Wotcher. It’s been a while.

There are two main public holidays in China: the spring festival (around late January, early February – also known as Chinese New Year) and the autumn festival (around early October). Each of these festivals lasts for approximately one week and is usually a good chance to go travelling. However, it’s often best not to travel around China at these times since every man, woman, child, dog and hamster journey back to their families’ homes in rural China. Leaving the country is therefore the best bet, and Hannah and I decided that we’d like to go to Japan; it’s only a three hour flight away and offered us the chance of further immersing ourselves into Asian culture.

The trip actually began fairly disastrously. We had to get an outbound flight to Tokyo via Osaka, which on any normal day would have presented no problem whatsoever. 1st October 2009 (our departure date) was not a normal day, though. It was the 60th birthday of the People’s Republic of China and Beijing had organised a huge party (or a massive display of military might, depending on your point of view) in the morning. Annoyingly, this also meant closing down the airport so that every single flight that day was delayed by a few hours, whether they were domestic or international. This had the knock on effect of making us late for our connecting flight from Osaka to Tokyo, which, of course, promptly left without us. Not for no reason are the Japanese renowned for their public transport services, however. As we disembarked from the plane at Kansai International Airport, Osaka, there was a member of staff waiting on the gang plank for us. He was sorry that we had missed our connecting flight to Tokyo, but offered to put us on another flight as soon as possible. He guided us with polite swiftness through passport control, security and customs and then again through the check in procedure for our new flight, and security, before departing with a bow. We knew from that moment on that Japan would be amazing, and we weren’t wrong.

The first thing to note about Japan is that it is expensive, especially compared to China. I could feel my wallet trembling at the mere thought of Japan, as though the cards and cash stuffed inside were its very lifeblood – they were removed often and in large quantities. The flights were fairly pricey, as were the hotels, and we knew that goods and services don’t come cheap either. The public transport system, while being amongst the best in the world, is actually eye-poppingly expensive, especially the Shinkansen (bullet train). Having said all that, both Hannah and I have previously lived in London for several years, so Tokyo presented no real problems on the money front as long as we didn’t act like desperate gamblers on a last throw of the dice with our money. All I can say is that most of the rest of the world has a long way to go to catch up to the Japanese transport system; it is amazing and it’s worth riding the Shinkansen for the experience alone.

The second thing to note about Japan is that it must be in the running for being the world headquarters of drinkers, especially Tokyo. There are bars and restaurants everywhere full of people eating and getting enormously drunk, regardless of the day of the week or even the time of the day. It’s commonplace to see businessmen in a bar at about 3am drinking until they fart blood and then going into work later that morning. So when we rocked up to a bar at about midnight on our first day in Japan and were beckoned in by a crowd of rowdy city workers, we naturally went over and sat down with them. They were swaying all over the place, had commandeered the bar’s stereo system and were playing whatever they wanted. As soon as they found out we were English, they slapped on the Sex Pistols and went mental to “Anarchy in the UK” and “God Save the Queen”. They followed this up by playing The Clash and giving us some of their food, a plate of horsemeat, which tasted surprisingly good. Even one of the barmen got into the spirit of things, getting so smashed he couldn’t actually walk, let alone serve drinks properly. I was a bit disappointed when the night came to an end but I suppose that our new friends had to get at least some sleep before work the next morning. It was, though, a fun start to what would turn into one of the best holidays I’ve ever had.

Tokyo really has something to offer everyone: quiet, contemplative places that don’t feel like they’re in a bustling metropolis; gaudy, neon lit strips, with sex clubs just round the corner from upper class restaurants; and everything in between. For example, Shinjuku, a transport hub on the west side, is the Tokyo that people have seen on TV: neon as far as the eye can see and commuters being packed onto subway trains by staff members as though they were pirates hoarding gold. It’s also a superb place to go in the evening for drinks and food. The Japanese have an excellent way of combining both; the izakaya (Shinjuku is full of them). It’s not a restaurant and neither is it solely a bar. The idea is that you spend the night drinking at one of these places, but they provide decent food as well, available throughout the night: yakitori, teriyaki, sushi, sashimi, you name it you can get it. This means that whenever you get hungry, even if it’s 3am, you don’t have to leave and find a 24 hour fast food place, you just order some more solid sustenance to keep the wolf from the door and keep drinking. So there’s no need to waste any energy standing up, or embarrassing yourself by walking straight into a wall. The idea is that you don’t eat and drink in an izakaya, you drink and eat.

Tokyo-ites are also a very fashionable bunch and they love to shop. There are several districts that serve various kinds of shoppers, from up-market boutiques to dingy second hand stores. A stroll around Ginza will give you a heart attack when looking at the prices, but then only designer stores are located here. At the other end of the scale are the markets and shops around Harajuku (which I much preferred to the snobbishness of Ginza, much like I prefer Carnaby Street to Bond Street when in London). Somehow, though, Tokyo-ites seem to look cool regardless of where they bought their clothes. Perhaps that’s just showing me up for not having a clue about fashion.

Tokyo does have some things that seem strange to my foreign eyes as well. For example, there are a lot of girls who are heavily into what is known as the Gothloli scene, which is essentially a hybrid of Gothic and Lolita. This is almost exactly what it sounds like; young girls dressed in goth outfits. The one difference being that these outfits leave very little to the imagination. When you combine this with the idol girls, who like to dress up in incredibly skimpy nurses outfits or as maids, then you’ve got a recipe for trouser tighteningly high blood pressure, made somewhat disturbing when you consider that they’re all high school girls or younger. I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to look or not (these girls being half my age – how did I get so old so quickly?!), so I decided to look only very briefly with my camera, therefore ensuring that my eyes didn’t get hit in full.

