Asia
Everyone told me Japan would be different. Not different like "oh, it's a bit exotic" different. Different like nothing you've ever experienced, different. I nodded politely and booked my flights anyway, half-convinced I was walking into the most overhyped destination on the internet.
I was wrong. Embarrassingly wrong.
I went in March 2025, solo, for nine days. Sakura season. I was strategic with every single one of those days, because nine days sounds like a lot until you're standing in Tokyo, a city that competes with Bangkok for the top of my list, realising you could spend a week there alone and still not be done. The cherry blossoms were real, the crowds were real and the food was so good it made me emotional on more than one occasion. Here's what happened.
Tokyo: Sensory Overload, in the Best Possible Way
Tokyo doesn't ease you in. It hits you all at once: the scale, the quiet efficiency, the vending machines on every corner, the convenience stores that somehow stock better food than most restaurants back home.
DisneySea and Disneyland both got a day each. Yes, I went to both. No regrets.
DisneySea is unlike any Disney park I've seen anywhere. The theming is cinematic and the atmosphere genuinely theatrical. But Tokyo Disneyland had the ride that stopped me completely. Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Adventure puts you inside the film in a way that is technically and emotionally overwhelming. I cried.
Then the Disney Harmony in Color daytime parade started and I cried again. It is a full spectacle of floats and characters and colour and music exclusive to Tokyo Disneyland, and in that setting, with the crowd around you, it hits differently than any parade has a right to.
After a stop at a 7-Eleven near Tokyo Tower, where I tried the egg salad sandwich and discovered Japanese strawberries, I made my way to TeamLab Borderless. Standing outside a convenience store near one of Tokyo's most iconic landmarks with a punnet of strawberries was not a moment I planned but it became one of my favourites.
TeamLab Borderless is where the trip shifted into something harder to explain. It is a museum of digital art installations where the boundaries between rooms dissolve and the art moves around you, through you and sometimes because of you. I walked into rooms I didn't want to leave. It is one of those experiences that genuinely resists description and rewards showing up with no expectations.
Day Trip: Mount Fuji, Oshino Hakkai, Lake Kawaguchiko and the Famous Lawson
Seeing Mount Fuji clearly is not guaranteed. Most people who visit the Fuji Five Lakes area leave without a clear view. The mountain hides behind clouds more often than not and you can spend a full day hoping and go home with nothing.
At Oshino Hakkai, a cluster of eight ancient spring-fed ponds fed by snowmelt from Fuji itself, I got lucky. The water is so clear it looks digitally altered. Traditional thatched-roof buildings frame the scene and Fuji sat behind all of it, fully visible. I stood there for a long time.
By the time I reached Lake Kawaguchiko, the mountain had mostly disappeared. You could sense it there, somewhere behind the haze, but it wasn't giving much.
Then there's the Lawson. If you've been anywhere near travel content in the last two years you've seen the photo: Mount Fuji rising perfectly behind the blue facade of a convenience store in Kawaguchiko. The image went so viral it became a pilgrimage stop in its own right. Fuji was barely there when I arrived, a faint outline you had to half-imagine into existence. I squinted at the sky, declared it a success and went inside to buy snacks. Some pilgrimages are more about the ritual than the view.
The day also included a traditional matcha ceremony, a slow and deliberate ritual that felt like the opposite of everything else. You sit, you watch, you receive your bowl with both hands. For fifteen minutes the whole trip paused.
Kyoto: Where Japan Shows You Its Other Face
If Tokyo is Japan's energy, Kyoto is its soul. I arrived by Shinkansen, stepped off and immediately felt the shift. My first stop was Gion and everything else followed as a single packed day tour from there.
Gion was the most crowded place I visited in all of Japan, which is saying something given the season. In the mornings the historic geisha district is packed, every lane full, every corner occupied. The wooden machiya facades and the particular electricity of a place that knows exactly what it is still cut through the noise.
I sat under the sakura in Gion and let the moment exist. That was enough.
On Ninenzaka, the stone-paved street leading up through Gion toward Kiyomizudera, there is a Starbucks that has no right to be as special as it is. It is housed inside a traditional machiya townhouse over a hundred years old, with no visible signage outside and tatami rooms on the upper floor. It is the only Starbucks in the world built inside a traditional Japanese house. I had a latte and a sakura doughnut there and it was completely absurd and completely wonderful.
At night the atmosphere in Gion shifts entirely. The lanterns come on, the crowds thin and if you are patient and quiet enough you might catch a glimpse of a geiko or maiko moving between appointments, composed and unhurried in a way that makes the rest of the street feel like it is holding its breath.
That is when dinner made sense. An omakase at an izakaya, which for the uninitiated is a Japanese gastropub, small dishes, great sake, the kind of place where you stay longer than you planned. The format is intimate and unhurried, each course placed in front of you like it matters. I had wagyu and everything you've heard is true. The marbling, the texture, the way it dissolves. It is exactly that good.
