Domo Arigato Japan

Tom and I had a great time in Japan last week. I flew up on Thursday and stayed until Tuesday, so we had a nice block of time to do some exploring. Since Tom had to be in a recall distance to the ship, we spent most of our nights in Tokyo at the New Sanno Hotel. For those of you out there with access to military hotels, the New Sanno is the equivalent of the Hale Koa in Honolulu, a very nice place in a very expensive area for very affordable prices.


We did have one overnight outing to the mountains. Tom was lucky to find an available reservation at an Onsen Ryokan (traditional Japanese Inn at a natural hotspring). It was a beautiful place, and fun to stay in a traditional room. Dinner and breakfast were served at the inn also, I have never eaten so many things that I had no idea what they were before! The server at dinner did not speak any English, and well, our Japanese is not quite at the level of useful. She would just talk and talk to us, and we just stared back at her, then ate the food. Most of it was good, some of it was odd. Some of the food tasted good, but had a texture that I could not really enjoy.


Oh, and the best part, aside from the amazing natural hot spring baths, was that as soon as you arrive you change into a cotton robe, called a Yukata, and you don't get dressed again until you check out.


Here are some shots of the inside of our room, the view from our room and the view along the river.

Our room is the corner room on the first floor of this building.

After that outing, we stayed in Tokyo for the remainder of the trip. I always thought that all of Tokyo was bright lights and tall buildings, but it is not. When traveling, I much prefer smaller towns to big cities (Rome was my least favorite part of Italy). We were able to find some small neighborhoods in Tokyo away from the flashy, neon Shinjuku area.

We visted the Imperial Palace Gardens. Unfortunately, you can not go inside the inner moat to see the Imperial Palace, but here is the view from the closest place you can get, along with a few shots of the city over the top of the gardens.

We lucked upon two street festivals in different neighborhoods. One was just a nice little celebration at a temple and down the surrounding streets. The other was a festival of the "fools dance" called Awa Odori. We stood in the pouring rain watching a parade of dancers in traditional costumes. There were 10,000 dancers in the three hour long parade. We only stood in the rain for a little over an hour to watch, then left. I don't have pictures because of the rain.

So, that is pretty much the synopsis of the trip. As I said, we enjoyed exploring and seeing new things. Even though I never thought I wanted to go to Japan, I would recommend it to anyone, especially if you are already on this side of the world.

Since I got back late Tuesday the only exciting thing that happened was a visit with two former shipmates from WILLOW. One is now on MORGANTHAU and they had a port call herein Guam. The ship left homeport in Alameda in April and is not due back till October. Now that is a long deployment! The other is the CO of KUKUI now, and they are in town covering for SEQUOIA during the drydock. It was good to see both of them.

Well, I should probably do something with this lovely Sunday afternoon. My plan is to organize my closet, but the sunshine looks so inviting, I don't know if that will happen!