Japan is sort of its own special planet. Nowhere is this clean, people are never this nice, and nothing is quiet this perfect. Maybe it’s the lack of land-based neighbors or the 200+ years cut off from the outside world, but they definitely have their own way of doing things. From style, culture, cuisine, humor,…
Tokyo is as lovely and well mannered as you’d expect the Japanese capital to be, but it has a nerdy, naughty, and edgy side that keeps it interesting. Things like capsule beds, anime emporiums, Pachinko parlors, and Hello-Kitty-themed Love Hotels thrive alongside ancient shrines and state-of-the-art skyscrapers. It’s a place of endless contradictions and it…
How to tie a kimono, arrange an ikebana flower arrangement, write kangi calligraphy…these are skills we never dreamt we’d learn, but with three days in the historic city of Kanazawa and the help of The Art of Travel, we took the ultimate crash course in Japanese culture. More an art insider than a tour operator,…
Picture your most elegant image of Japan–-a woman in a floral kimono walking under the shade of her paper umbrella or a zen garden perfectly manicured in a courtyard of red maples–-this is Kyoto. Even in a country that was tragically razed in World War II, this former capital remained pristine. Having all their cultural…
After getting our feet wet on Okinawa’s largest island, we navigated to the tiny isles in the far reaches of the Ryukyu archipelago. Most people don’t make it this far but the Okinawa tourism bureau and Hoshino Resorts are trying to change that. To help spread the word on the unique beauty and culture of…
Japan may seem compact but when you add in the 160 islands of Okinawa it seems to stretch endlessly into the East China Sea. Like Hokkaido, Okinawa is a recent addition to Japan proper and was its own kingdom and trading epicenter until 1879. Feeling more like Hawaii than Honshu, this string of volcanic islands…
We’ve always known that we would WWOOF Japan (World-Wide Opportunities On Organic Farms…a.k.a. Travelers willing to work four-to-six hours per day in exchange for room and board), for a variety of reasons. Aside from the free room and board in an expensive country, WWOOFing is a wonderful way to gain access into a culture that…
Japan!!! A place near and dear to our hearts for so many reasons. My parents lived here in the 1970s and loved it so much that they brought my sister and me here to look at schools and houses during our elementary-school years. For Mike, having so many Hawaiian friends in college prompted him to…