Japan May 2014

I stayed on Miyajima and walked up the mountain - a totally unspoilt island. In '94 we were a "novelty" and were treated so well. The guest house went to find "slippers" for me - size 10 as they only catered for the smaller Japanese, they offered to give us a table and chairs - we declined and did the same as te locals, sat on the floor.

Hakone - we went during a religious festival and again treated so well. We went up the mountain on a bus - 21 hairpin bends on the up road and 22 on the down road. A bit hair raising when sitting at the back and looking out there is nothing underneath.

Putting the two together to ease comparison ...


Yes I agree with Nigel it's better but the silhouette section has been modified too. I would have selected only the background and worked on that.

Very nice

Jamie,

Thanks for all the ideas! We had JR rail passes when we previously went and they are well worth it - although I didn't know about JR hotels, so that's definitely worth knowing, thank you!

Both me and the other half are compiling lists of where we want to go and what we want to do so we can put together an itinery - some of the places you've mentioned I already had noted down and you've given me a few more ideas. Infact I think I'm going to need longer than three weeks!!

I remember the food to be very cheap and very nice, I too had an experience with octopus - wasn't very nice! The plastic food in the window of restaurants was quite amusing too. We tried to go off the beaten track and eat where the locals ate and the food was amazing.

Are there any restrictions with photographing in train stations or shopping centres similar to the UK? Are the Japanese happy to be photographed, is there any etiquette to follow? I'm thinking about taking a long lens to capture some candids.

I think the discount at JR Hotels is 10%. http://www.jrhotelgroup.com/eng/jrpass.htm Simply state that you have a pass at booking time and show it when you check in. Though I've now booked so many times on Booking.com that I get what they call Genius rates. My Narita hotel fell from £52 to £29 when I logged on to book it. Just check that hotels have wifi in the rooms - as all cellphone services there have 3G/4G internet access as standard many hotels only have wired internet access in the rooms. It's a bit of a bummer if you have a tablet. Most will have wifi in the lobby however.
If you are happy to stick to small restaurants off the main tourist routes eating is cheap. We were eating out for dinner with 2 courses and 2 beers each and we averaged £25 in total ( £12.50 each).
I've plenty of station platform shots of the Shinkansen bullet train as well as from the viewing platform at Narita - they even have cutouts in the security fence for poking your lens through. I did a lot of people watching and photographing without any issues. The only places I found with photography restrictions was the inner sanctums of the shrines and some stalls in Nishiki market Kyoto asked for no photos. I think that was more crush of people walking through than not wanting their giant tuna/octopus captured.
Hope you enjoy your trip - I'm envious already.

The doorway silhouette is in Adobe RGB not sRGB. sRGB is better for the web.
Opened in Photoshop, the image shows far more detail.
In Web browsers Adobe RGB is particularly poor for greens in my experience.
Although Adobe RGB has a wider (or more versatile) gamut, I set my camera to sRGB for JPEGs.
Note to self: go to Japan.