We also ventured outside Tokyo, first to Hakone. This is a massive national park near Mount Fuji, an extinct volcano (as well as being Japan’s highest mountain) and so it is geologically unstable, with sulphurous gas pouring out from the mountainside, staining it a bright yellow colour. Unfortunately for us, it rained for almost our entire stay there, meaning that we were not treated to amazing views of Mount Fuji and nor could we properly see the gas leaking from the rocks. All we saw as we rode over the valley in a cable car was a great wall of cloud, making it feel as though we were travelling into another dimension, or lost in some kind of limbo. Despite this setback, Hakone was still very pleasant. Because of the geological uncertainty of the place, hot springs are everywhere. It is most agreeable to sit in a hot spring (with a makeshift roof, of course) while eating potato soup and drinking a cup of coffee on a miserably wet afternoon. I could have stayed there all day but then I suppose people would have noticed clouds of yellow seeping from me into the water when I inevitably needed to evacuate liquid waste.

After Hakone, we travelled on to Kyoto, which is the old capital of Japan, back before Tokyo became HQ in 1868. While it has, like Tokyo, become a very modern city, it has retained slightly more of the old Japan than its bigger brother has, including some majestic temples and amazing Japanese Zen Gardens. The temples themselves actually don’t differ in style too much from their Chinese counterparts, but it’s the decoration that makes them worth seeing, even if you have over feasted your eyes on those in China (as we have). The Chinese temples are all painted in bright colours, showing off their plumage like a peacock displays its feathers. Those in Japan (or Kyoto at any rate) are a little more understated, but no less impressive for it.

One of the best examples in Kyoto is Nijo-jo, which is technically a castle, although in look and feel it’s more akin to a temple. What sets it apart from the rest is the size of the gardens outside, which are huge and magnificent. The Japanese style is to reject grass and instead use moss to cover the ground. This gives it an almost surreal look as well as making them look like model miniatures when photographed. A walk around the gardens of Nijo-jo is breathtaking and should be enjoyed by everyone. It’s something that I have not seen of the temples in China and Hannah and I let our eyes feast as though we’d never see the like again.

If you want to venture inside the castle (and because you’ve already paid to get in and see the gardens, it would be pretty silly not to) you have to remove your shoes. Visitors follow a route through the castle, which takes in all the important rooms, where the shogun (as a quick aside, this particular castle was constructed by Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate) of the time would entertain and host important, as well as not so important, guests. Some of the rooms contain hidden doors, behind which would stand the bodyguards of the shogun, ready and waiting to jump out and defend him if required. It must have come as a bit of a surprise to potential assassins; they thought they’d managed to get close to a seemingly unprotected and unguarded shogun, only to suddenly discover (much to their chagrin, I’m sure) that their heads had been removed from their bodies. Another defence mechanism in place here (they are in place in many of the temples around Kyoto, but it is here that they were made famous) are the Nightingale Floorboards, which were purposely designed to squeak when pressure was applied to them, meaning that it was nearly impossible for anyone to creep through the castle.

The vast amount of temples and castles in Kyoto might give one the impression that there is not much else available. Anyone coming to this conclusion would be severely mistaken. As I’ve already mentioned, the Japanese are monstrous booze hounds (my kind of people), and it wouldn’t be right or proper for Kyoto to be devoid of places where one could purchase and consume some loopy juice. The two best places, or districts, for this are Pontocho and Gion. Both have a series of small side streets containing nothing but shops and places to get inebriated. These alleyways appear crowded even when deserted, simply because of the mélange of bar signs trying to attract revellers like a bug zapper attracts, er, bugs. Bar crawling here would basically be a form of suicide, since even the most hardened alcoholic wouldn’t get a quarter of the way through the huge amount of watering holes before their internal organs gave up and exploded.

Despite the similarities between these two districts of Kyoto, Gion has one advantage over Pontocho: it is where businessmen and politicians come to entertain clients and VIPs and be entertained by a Geisha. A gentle stroll through these streets will soon uncover a small groups of important looking men wandering around with a Geisha, looking for a place to eat and drink (these places, by the way, are incredibly exclusive; if you have not been introduced to the owners by someone important, you will not be allowed to enter). It should be noted that traditionally Geisha were female entertainers, incredibly skilled in performing arts, music and conversation; they were not prostitutes. Supposedly, they do not and have not engaged in sexual acts with their clients. However, recently there has been some muddying of the traditional waters, and some Geisha (dubbed onsen Geisha, or “Geisha Girls” if you’re an American GI) do engage in prostitution. Although Geisha still abound, they are dwindling in number, mainly due to the economy (Geisha are expensive to hire) and movement more towards the future and a decline in interest of traditional arts.

We decided to bookend our stay in Japan by returning to Tokyo for a couple of days before departing back to China. This was not just because our flights arrived and departed from there (although it did, of course, play a huge part) but because we loved the city so much. While it was nice to get away from this huge and sprawling metropolis and explore more of the country, I found that Tokyo had an almost magnetic effect on me; no matter how far away we went I just wanted to go back there. It’s a completely mesmerising city and I fell for it in a big way. In just a short time, it has become one of my favourite places in the world and makes me wish that I were, in fact, Japanese (OK, so that’s slightly over the top, but exaggeration makes for a better story and works better to drive my point home). I can say that given the chance to return, I would without a second thought. I am, indeed, turning Japanese.