A trip long time in the works

Right now travel to Japan is hot. Everyone and their brother and their third cousin twice removed has been making their way to the Land of the Rising Sun. The government closed the country to tourists for over two years during the COVID-19 pandemic, with individual travelers only being able to enter after 2 1/2 years. Thus a weak yen and people no longer wanting to put off their trip of a lifetime, Japan is now seeing record-breaking numbers of visitors.

Our trip though had been long in the making. I have wanted to take my daughter for many years. When she was in the first grade she did a presentation on Japan as the place she wanted to visit the most because, she said, the people there cared deeply about nature (this is the same kid who broke out in sobs during the class viewing of the great floating garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean). That same year C told her teacher she was part-Japanese so that could march in the school’s international parade with the small contingent of Japanese students.

C has loved Pokémon, anime, Nintendo, and Japanese snacks for several years, and now as a teenager is very keen on the fashion. She has wanted to go to Japan soooo bad. Also, we love Disney amusement parks and Tokyo was the final park for us to visit (after four times each to Florida and Shanghai, two times to Paris, two times to California, and one time to Hong Kong).  And over 20 years ago I was an English teacher in Western Japan, and though we would not make it to my Japanese hometown, I still wanted to introduce my daughter to this country where I made so many memories.

I initially planned for us to visit while we were in Malawi, though the long distance and the complicated route were making me rethink it. Then the plan, for April 2020, was made impossible by the global pandemic.

Planning in advance, but not too far in advance

C and I would be traveling to Tokyo with our good friends CZ and her son Little CZ, with whom we have traveled together with in China, Paris, Finland, and on our London and Norway trip. After some discussion, we made the decision to only visit Tokyo as the mega-city offered ample cultural activities and sights to keep us plenty busy.

CZ and I are big travel planners; we really love it. For example, we have known we would go to Japan together in the summer of 2024 since sometime in 2022. We bought our plane tickets in the summer of 2023, as soon as the dates became available. We had our hotel in central Tokyo for the first part of the trip booked nine months out. And, we began to build our shared spreadsheet on places of interest about seven months out.

And then we were stymied because so much to see in Tokyo must be booked in advance, but not too far in advance. And it seemed every place has its own advance reservation rules. So many times we knew what we wanted to do, but we had to wait until the window of opportunity opened. This was a whole other level of planning detail that we had not been quite prepared for.

• Tokyo Disney hotels can be booked from 11 AM of the day four months before.
• Tokyo Disney park tickets can be booked starting from 2 PM of the day two months ahead of your visit (and you cannot book multi day tickets or park hopper).
• Imperial palace gardens tour can be booked from the first of the month preceding the month you want to visit.
• Pokémon cafe – reservations are accepted from 6 PM 31 days out from desired visit date, but you need to be on the website at the moment reservations open and have a tremendous amount of luck.
• Cup of Noodles Museum Yokohama – reservations can be made starting at 10 AM three months and one day prior to the day you wish to visit. 
• Toyusu Market Tuna Auction tour – is offered through an advance lottery system: to visit one has to apply for lottery the first seven days of the month preceding the month of your visit and only 100 people selected per day. (We got it!) 
• Ghibli museum – Visitors must have advance reservations, but one can only do so at 10 AM on the 10th of the month preceding the month of your visit. This was the most difficult of them all as there are only 200 tickets available in 4 entry times per day. CZ and I logged on to the website in advance.; at 15 minutes till the appointed hour, a countdown started on the website. At exactly 10 AM Tokyo time, we were brought into the virtual queue – CZ had about 2500 people in front of her and I had about 17,000!! It took about 15 minutes and CZ got in; she was booted out of her first attempt – probably sold out – but on her second attempt she got in and scored us our tickets!! It felt amazing! It felt like we had just one the lottery and I suppose in a way we did.  (I waited and I got in at 10:58 and nearly all days were completely sold out, just an hour after tickets sales for the month went live!!) 

Is your head about to explode? We thought ours might! Yet, against the odds, we lucked out time and again. Sadly, it did not work out for the notoriously difficult-to-get Pokémon Cafe. I set my alarm for 4:50 AM so I would be on at 6 PM 31 days in advance. I logged in and could see the tickets for my day were not yet available. I refreshed at 5 AM, and the site was immediately unavailable due to heavy usage. At 5:03 it cleared and every single entry for the day was already sold out! In three minutes.

The jet-lag busting plan and the first full day

It had been a long time since we had made a flight as long as that to Japan, 14 hours from Dulles Airport to Haneda Airport. To combat jet lag, I had us in bed at a decent time the night before our flight and then we slept in as long as we could. As our flight took off around noon, the plan was to stay awake as long as possible, falling asleep only the last few hours. We would disembark bleary eyed and shuffle our way through immigration at 3:30 PM Tokyo-time, but the equivalent of 2:30 AM Eastern Standard Time. I hoped we would get to our hotel room around 5 PM where we could collapse and sleep as much as we could.

The first part worked out well, but the second part a bit too well. I did not sleep on the plane at all and C only slept for 1.5 hours. I worried we would be extra grumpy in the immigration line, but managed to get through the surprisingly poorly-designed immigration line. It seemed the airport was not quite prepared for the tsunami of visitors; it took us at least an hour. But we remained awake and in good spirits.

We did not fall asleep in the taxi ride to the hotel. Nor did we do so immediately in the hotel room. We had showers and went out to get some food from the closest convenience store. It was nearly 8 PM when I finally just turned out the light after 23 hours straight without any shut-eye.

I knew we would wake up in the early morning hours, but I thought it would be even earlier than it was; we made it to 3:50 AM. Luckily, our hotel was smack dab in the bustling area of Roppongi in the world’s largest city. There were, at a minimum, eight 24-hour convenience stores within a 6-minute walk from our hotel. We visited at least one each of 7-Eleven, Daily Yamazaki, Lawson, and Family Mart, checking out all the Japanese goodies, and buying snacks along the way. Once we had been out at least three hours we took our haul back to the hotel room for an eclectic breakfast.

Knowing we would have jet lag and expecting an early afternoon crash, we had only one thing planned for our first day. We met CZ and Little CZ at the teamLab Borderless digital art museum about 15 minutes from our hotel on foot. They had arrived in Tokyo a few days before us after a multi-stop journey to Dubai, Singapore, and Borneo, and thus were already adjusted to the time difference.

I find it hard to describe the teamLab installation; it really is something that must be experienced. A series of rooms with digital art projected on to the walls and spilling from room to room? The overflow from one room to another is why it is called “borderless.” Yet, this does not even begin to adequately describe the sensations of rooms large and small that defied my expectations. My favorite installations were: the Bubble Universe room filled with thousands of silver crystal orbs hanging from the ceiling that would light up at our proximity and the En Tea House which is so dimly lit that the colorful digital flowers that bloom from the tea or coconut matcha ice cream are even more vibrant as they spread out across the darkened liquid or black table top. We stayed in the museum for three hours.

We grabbed lunch at the nearby Hard Rock Cafe Tokyo (C and I have a tradition of visiting Hard Rocks around the world). I was sure that after lunch C and I would drag our jet-lag-fogged selves back to the hotel. But we were still awake! The magnificent 7-story, 24-hour operated Don Quixote store across the street called to us and we all heeded. We spent at least an hour, and a good chunk of change, exploring every floor.

C and I then parted ways from our friends. I figured we were going to give in to the jet-lag at any minute and would be best off at our hotel when it happened. I don’t know how we did it, but we made it to 7:30 PM! Surely, this could not last, right? We would find out on day two…