara with the intent of getting new glasses from JINS, but found out that with my astigmatism, it would take a week for them to get me glasses that have the lenses I need. This is unfortunately a common story for tourists going to Japan and trying to get glasses, and I didn’t have a week to spare, as I was flying out Thursday the week after.

Undeterred, I went to Zoff, which is another eyeglass store in Japan, and they were able to promise me glasses in 5 days. I made sure to clarify that it was 5 days and not 5 business days, and was given the go-ahead. The glasses ended up being available in only 3 days, but I was in Kyoto at the time and didn’t get to pick them up until 5 days anyways.

So here I am, with new glasses from Japan! It’s one of my favorite souvenirs for sure, even if they are pretty basic frames and the nose piece is pretty high up. Speaking of souvenirs…

Souvenirs

I brought back some nice souvenirs from Japan. I brought back some capsule toys, as the capsule machines were all over Tokyo, particularly in the subway stations and Akihabara. I went to some bookstores and brought home some Japanese books which I intend to read if I get better at Japanese. I also brought back some Bioré sunscreen for my girlfriend, as she likes that brand and it’s very cheap there (Japan loves its skincare). I got some stickers, some charms from shrines, and a few other small things too, like a magnet for my fridge. All-in-all, I feel like I could have easily brought another suitcase for souvenirs, because there were so many cool shops.

Tech Stuff

I didn’t do a lot of tech stuff on the trip, but I did see some used technology stores in Nakano Broadway, and that was pretty neat. Nothing beats ebay though, unfortunately.

I also managed to set up an Immich instance remotely with a little help from my girlfriend who switched out the ethernet cables for my server after I noticed my server acting up with a whopping 20% packet loss and mere kilobytes of download speed. This was crucial as I was running out of storage space on my phone, and I was able to offload most of my photos to the instance.

There was also a COSMIC update that came out while I was in Japan, so I’m working on that today to get it released in Fedora. It includes work I did on adding an rpm-ostree backend to cosmic-store, so if you’re a Fedora Atomic user, enjoy!