After Gion, Kadensho. The onsen ryokan sits in the heart of Arashiyama, steps from the bamboo grove, and it is exactly what you need when Kyoto has been throwing beauty at you all day. Private baths, natural hot spring water, complete quiet. The kind of reset that makes you realise how much your body needed it.
Then the day tour: Nara first, then Fushimi Inari, then Kinkaku-ji, then Arashiyama, all in one day.
Nara sets the tone. The deer are wild and completely unbothered by humans in the most endearing way possible. They bow for crackers, they follow you around and they let you pet them with a gentleness that catches you completely off guard. Todai-ji, the enormous wooden temple housing a giant bronze Buddha, sits behind all of this with total indifference to how sweet the deer situation is outside its gates.
Fushimi Inari followed. The thousands of torii gates climbing up the mountain, that deep vermillion against the green, is one of those images you think you know from Instagram and then you're standing inside it and your brain can't quite process that it's real. Go early. Go very early.
Kinkaku-ji, the Golden Pavilion, deserves every superlative it receives. The gold leaf exterior reflected in the still pond in front of it is one of those sights that genuinely stops you mid-step. No photograph prepares you for the stillness of it.
Arashiyama closed out the day. The bamboo grove in soft afternoon light felt like moving through something ancient. The grove leads out into a quieter area along the river that most people miss because they turn back too quickly. Keep walking.
Osaka: A Different Gear
Osaka runs on a different energy to Tokyo and Kyoto. Louder, faster, more irreverent.
I spent a full day at Universal Studios Japan, including the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, which is worth every minute of the planning it requires. Butterbeer in Hogsmeade with a castle behind you is a specific kind of joy that requires no justification. I came very close to buying a magic wand. You can use them to perform actual tricks at interactive spots all around the street and it is genuinely magical. I put it back. The wand only works inside the park and half an hour of practice for a souvenir that does nothing at home is a hard sell even in the moment.
The city itself rewards wandering. Dotonbori at night is a full sensory experience: the neon reflections rippling across the canal, takoyaki handed to you in paper trays too hot to hold, yakitori smoke drifting out of tiny side-street restaurants. You don't need to eat it all. Just being there, inside all of that light and noise and life, is enough.
The Food
Nobody fully prepares you for eating in Japan. You read about it, you watch the videos, you hear the stories and then you arrive and realise the stories were underselling it.
Sushi was everywhere and it was good everywhere. Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, it didn't matter. Cheap, fresh and the seafood tasted like the sea. I ate it constantly and it never got old.
The convenience stores deserve their own chapter in any honest account of Japan. The egg salad sandwich at 7-Eleven is real and it is as good as the internet says. The strawberries in March are extraordinary, sweet and deeply flavoured in a way that makes anything back home feel like a rough draft. These are not backup options. They are destinations.
The Fushimi Inari street food stalls stopped me before I even reached the gates: sweet potato fries, fresh sushi, wagyu, seafood. Street food with that level of intention and quality is not something you forget.
The omakase at an izakaya in Kyoto was one of the finest meals of my life. The wagyu, the way it dissolves, the unhurried pace of it all. The fluffy soufflé pancakes in Kyoto were the opposite of fine dining and equally unforgettable, towers of soft cloud-like layers that made me understand why people queue for them.
Japan does not have bad food. It has varying degrees of extraordinary.
The Sakura
Sakura season in Japan is not a backdrop. It is the whole point and you know it before you arrive. What you don't know is how it will still exceed every expectation.
The Japanese have a word for it, mono no aware, the bittersweet awareness of impermanence. You feel it sitting under the blossoms. Everything is beautiful and temporary and that combination does something to you that no photograph comes close to capturing.
I felt it in Gion, sitting under sakura with nowhere to be and no plan for the next hour. That was enough.
The Honest Part About the Crowds
Yes, it was crowded. Gion in the mornings. Fushimi Inari as the day progresses. Kinkaku-ji always. Arashiyama fills up fast.
None of it actually ruined anything. Japan handles crowds better than almost anywhere I've been. Things move. People are considerate. The infrastructure is so good that even when places are full they don't feel chaotic. Early mornings solve most of it anyway.
Go. Everyone is right. Go anyway.
Practical Notes
Japan Rail Pass: check carefully before buying. Prices have increased significantly and for shorter trips or city-focused itineraries it often doesn't make financial sense anymore. Buy individual tickets or use an IC card (Suica or Pasmo) instead and calculate your routes in advance.
Cash: still essential, less for big cities and more for smaller shrines, local stalls, rural stops and any village markets or farmers you encounter off the main trail.
Best timing for sakura: late March to early April, though it shifts year to year. Check the bloom forecasts closer to your dates.
Convenience stores: take them seriously. 7-Eleven, FamilyMart and Lawson are not a backup plan. They are a destination. And if it's March, get the strawberries.
