2 week trip report – what a great visit!!

A bit of a belated trip report! I went in the beginning of November and stayed for two weeks, from the 2nd to the 17th! I went with two of my friends and we stayed in Tokyo, Hakone, and Osaka (with day trips to Kobe and Kyoto.)

I tried writing out this post by going over what we did day-by-day, but it ended up way too long, so i’m just going to go over highlights and general takeaways and how we planned our trip. We’re three women in our mid 20s that are into anime, geeky stuff, and Japanese fashion.

The trip was pretty underplanned. i had looked into a lot of stuff when we first decided to go months ago, but by the time our trip was set i was extremely busy with school and other nonsense, so I ended up going much less prepared than i wanted to be. despite this, I think it turned out pretty incredible. I had some big ideas of what i wanted to do during the trip (idol concert, getting my nails done, kimono rental) and some neighborhoods we wanted to go to. I was able to schedule and plan out the bigger ideas a few days ahead of time, and then we planned what neighborhood we’d be in and what stores we’d go to around these things, usually the day before. When we got back to the AirBNB, I would scroll reddit and make a big list of stuff that we could do in the neighborhood we were planning on and then we usually ended up getting to 30-60% of it. 

• We spent a LOT of time clothes shopping. My friends wanted to get full lolita outfits, and I wanted more clothes in general. I really loved the Marui Annex in Shinjuku for clothing (as well as an incredible art store that had tons of prints, keychains, etc from different artists) and Laforet in Harajuku for the same thing but with a bigger selection. Sadly I also really wanted shoes but size 9 womens is too big to fit into almost anything we saw and i didn’t end up getting any I could wear, but up to size 8 should be fine. 
• I got a sketchbook on the first day of the trip. This was the best purchase of the entire trip. I'm out of practice drawing, but I still had experience doing live people sketching in cafes and on public transit, and I figured i’d be spending a lot of time on public transit on the trip. Drawing in my sketchbook was so much fun and also lead to some great interactions with locals, i am so happy about it. (if you're interested in seeing some of my drawings i posted a few of them here!)
• Aside from wanting to go shopping, I also wanted to see live performances. we went to Harumiya Gardens on our first full day for the nighttime illumination and moon viewing festival and happened to catch a small Sato Kagura performance, which was incredibly cool. we also got cute little rabbit lanterns on a stick we could carry around through the gardens, and on a whim decided to walk from the gardens to tokyo tower, which was a 40 minute walk. Maybe that was a rough first day for my feet but it was just a really fun and low key night and the pilgrimage to tokyo tower was so much fun.
• I also ended up going to a small jazz night that I saw being advertised at a cafe we ate at in the morning. It was super low-key, the space only had room for like 20 people, and they were all older Japanese ladies, I was the only tourist there. It was super fun and I was sketching during the performance and the women in the audience were super into it and pushed me to show it to the band etc, it was just a great evening and fun music!
• There were also people at restaurants and on the train who liked my sketchbook and one lady even took a photo of my drawing I did of her and her daughter. The sketchbook was really the MVP of the trip!!
• I wanted to go see a small Idol performance and I used the advice in this comment to find a venue that worked, we got to see two groups perform, Congratulations and Meteor Shower Curtain. It was so weird and funny being the only women in the audience but the girls were so cute and interacted with us a bit and I was like, I get it, I get why you'd come to these to get the girls to smile and wave at you.
• We went to Ikebukuro/Sunshine City on a day that there was a convention going on, so even though I wasn't going to the convention there was open areas where lots of cosplayers were walking around. Super busy, but amazing to see the cosplays and I got photos with a few characters I liked!
• We also went to karaoke in Akihabara, we were just planning on going to a big chain one we saw on the way to the station but I found a review for one that had apparently legendary ice cream honey toast (it was really good) as well as themed rooms like an Neon Genesis Evangelion themed room. we didn’t get the NGE themed room but it was still really cute and great vibes
• We got INCREDIBLE sukiyaki at しゃぶ晃, near where we were staying around Mozennakacho station, we stayed there for like 3 hours until we ran out of broth and water and it caramelized on the pan. The man running the place was very cool and spoke a lot of english, he answered a question we were asking between ourselves about what one of the ingredients in our bowl was (a rice cake) that I didn’t even realize he had heard. It came with a sweet blueberry jelly dessert and was just perfect, one of the best dinners of the whole trip.
