2026-06-18 22:41:55 +02:00
8 changed files with 165 additions and 15 deletions
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 title: 'Wheels Down at Narita'
 date: '2026-03-25 15:40'
 template: entry
 published: true
 hero_image: ''
 lat: '35.7720'
 lng: '140.3929'
 location_city: 'Tokyo'
 location_country: 'Japan'
 weather_temp_c: 16
 weather_desc: 'Sunny'
 ---
 Eleven hours of flight time, two mediocre films, and one surprisingly good noodle dish from the trolley. Then the descent through scattered cloud, the first glimpse of grey-green patchwork below, and that particular feeling when the wheels finally touch down on a continent you have never stood on before.
 Narita is large and orderly and very, very calm. Immigration moved faster than any airport I have ever been through. The officer looked at my passport, looked at me, stamped it once, and handed it back without a word. That was it. Entry to Japan.
 The Narita Express runs direct to Shinjuku. I found a window seat and spent 90 minutes watching the city materialise from the outside in — rice fields giving way to low housing, then arterial roads, then the sudden verticality of central Tokyo rising up all at once as if someone just switched a setting.
 The hotel is small but perfect. A room roughly the width of my arms outstretched, a window looking onto a grey concrete wall, and a bed that feels like sleeping on a cloud. I went out for ramen at a place around the corner where you order from a vending machine and sit at a counter alone with a small wooden partition between you and the next person. Nobody spoke. It was the best meal I have had in months.
 Tomorrow: Ueno. The forecast says the cherry blossoms may finally be open.
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 title: 'Sakura in Ueno Park'
 date: '2026-03-26 10:00'
 template: entry
 published: true
 hero_image: ''
 lat: '35.7155'
 lng: '139.7753'
 location_city: 'Tokyo'
 location_country: 'Japan'
 weather_temp_c: 14
 weather_desc: 'Partly cloudy'
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 I arrived at Ueno Park at ten in the morning thinking I would beat the crowds. I was wrong. Several thousand people had the same idea, and the same Instagram instinct. But here is the thing about cherry blossom season in Japan — the crowds are almost part of it. Families with picnic sheets. Couples with matching outfits. Office workers in suits sitting on blue tarps eating convenience-store onigiri. Everyone doing the same thing: looking up at the same trees.
 The blossoms were at maybe seventy percent. Enough to understand what the fuss is about.
 I walked the park from one end to the other and then sat under a particularly generous tree for about an hour just watching people react to something beautiful. There is a Japanese word for it — *hanami* — which translates roughly as "flower viewing" and is more or less an entire cultural practice. You do not rush past the blossoms. You sit with them.
 Later I found the Tokyo National Museum at the top of the park. Three floors of Japanese history, almost entirely in Japanese, which I cannot read, but context is its own language. A display case of Edo-period swords. Painted screens showing mountains I now recognise. A reconstructed tea house in the garden, closed for the season but visible through the glass.
 Dinner: tonkatsu on a side street off Ueno-Okachimachi station. The woman who runs the counter has been there for at least thirty years by the look of it. She refilled my miso soup without being asked, twice.
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 title: 'Summit Clouds and Snow'
 date: '2026-03-27 07:15'
 template: entry
 published: true
 hero_image: ''
 lat: '35.5095'
 lng: '138.7646'
 location_city: 'Kawaguchiko'
 location_country: 'Japan'
 weather_temp_c: 1
 weather_desc: 'Snow'
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 Nobody told me it would snow.
 I took the early bus from Shinjuku at 6:45am because the forecast for the Fuji Five Lakes region said "clear morning, clouds by noon." That is the window you want — Fuji is notorious for hiding inside its own weather system, and most visitors spend an entire day staring at a blank white sky where a mountain ought to be.
 I got the mountain. For about forty minutes.
 By the time the bus pulled into Kawaguchiko, the first flakes were already coming down. Light at first — the decorative kind that you hold your hand out for. Then, steadily, not decorative at all. I walked down to the lake with my bag under my jacket and stood at the water's edge while the snow thickened and Fuji turned from a sharply defined white cone into a suggestion, and then into nothing.
 The lake surface was perfectly still. The snow fell straight down. There were no other tourists on the path, or if there were I could not see them. It was one of those moments of completely accidental solitude that you cannot plan for and would not trade.
 I sat on a wooden bench on the lakefront for longer than made any meteorological sense. The snow kept falling. A single cormorant sat on a rock offshore and did not move the entire time I was there.
 Caught the bus back to Shinjuku in the afternoon. The mountain never reappeared. I do not mind even slightly.
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 title: 'A Thousand Torii Gates'
 date: '2026-03-28 11:30'
 template: entry
 published: true
 hero_image: ''
 lat: '34.9671'
 lng: '135.7727'
 location_city: 'Kyoto'
 location_country: 'Japan'
 weather_temp_c: 18
 weather_desc: 'Sunny'
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 The Shinkansen from Tokyo to Kyoto takes two hours and twelve minutes. You travel at 285km/h. At one point Fuji appears out the right-hand window, clear and enormous and completely snow-covered, and the entire carriage rotates slightly to look at it. The mountain is visible for about four minutes. Then it is gone.
 Kyoto is everything Tokyo is not: low, slow, wooden. The streets around Fushimi Inari were already warm with tourists at 11am but the shrine itself is large enough to absorb them. You walk under a tunnel of orange torii gates — thousands of them, each donated by a business and engraved with the donor's name — up a hillside through cedar forest, and the further you climb the more the crowd thins out.
