You might think a lengthy diatribe about the factors you consider when planning a trip to Japan is a bit rich when it's coming from the bloke who doesn't do a whole lot of the actual planning, but I've been known to expound on all manner of subjects where there isn't a whole lot of experience to back things up, and, anyway, this is how the planning process looks from where I'm sitting.
There have, of course, been numerous discussions about possibilities, so I do have something to base my assumptions on.
It mightn't be 100 per cent accurate, but it gives some sort of explanation about the itinerary that's tacked onto the end of this little ramble.
The first thing you need to realize when you're planning something like this three week jaunt around the Land of the Rising Sun is that you can't go everywhere and see everything. Take a place like Kyoto and you'd probably need a good fortnight to get beyond a fairly elementary scratching of the surface. Live there for a year and you'd probably find there are things you've somehow missed that you really shouldn't have.
And that's just Kyoto.
Second, it helps to have a theme, or possibly two. When we went in April 2008 we weren't sure how I'd go, so we had two.
One was the Sakura season, and the second was some of Japan's greatest hits. Actually, the two of those combine rather nicely because most of Japan's greatest hits are at their best in when the cherry blossoms are in bloom. Having done that one (and we could easily do another trip based on the same seasonal factor) the logical extension was to go to the coloured leaves time, and catch the trees in their multicolored autumnal glory.
The second theme you could throw in this time around is trains, based on the principle that we've got a couple of two week Japan Rail Passes, and there's no way we were going to limit ourselves to the Shinkansen.
The seasonal theme has the added advantage of delivering a direction to work within. In spring, the Sakura blossoms start in the warmer south and gradually make their way up to Hokkaido, while in autumn the process is reversed. Trees start to lose their leaves in the colder regions first, and the colouring gradually makes its way towards the Equator, not that it's ever going to get there...
So this time around we start in Kansai, make our way north and then loop back to the centre, ending up at the other end of the country.
Third, when you've got access to virtually unlimited rail travel, you're obviously going to travel, because you can. Without the rail pass, you might be inclined to spend a couple of days in Tokyo, but other considerations mean that on the last trip, and on the one I'm looking down the barrel at as I start typing this in a Cairns hotel room Tokyo is somewhere to stop for lunch on the way to somewhere else. Well, you can't go everywhere and see everything, can you?
See point #1 in that regard.
