We divided our stay in Hokkaido between its biggest national park, Daisetsuzan, in the centre of the island, and the smaller Shikotsu-Toya National Park to the south of the capital, Sapporo. Most of Japan’s population of 120 million is squeezed into the narrow coastal lowlands, especially on the main island of Honshu. Hokkaido is much less crowded, with an area and population similar to Scotland. And like Scotland it has open farmland overlooked by the mountains often around 1000 m high. However, some of the peaks are twice that height, and many of them are still active volcanoes.
We managed three good mountain walks in Hokkaido, then a strenuous night-time ascent of Mount Fuji, followed by a much easier walk through the beautiful Kiso Valley in central Honshu – the main island. Even when visiting temples and shrines – in Kyoto, Kamakura, Nikko and on the island of Miyajima – we were able to combine these with delightful walks. Together with some impressions of getting around Tokyo itself, there is a wide range included. Individual walking stories are provided for each of these, providing some personal reflections on different aspects of Japan, so far as a short-term visitor is able to appreciate them. Several of the locations are World Heritage sites – Nikko, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Miyajima, and Himeji-jo.
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Practical observations and advice
Language
We had some difficulty finding information brochures in English – like packets of food and other products, they often have a title in English, but all the rest of the text is in Japanese characters. This is the biggest challenge for visitors to Japan who don’t speak the language – you have no idea what the words on the map, the brochure or the streetname say. I only really had to cope for myself at the start and end of my visit, but even in the cities of Kyoto, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Osaka it was often necessary to resort to sign language due to the lack of English speakers. Bigger hotels and many restaurants have English-speaking staff, but it can be a bit of a struggle when staying in guest houses. The main cities and the popular tourist locations such as Nikko, Kamakura and Mount Fuji have tourist information literature in English, which is a great help.
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Accommodation
We used modern hotels in the cities, booked in advance on the internet at reasonable prices (£66 for a spacious single in a luxury hotel in central Osaka, slightly more for a twin room in a good hotel in Tokyo, £48 for a twin booked as a single at an economy hotel in central Kyoto). In country areas we used small guest houses costing around £30-£40 per person including two meals. We found these in the Lonely Planet guide or Rough Guide books, and Catriona booked them in advance over the phone. Not so easy when you don’t speak the language, but the guide books give plenty of advice on the best ways to book a room – using the tourist offices, or just turning up in the early evening. We also had a night in a traditional Ryokan on Miyajima island – more expensive than the usual guest house (£65 per night each including two meals), but bound up by ceremony which makes it well worth experiencing at least once during a visit to Japan. Ryokans can be located and booked on the internet at http://www.japaneseguesthouses.com/index.htm
My wife and niece went out to Japan earlier in the year, and stayed in Shukubo (temple) lodgings at the top of a cable car where they were treated to solemn chanting by the monks. They thoroughly recommended it as part of the Japanese experience. (See for example a list of those in Kyoto, with prices, at http://www3.tky.3web.ne.jp/~edjacob/kyoto.html )
The hotels and guest houses all supply yucatas (like a thin dressing gown with a belt) to wear after a hot bath and slippers, and the hotels also provided little toothbrushes and razors!
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Onsens
We very much appreciated another distinctive aspect of Japan, the onsens. These hot-spring spa baths are found all over the country thanks to the hot rocks just under the ground. Those which we used were in hotels, and could be used by those staying elsewhere – our hosts regarded it as part of the service, to provide a free pass or drive us to the hotel. There’s nothing better to soothe aching muscles after a tough hillwalk, than to wash off under a shower then slide into a (very) hot bath. However, it can be a bit disconcerting to be sharing a bath with other bathers, wearing nothing more than a wet towel on your head (supposedly it helps stop you passing out!).
There is an etiquette to using onsens, as to much else in Japanese life. Most importantly, you must NOT go into the changing rooms in outdoor shoes (a serious mistake which I made once and was told very firmly by another bather to remove them). In any building, there is a threshold where shoes must be changed for slippers, and another where general slippers are changed into washroom slippers. And you must NOT get into the bath without having had a thorough shower first, and washing all the soap off.
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Public Toilets
There are well-kept public toilets in most places frequented by visitors. These often combine the Japanese style crouching facility with an adjacent cubicle with a western-style seated WC. However as with other technology borrowed from the west, the Japanese have improved on it by adding electric gadgets such as a seat warmer and music. Oddly, there is often nowhere to dry your hands, so it’s worth carrying around a small piece of absorbent cloth or a couple of paper napkins.
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Food
Okay, so the language isn’t the only challenge to be faced by visitors to Japan. I’d been warned about the “unusual” nature of traditional Japanese food, and decided it was going to be a matter of gritting my teeth and trying everything I was given. At times this was difficult, particularly in our first guest house where I was introduced to the delights of pickled vegetables and various deep-sea objects, some lurking at the bottom of the soup bowl. However things improved after that, particularly at the next guest house in Shikotsu-ko, where the host cooked up wonderful meals in a table-top frying pan! By the time I’d sampled more traditional fare at other guest houses I was getting a taste for some of the strange-looking specialities, but raw horsemeat and deep-fried locusts still came as a bit of a surprise, and I never really got used to having sticky steamed rice for breakfast.
There are plenty of restaurants serving noodles with various sauces, at reasonable prices, and the larger railway stations have a variety of eating places, usually including pizza and pasta. Plus there are convenience stores where you can pick up snack items for breakfast or lunch. I was surprised to find that the apple pastries I’d been eating for breakfast in Tokyo included sweet potato – then found myself enjoying sweet potato and green tea ice cream with red bean sauce! Even the trusty Kit-Kat bars had an oriental twist, flavoured with melon or red fruits.