 I walked for two hours. Most visitors turn back at the first lookout. I kept going, past smaller shrines and stone fox statues and mossy steps worn down by a century of feet. Near the top the path was almost empty. The air smelled of pine and incense.
 The city below spread out in all directions. Very few tall buildings — there are strict height regulations to preserve the sightlines. The Kamo River was a thin silver line running south. Distant mountains still wearing snow.
 Dinner at a kaiseki restaurant in Gion, the old entertainment district. Eight small courses, each plated like a small still life. I ate slowly and said nothing and it was the right approach.
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 title: 'The Deer of Nara'
 date: '2026-03-29 14:00'
 template: entry
 published: true
 hero_image: ''
 lat: '34.6851'
 lng: '135.8048'
 location_city: 'Nara'
 location_country: 'Japan'
 weather_temp_c: 17
 weather_desc: 'Partly cloudy'
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 The deer at Nara are not afraid of you. This is the first thing you notice — not just that they tolerate humans, but that they regard you with a kind of benign indifference that borders on contempt. They walk into traffic. They push their noses into your pockets. They bow, which sounds enchanting and is, in practice, a manoeuvre to knock crackers out of your hand faster.
 I bought a small bundle of *shika senbei* — deer crackers — from a vendor at the park entrance. They were gone in about forty-five seconds to a small gang of deer who appeared from nowhere and surrounded me in a tight semicircle. One bit my sleeve. Another headbutted a woman walking past who was not even involved.
 Todai-ji temple is at the far end of the park and contains the largest bronze Buddha in Japan. The building is immense — apparently it was rebuilt at two-thirds the original size in the 18th century and is still the largest wooden structure in the world. The Buddha sits in the dim interior looking calm about this. There is a wooden pillar near the back with a hole cut through its base the same width as one of the Buddha's nostrils. Schoolchildren queue to crawl through it. Wisdom awaits on the other side.
 The train back to Kyoto takes 45 minutes through flat agricultural land. The deer do not follow you.
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 title: 'Dotonbori After Dark'
 date: '2026-03-30 18:00'
 template: entry
 published: true
 hero_image: ''
 lat: '34.6687'
 lng: '135.5017'
 location_city: 'Osaka'
 location_country: 'Japan'
 weather_temp_c: 19
 weather_desc: 'Cloudy'
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 Osaka is louder than Kyoto and prouder of it. Kyoto has temples and restraint. Osaka has neon and takoyaki and a sign the size of a building advertising a restaurant with a mechanical crab on the front. Both are correct.
 I arrived from Kyoto mid-afternoon, dropped my bag, and went directly to Dotonbori to get my bearings before the evening crowd descended. The canal runs through the entertainment district, and on both sides there are restaurants stacked six floors high with illuminated signs competing for your attention so aggressively that after ten minutes you start to tune out the sensory overload and just walk.
 At six in the evening the neon started properly. The famous running man billboard. The Glico sign. Streets full of people eating while walking — takoyaki (octopus balls, better than they sound), skewered meats, cones of spicy shrimp. Osaka has a word for its own food philosophy: *kuidaore*, which means "eat until you drop."
 I took it as guidance.
 Three hours of eating across four separate establishments. Kushikatsu — battered and deep-fried everything — at a counter in an alley so narrow that diners on opposite sides can shake hands across the table. Soft-serve matcha ice cream on the street. Okonomiyaki from a woman who pressed the pancake flat with a heavy iron tool and would not let me touch anything.
 The canal was dark and the lights were reflected in it and for a while I just stood on the bridge watching people eat.
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 title: 'Seoul Calling'
 date: '2026-04-01 09:00'
 template: entry
 published: true
 hero_image: ''
 lat: '37.5635'
 lng: '126.9851'
 location_city: 'Seoul'
 location_country: 'South Korea'
 weather_temp_c: 10
 weather_desc: 'Rain'
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 The flight from Osaka to Seoul takes one hour and forty minutes. Shorter than some commutes I have had. At Incheon I changed SIM cards, changed currency, changed alphabet, and walked out into a grey April morning with rain coming in off the Yellow Sea.
 Korea hits differently than Japan. Japan felt deliberate and enclosed, every surface managed, every system timed to the second. Seoul feels faster and more argumentative, as if things are still being decided. The streets around Myeongdong were already busy at 9am: coffee shops the size of ballrooms, street vendors selling *hotteok* (sweet pancakes) from portable griddles, and the particular energy of a city that moves at one speed regardless of the weather.
 My guesthouse is in Mapo-gu, a neighbourhood that turns out to be significantly cooler than anywhere the guidebooks sent me. Independent coffee roasters. Record shops. A gallery in a converted printing house showing black-and-white photography of the Han River in the 1970s.
 I spent the afternoon walking the Han River itself — a massive green ribbon running through the city with dedicated cycling paths, outdoor fitness equipment, and Koreans doing every possible outdoor activity despite the rain. A group of older men playing badminton with very serious expressions. Two people kayaking. A family of five sharing a communal barbecue under an umbrella.
 Dinner: Korean fried chicken at a place that opened at 5pm and was full by 5:05. Beer so cold it was almost painful. Outside, the rain kept up steadily. I stayed longer than I meant to.
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 title: 'QA Test Entry'
 date: '2026-06-18 10:00'
 template: entry
 published: true
 hero_image: ''
 lat: '35.689487'
 lng: '139.691711'
 location_city: 'Tokyo'
 location_country: 'Japan'
 weather_temp_c: ''
 weather_desc: ''
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 This is the QA test body. Second sentence for length.