Japan Travel Guides: Places to Visit and Things to Do

Japan feels like someone took 2,000 years of tradition, bullet trains, ancient temples, neon skyscrapers, convenience stores and approximately nine billion vending machines, threw everything together and somehow made the entire fucking thing run on time.

It’s honestly suspicious.

Tokyo alone can completely overwhelm your senses. Giant video screens, tiny restaurants, packed train stations, hidden bars, endless shopping and enough people crossing Shibuya at once to make you wonder whether someone accidentally announced an evacuation.

Then you take a train to Kyoto and suddenly you’re walking through temples, bamboo forests, shrines and neighborhoods that feel centuries removed from the technological insanity you just left.

And that’s Japan.

One minute you’re staring at a thousand-year-old temple. The next you’re sitting on a toilet with more computing power than your first laptop wondering which button makes it stop singing.

The food is reason enough to visit. Sushi, ramen, yakitori, tempura and convenience-store food that’s inexplicably better than meals you’ve paid significantly more money for elsewhere.

Japan isn’t perfect. Popular attractions can be brutally crowded. Hotels can redefine your understanding of square footage. Train stations occasionally resemble underground cities designed specifically to test whether you’ve been paying attention.

But traveling here can also feel almost suspiciously easy. Trains work. Streets are clean. Things generally happen when they’re supposed to.

Japan is beautiful, bizarre, traditional, futuristic and endlessly fascinating.

Come for the temples, food and neon insanity.

Stay because your train leaves in 37 seconds and, unlike you, it has its shit together.

Map of Japan

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