After more than a week of Japanese cities, we allowed ourselves a change of pace. From Kyoto, a few trains, a dockside lunch, and a brief rush through the heat found us on a small ferry bound for Naoshima. The small island loomed up ahead, bare brown rock rising from the inland sea, the distance… Read More Floating Worlds
Kyoto wasn’t on my list while trip planning. Everything I’d heard was of a nice but overtouristed city, camera-toting visitors trawling the streets, trailing behind women in kimonos, snapping mindlessly, or shuffling in long, winding queues on pathways between shrines. This didn’t appeal to me and I pushed back until, in the end, the inexorable… Read More Old Enough
We broke away from Tokyo for a daytrip into the western suburbs, a morning express train taking us to Kawagoe before a bus transfer to another smaller town. Our destination: the Kinbue Soy Sauce factory. Hannah had reached out over email weeks before, and we stood under a mister in the shade, dodging the heat,… Read More Day Trippers
Tokyo spread out 800 feet below us, an indistinguishable sea of buildings, shoulder to shoulder, stretched out across the Kanto Plain and broken only by the hard edges of the sea. Periodic clusters of skyscrapers showed where the rails and elevated highways, steel and concrete ribbons, come together. Somewhere to the west, Mount Fuji hid… Read More Back to the Future
Zak Abroad 