• We were originally going to do kimono rental in a Kyoto day trip, but i decided to do it in Hakone instead. It was hard to get up in the morning and get from Tokyo to Hakone in time since the train going up the mountain was so packed (and we were hungover lol, maybe our bad) but once we did the kimono rental it was so fun and magical. We only wanted to do it for a few hours for photographs and stay nearby so we could take it off easily, because I knew the shoes would be painful. Instead of trying to go to shrines for photographs we just went to the nearby Gora park and looked around the greenhouses, which was really nice because we could spend exactly as much time as we wanted there, as well as sit down in lots of places in the gardens and eat at the nice cafe there. We were also the only people wearing kimono there and we got complimented a lot, while lots of people are wearing kimono in Kyoto since theres so many rental places and so many tourists. 
• There was also an extremely funny interaction when i was getting my kimono getup taken off, since I have frizzy brown hair. The single woman who was running the rental place was struggling with my hair getting tangled around the hair ties and she had to call in an assistant to help it get taken out and it took like 20 minutes. My friends used google translate’s voice function to tell what she was saying, and told me later she was saying “It just keeps turning into a fuzz ball. you know they make products for this right?” and when the assistant said my hair was pretty like Aurora from Sleeping Beauty she said “I thought aurora was blonde though..” which was incredibly funny to find out afterwards.
• Hakone Kyuan was just incredible, a great Ryokan to stay at for one night. the 7 course dinner was incredible, i ate the wasabi on it’s own despite hating spicy food because it was just that good. We rented out the private onsen and the website said it was 40 minute timeslots but no one told us that in person, I think we were the only one renting it for the night so we were able to stay for like twice the time and lay half in/half out of the bath, spray ourselves with cold shower water while being in the hot bath. All the rooms are so lovely and came with their own hot spring/bathtubs too, and we woke up early to watch the sunset from our bath. I also got a great drawing of the mountains from our room and my friend looking out the window, and then we found a stamp set at Gora station that I stamped into the corner of the drawing, it’s one of the favorite pages I got in my sketchbook.
• When we were in Osaka we ate at a great sushi place that also had grilled fish and a small Omakase experience, something I wanted to do but I was worried I was too picky and would offend the chef, but they offered just five pieces of nigiri as a course and I was able to eat all of it! The vibes there were great and it had great fruit wine. There was a really funny moment where my friend was slightly drunk and I was playfully annoying her, so she gave me a thumbs down, but the chef behind the counter pretended he thought it was about him and said "oh I'm sorry the food wasn't good" and then she desperately tried to tell him she loved all of it and everyone laughed with how frantically she was trying to correct herself.
• I also went to a nail artist and got my nails done! She did a great job and was fun to talk to and work with her for my design. She also at one point asked me about American Cartoons, specifically asking me if Rick and Morty was a children's show and telling me she loved the show, and then put on Rick and Morty on an IPad for us to watch together which was hysterical to me.

Overall it was just a great trip, there was even more great moments and stuff that we got to do but I don't want to overload the post any more. I'm definitely already considering going back for a more art-focused trip, we did a lot of shopping which was great but I'd be interested to focus on going to museums and shrines and drawing more outdoor environments and architecture. Here's some small advice from my trip:

• I got a huge bag at the Wiggle Wiggle store and it was super useful for the trip, if you're planning on doing a lot of shopping getting a big bag that you can consolidate shopping bags into by the end of the day is very helpful.
• Don't get an AirBNB, I figure if you're here you already know this but my friends wanted to so I went along with them, but it was a longer walk to the station and worse accommodations and only one room key made it harder to split up when we wanted to.
• If you're planning on doing scrapbooking and saving paper goods/flyers/tags/etc from the trip, make sure to have a dedicated area to put all your stuff like a folder, it was definitely very hectic and chaotic to pack and find all the stuff I wanted to keep from the trip.