So when I said I had travel plans the weekend I posted my last blog post… I was in Japan!
Japan had been a huge bucket list place for me to visit this semester, and I’m so glad I managed to figure it out. In spite of my East Asian Studies major, I am definitely the least familiar with Japanese language and culture compared to Korea and China, and most of what I’ve learned about Japan since the Edo period has been through the lens of Korean history. Knowing so little about modern Japan was super intimidating, and I hadn’t been to a country where I didn’t speak the language since I was 12 years old – and I was solo traveling, which was yet another first for me. While it was definitely a little stressful trying to figure logistics out on my own, I am glad that I got to do everything at my own pace, which made the actual tourism of my trip a lot more relaxed.
I was in Kyoto for 3 days and 4 nights, and I stayed in a capsule hotel in the Shimogyo ward of the city which was a very central location. My travel logistics were kind of too stressful to even think about recapping, but I managed to make it to my capsule at around midnight, and managed to figure out some of the facilities before I went to bed. The capsule hotel was definitely an experience, but I actually enjoyed it quite a bit, especially since I was traveling on my own!
On day one, I explored the traditional Gion district, which is on the east side of the city across the Kamo river. After getting lunch, I walked to the furthest site from my hotel that I had starred in the Gion area, which was the famous Kiyomizu-dera Buddhist temple. The closer I got to the temple, the more packed the streets got, which I would’ve been annoyed by otherwise – but considering it was my first full day in Japan ever, I just listened to some music and enjoyed the sights! (Part of what I mean by it being nice to set my own pace, because I didn’t feel like I had to keep track of anyone else in the crowd.)
Kiyomizu-dera was such a gorgeous temple, and I’m glad it was the first place I went, since it was in such a beautiful location. The temple and its grounds are nestled in the eastern mountains of the city, and the fall foliage made the view worth the visit, in spite of the large crowds. After having seen some UNESCO World Heritage Buddhist temples in Gyeongju, it was cool to see the architectural differences between Korean and Japanese Buddhist temples! Kiyomizu-dera is probably best known for the scaffold-like stilts that it is held up on, which are made with the Japanese carpentry method that doesn’t use any nails.
After exploring Kiyomizu-dera for a bit, I walked around Gion and did some shopping! I made sure to hit Ninenzaka and Sannenzaka, two paths lined with traditional Japanese architecture and packed with gift shops and other such stores and cafes. The Gion neighborhood is also scattered with other smaller temples and shrines that were really fun to stumble across. Kyoto has over 1,600 temples and shrines throughout the city, so I wasn’t aiming to go and see all of them in the 3 days I was there, but everywhere I went there were at least a few nearby so I didn’t even need to make an effort to see them. Some fun stores I hit were the Studio Ghibli and Peter Rabbit stores, where I did in fact buy a good amount of stuff, and I also sat down at a cafe with a pretty garden to have a matcha latte!
I was mostly killing time that afternoon just wandering around, since I signed up for a guided food tour in the evening. I know doing a food tour is a very tourist-y thing to do, but I figured I might as well have a full-on tourist experience on my visit, and hopefully get some good food along the way. In retrospect, I’m glad I did it! As a solo traveler, it was nice to get to chat with some other people, including my guide, who was the closest in the group to my age (lol) and told us a lot about what her life in Japan is like, as well as some Kyoto history. I will confess that I am really not the biggest fan of seafood or mushrooms, but in the spirit of being a tourist in Japan I was willing to step out of my comfort zone! If there’s anywhere for me to try and get over my distaste for sashimi, it would be in Japan, and thankfully I did find myself enjoying the seafood I tried. For dessert, I also tried a kind of mochi made with bracken starch (or potato starch, since bracken starch can get expensive) called warabimochi, which was also really good.
On my second day in Kyoto, I took it a bit easier. I walked more around the central part of the city, and did shopping along Teramachi-dori, the historical eastern limit of the city during the Heian period that is now a large roofed shopping street. I had my first ramen of the trip (so good), and visited an Animate store to get some gifts for friends.
