Hi I have visited #7 #18 #46 #48 # 49 . #7 is my hometown. You shold visit to Saitama shokubutsu mihohen, Kawaguchi city, Saitama. where you want go is depend your time abelible . traveling budget. some place you have mentioned are new, some are few hundred years old. #7 Hachioji Asakawa station is famus of collection of cherry trees. it's name has been chaneged however .The place is about 10 minuts taxi ride from Takao station or you can take bus. near by Mt Takao you can see towering Cryptmeria japanica 150 feet tall 3 ~ 5 feet diameter. also Mausoleum of Taisho empror is near by. each place are 3~5 miles part. #46 If you are intersting Bamboos # 46 is good place to visit. also kyoto has 3 bamboo gardens. Dr kashiwagi is reserching over there. It may take 3~ 4 hours from Tokyo some place is purly for academic, some place are for entertainment. If you are going to visit your self you have much more choice , If you are takeing your wife and kids, then when you visit # 7 you have to waer sneker and have towel and bottled water. And carefull with poisin snake. No English sign warning you . no visitors bit by snake yet. ^-^ . #23 Makino memorial Botanical garened is nice place to vist. I have not visited yet. Dr Makino is father of Japanese society of Botany. many plants are named after him. .........mike

Hi Jane, Thank you, that sounds very cool. I love the fact that they are railroad employees! I think it may be too far for a daytrip, though/ CarrieM, Sounds like we are going to Tokyo for the same reason you did; stopover. We are really going to Asia to see the places I've never been to and DH and I want to see; Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand. But on the way we will see San Francisco, Tokyo and Hong Kong. I am happy to see SF and HK over and over again, but to be honest I've never had any desire to be in Tokyo as a tourist. And it was always my least favorite business trip, with the smoking in meetings, odd seating on sofas instead of at tables, insufficient a/c for American standards, and the frequent spectre of dozing meeting attendees. (possibly my fault on that last one) But my kids wanted to see Tokyo, and I guess that does make sense. We are staying in the Four Seasons directly adjacent to the train station where Narita Express terminates. I know that after the trip we will appreciate not going far before we plop into bed! You are lucky you saw a wedding; I hear they are something to look out for on the grounds of the Palace, near our hotel. KSWL, I know nothing about anime, except my older brother watching re-runs of SpeedRacer when I was growing up, which I hated. But should we, as part of our experience, get educated and familiar with anime? I think I might like Howl's Moving Castle a bit better then Speed Racer reruns. With only three days, I don't think we will be bored enough for a theme park; plus, when we travel, I try to do things that are either educational or a chance to see nature (although I understand that the most mundane things are still educational). I think a taste of Kabuki is a good idea, since it is parodied so much it would be nice if they understood it a bit. You are the second person to recommend that restaurant, which is a definite yes! That will be fun. Plus we have to eat anyway. The only other time I spent leisure time in Japan was at a riokan in Kyoto. It was summer, and I loved it. But I try not to go to the same place twice, if I can, and plus the logistics of our trip already involve 11 flights, so we will keep it to Tokyo. Thanks, everyone!

