2026 Japan & South Korea

Today involves a fully guided tour day.  We are with our guide Yuko, who was one of our guides back in Toyko.  Her family lives in nearby Osaka and she had already planned to be there to visit her family and so she clearly fills some of her visiting time guiding. Our tour started with a visit to Nijo-jo Castle, originally built to be the private villa of Tokugawa leyasu, the founder and first Shogun of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1603.  He is the same person whose shrine we visited near Nikko a few days ago who unified Japan after a long period of civil war and started a period of over 260 years of peace and prosperity.  The castle was the location for 2 major historical events.  After being appointed Shogun by the Emperor, Tokugawa leyasu came to Nijo-jo castle to announce his appointment to the feudal lords and began one of the most important periods in Japanese history.   Secondly in 1867, the 15th Shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu summoned the senior vassals fro...

This morning involves a three hour city tour of Kanazawa.  After that we head to Kyoto on the Shinkansen train system. It’s an early start of 8:00 so we have an early breakfast and check out before meeting with our guide.   We walk through the bus station on our way to the subway.  This East Square concourse has a huge glass and steel atrium roof which provides cover from sun and rain.  It’s hard describe the magnitude of this area.  It feels like a spacious open air plaza with the roof maybe 7 stories above you.   Front grand entranceway into the covered section.  This part of the structure is lit up at night providing a very impressive display. Backside of the entrance.   The steel and glass cover stretches to Kanazawa Station building which is far behind me as I take this picture. We all head to Kenroku-en garden by subway.  Kenroku-en means garden that combines six attributes.  There is a belief that Japanese gardens should find the ...

Today we are taking the day trip to Shirakawago, a small traditional village in Gifu Prefecture.  The village is famous for its steep thatched roofs (gassho-zukri) built to withstand heavy winter snow.  The village is a UNESCO World Heritage site.   But to accommodate the next day, we shipped our luggage to our next hotel.  Luggage forwarding service in Japan is big business and there are several companies who do this for you.  Our plans for the next day involves a morning tour and then taking the Shinkansen train to Kyoto.  We decide to get our big suitcases to our hotel in Kyoto so that we don’t have to shlep them around that morning.  In hindsight, we could have left the cases with the hotel that morning and taken them on the train that afternoon with us, but it was pretty liberating navigating the train stations without wheeled luggage.   After breakfast we walked over to the East gate Kanazawa Ekimae bus terminal, which is across from our hot...