I then stopped at a cafe for yet another matcha latte, and then walked to the Kyoto Imperial Palace, which wasn’t open to the public but the grounds were still incredibly gorgeous. On my way back, I did a bit more shopping at a pretty stationery store, and then walked back to my hotel via Nishiki Market, a famous traditional market. I didn’t get any food from the stalls there and opted for trying food from a 7-11 for dinner since I had ended up walking a lot more than I meant to and was pretty tired, but it was still cool to walk through even if I didn’t try anything!
On my last day, I spent it by doing a day trip to the neighboring city of Nara. The city is reachable from Kyoto by public transport, and it took around an hour and 20 minutes to get there (after I tried some katsudon for lunch, because of course). The main reason I wanted to visit Nara is because of Nara Park, a huge park full of very friendly deer that just wander around. They sell deer crackers so that tourists can feed the deer, and it was really cool to get to feed them! I saved my crackers for deer a bit further into the park, as I figured they probably weren’t getting fed as much as the ones closer to the entrance.
If you bow to the deer, they will bow back, expecting you to feed them, and if you take too long they start just bowing aggressively, which was hilarious to watch – but I tried not to piss them off. I did see a sign that said to beware of the male deer because fall is mating season, so they get feisty; I of course saw this after feeding a male deer who headbutted me after I finished giving him his deer cracker. The deer were very pretty and charismatic, though, and it was so fun to get to interact with wild animals!
The deer weren’t the only sights to see at Nara park, of course. I followed the path to Kasuga-taisha, which is one of the oldest Shinto shrines in Japan. The deer that mill around the shrine and the rest of Nara Park are believed to be sacred messengers of the Shinto gods, which is why they are so ubiquitous. On the stone lanterns that lead up to the shrine, there are images of deer, and there was a really pretty deer statue on my way as well. I found it really sweet to see how the deer were so respected and incorporated into all of the iconography of the shrine and its surroundings.
That was about it for the day, though. On my way back to the train station, I stopped at a gift shop to buy some deer/Nara-specific gifts for people, and then I took the long journey back to Kyoto, since I had an early morning flight the next day back to Seoul in order to try and get back in time for my classes… I made it on time. Somehow.
As I mentioned before, my knowledge of Japanese culture is very limited, so this probably sin’t as informative as some of my blog posts about Korea may be. Regardless, I’ve been looking back on this trip very fondly! I feel like I learned a lot about myself by traveling alone and being responsible for all of the logistics and plans myself in a country where I don’t speak the language, and I feel a lot more confident in myself and my ability to settle into new experiences. It kind of feels like, “Well, if I can travel on my own to Japan from Seoul and back, anything else will be a piece of cake”. I also think that when I travel with other people, I tend to feel responsible for other people having a good time, and being on my own let me let go of that instinct and just enjoy everything around me without overthinking too much, which led to me making some really great memories.
Japan was also a really easy place to solo travel! Public transportation is everywhere, I felt really safe walking around everywhere even after dark, and there are a lot of other foreign tourists – way more than in Seoul/South Korea, which ironically made me feel like I blended in a lot more than I do in Korea. I will say, though, the difficult thing about solo traveling was actually getting myself to see everything I wanted to, since if I don’t want to get out of bed, no one is going to force me. There were some places I wanted to go (namely Arashiyama and Fushimi Inari Shrine) that I originally planned to go to, but I got too lazy to get out of bed early in the morning to visit them. Regardless, I still saw a lot, and I had a really amazing time!
While I’d love to go travel somewhere else this semester, I’m not sure if it’ll be feasible, as finals season is coming up soon. I feel a bit guilty for not taking advantage of being in a new country, but in a normal semester at school I barely ever leave my small college town on the weekends, let alone the country, so I’m trying to give myself a bit of grace. Maybe I’ll try to visit another Korean city before I leave, but I’m also getting kind of wistful about finally leaving Seoul, so I kind of want to visit some of my favorite places in the city for a final time before I go home!