Our trip was quick, only 7 days. I'm unable to give you day by day detail as I did not keep a diary. (sorry) We visited shrines, temples, took a Tokyo harbor tour in a boat (Symphony). Hiroshima was meaningful, but not sure if that would work for you with your plan to go to Okinawa. If your kids are older (like teens at least), it would be educational for them. We arrived in Japan by flying into Haneda and took the train to the Via Inn/Ooimachi. It was a fine place for our first night. The rooms were a bit on the small side, but not a problem. Next morning we went to a restaurant downstairs which had a wide range of breakfast items which was good for that first morning. After that first night in Tokyo, we transferred to the ryokan Tsurugata in Kurashiki, Okayama, mentioned above where we spent two nights. It really is a charming place. I recall it was a little pricey but included breakfast and dinner. We spent two nights there. Other places we stayed were less expensive, so it evened out somewhat, and it was worth the expense to be in that traditional setting. After that we went to the thatched roof village, Miyama, for one night. We then stayed one night at the Granvia Hotel in Kyoto, which is at the train station. Very nice hotel. From there we went to the Disneyland resort (Hilton Tokyo Bay) so the Disney-lovers could get their fill of Disney Sea theme park. Maybe not too interesting to you, but I must share with you that we visited an elementary school since one of us had a contact there. It was really fun to see a Japanese classroom, and the kids were thrilled to have us as visitors. If you are out shopping and see a Daiso store, it's a good place to stop in to pick up odds and ends affordably, maybe little souvenirs. Not joking here: check 7-11 for affordable food. They have fresh, good food available, meals. (I know, sounds wrong, but they are better in Japan than in the US.) It can save you quite a bit if you can pick up some meals there. If anyone in your group cannot function without coffee, take a couple of packets of instant coffee. Every place but one had coffee. Here's the Fushimi-Inari shrine with over 1,000 gates. It's reachable from Kyoto and is very interesting, amazing actually. The fox is significant to Shinto believers, so there are a few statues at the Fushimi-Inari shrine. Very charming. Bullet train (shinkansen). Comfortable, clean, well maintained. (Local trains are more crowded, often packed. When you think no more can fit in the car, many more come in and everyone bunches up! You get to know your fellow travelers!) The shrines offer an opportunity to write a special message like a prayer on these small wood plaques. At shrines you can purchase inexpensively small, beautiful charms of all sorts to help you get a wife, heal your knee, make more money--anything you want. Fabric with the message inside. I bought several as gifts but neglected to make a note of what each one was for and so never gifted them. Last, the Golden Pavilion, near Kyoto

I grew up eating alternatively grandma’s Chinese home cooking or my single dad‘s random single dad cooking - you know, dinners of steak and orange juice. Sometimes I lived in France and ate whatever single dad post docs could afford to feed their kids in Paris and Strasbourg. I don’t recall having any very special food in early 1970s France - I think we were eating street food basically. When I went to school, I lived on Top Ramen through college and grad school. We all did, with occasional splurges on Hamburger Helper, burritos, and pizza to wash down the beer. One of my friends made a ”Shrine to Top Ramen” that we bowed to daily. I don’t think my first fiance, A*****, cooked, other than pasta. I didn’t. We ate out a lot. SWMBO didn’t really cook when we started co-habitating, but she wanted to replicate the home cooked meals that she’d grown up with. We referred to the Betty Crocker cookbook a lot and made a lot of stuff that we had no idea what to do with. SWMBO denies it, but I distinctly remember one Thanksgiving hearing her on the phone to her older sister asking ”which end of the turkey do I stuff?” When we roasted a goose at Christmas, there was no-one to tell us what to do with the river of molten fat overflowing the sheet pan. I learned to cook from SWMBO’s college friend, S*****, who was putting himself through culinary school working with his partner in a catering business. He’s the top food scientist in a seafood company today. S*****’s mother became my and SWMBO’s adoptive parents in Los Angeles. She is the best cook and hostess I have ever known, and while she didn’t necessarily teach me many specific techniques, she taught us to express love and friendship with food. In recent years, I’ve learned from DD who has become a much better cook than I. Her years running the commercial kitchen at camp, leading crews of hungover teenage line cooks in feeding 150 very-picky Berkeley families nightly while improvising “dietary” meals for the few who announce that they are vegetarian soy-intolerant low-spice non-dairy but want something as tasty as the ribs and salmon everyone ELSE is getting - ”oh, and I can’t have garlic, or salt either” - well, it’s made her inflappable and inventive. (She was actually sad to leave for Marseille, because with the shortage of people applying to restaurant jobs, she really wanted to stay in Portland and try to get a line cook job in a fancy restaurant. One thing she’s thinking now about now is culinary school in Europe. She’s also trying to figure it if she can find work in a Marseille restaurant, since her teaching job isn’t full time.) So, I’ve been cooking for about 35 years, starting around age 23. I can cook some things very well, am hopeless at others, and am in a deep cooking slump at the moment - well, for the last 18 months really, because when gatherings are virtual, cooking just isn’t very interesting for me. I’m really, really ready for the pandemic to be over or become endemic. Except that a lot of my friends are older or medically fragile, and I’ve recently lost one to Covid who was neither and only in her 50s, I’m kind of getting indifferent to which it might be. Oh, last thing that might be interesting - after I’ve cooked a lot, like 8 hours in the kitchen for a dinner party, I have no interest in eating. I figured out that I want to be involved with the food, but don’t necessarily need to eat it.