Perhaps the biggest surprise was when we were at the top of a mountain and opened up the rice cake wrapped in foil which our kindly guest house proprietor provided, to find it filled with tiny grey eels!
Another distinctive and welcome feature of Japan is the presence of drinks vending machines not just at railway stations, but in virtually every street, offering hot coffee and tea as well as cold tea, water and other soft drinks. The favourite sports drink has the rather unappetising name, Pocari Sweat, but it tastes OK. Given the heat and humidity in the summer, it’s important to stock up on bottled drinks before starting a walk. On Mount Fuji the cost of bottles of water rose progressively at each station as we climbed towards the summit!
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Getting around
We travelled around mostly by train, and the Japan Railpass proved to be indispensable. You have to buy this before going to Japan, in multiples of 1 week, and exchange a voucher for the pass on arrival. It gets relatively cheaper for the 2nd and 3rd week. The railpass is available through a number of agents in the UK and other countries, details at http://www.seejapan.co.uk/fjrpass.html . It covers all but a few of the most modern shinkansen super-fast trains, and also covers several of the main lines through Tokyo, and the ferry to Miyajima. Even with the railpass it’s important to book a seat for each journey, even at short notice, to be sure of getting a seat. For more information go to the official website: http://www.japanrailpass.net/. The railpass works in an almost magical way to get around the ticket barriers.
Other metro lines in Tokyo and other cities are not included, but these seemed to be cheaper than London Tube prices, and when we took local buses these were reasonably priced and reliable. The bus stances always seemed to be right outside the train stations, and with so many people using the trains it’s not surprising that the city stations have become big retail and commercial centres with lots of exquisitely wrapped gift items and fashion stores. Kyoto station was just amazing! With so many people squeezed in to the built up coastal areas, the super-efficient public transport systems stop the country seizing up. Most train station names are in Roman lettering as well as Japanese characters, and indicator boards on the trains show which station is coming up, but the bus service information can be difficult to work out.
The recycling bins for cans and bottles at all the stations were also impressive, and if you’ve no time to stop at a restaurant you can pick up a boxed meal at a platform kiosk or from a buffet car on the train. In a funny way, however, it was comforting to find ourselves on local trains occasionally, which wouldn’t look out of place on a British rural train line. The shinkansen run on their own concrete tracks raised up from the coastal plains and cutting through the mountains, whilst the original tracks still carry older trains at a more modest speed.
Railway stations generally have plenty of luggage lockers, and we usually found some big enough for our large rucksacks. That made life a lot easier when stopping off to visit places.
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Money
One of the regular problems travelling abroad is knowing how to get foreign currency without carrying loads of it around. It’s easier now in Europe to find a cash machine, but in Japan there are few of them that take British credit or debit cards, especially in smaller towns and villages. Even in the cities it can be difficult to find them, although the Lonely Planet guide helpfully indicates where some are located. I had therefore taken enough Japanese cash to last the first few days, but knew I’d have to get more to pay for several nights’ accommodation in Hokkaido. The bigger hotels accepted a credit card, but guest houses did not. It was a bit of a panic in Sapporo station when I couldn’t find a cash machine to take either card. Eventually I did find one that worked, to great relief. After that the quest for a bank or post office with a suitable cash machine became a periodic feature of the holiday, and I was often carrying quite a lot of cash around. At least in Japan, crime is very low, so there was little risk of theft.
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The walking environment and facilities
The national parks which we visited in Hokkaido both had impressive modern visitor centres where we could survey relief models of the area, explanations of the formation of volcanoes, life-size displays of the local wildlife, and audio-visual presentations. The centre in Sounkyo provided a welcome shelter from heavy rain at the end of one of our walks, with a hot drinks machine and table space to write postcards.
Walking routes which we used were usually well signposted, with the paths in Daisetsuzan being bounded by ropes strung between poles. This may have been to avoid walkers trampling on the delicate Alpine plant life at these high altitiudes. The route which we took up Mount Fuji was clear enough, even the first half by torchlight through the forest. The route through the Kiso Valley was clearly signposted, with distances in each direction. In Kamakura we were a bit lost at one point on the route to see “the Big Buddha”, but got there in the end.
There’s a protective approach to managing the walking areas, for visitors and wildlife alike. As well as to protect plant life, rope fences are also used to restrict access to dangerous areas, such as the crater of Mt Tarumaesan with sulphurous fumes rising from a vent. On Eniwadake, a sign and rope barrier indicated the summit was closed for safety reasons. Walkers are also discouraged from venturing into the deep forests of Hokkaido where there are still brown bears, which could react aggressively to an approaching walker. Bear bells should be worn in forested areas of Hokkaido to encourage any bears to keep a safe distance, and as we hadn’t got one we went through a forest near Sounkyo singing songs loudly!
On the hills of Miyajima there are big signs warning walkers not to approach the wild monkeys. However, the most exciting wild animals we saw were the Ezo chipmunks scurrying across the path on Kurodake above Sounkyo! There were some not-very-wild deer which grazed enthusiastically on our rucksacks when we alighted at Miyajima, and they were very persistent despite efforts to shoo them away.
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Maps and guidebooks
The national park centres sold excellent detailed 1:25,000 walking maps under the “Target” label. The text was in Japanese, but at least we could make enough sense of the contours, heights, and footpaths to be able to tackle the mountains. According to the Lonely Planet guide to Hiking in Japan, there is a “phenomenal array” of high quality topographical hiking maps available, but these were the only ones we came across in the parks themselves.
Similarly, the guidebooks indicated that English-language leaflets were available at Tourist Information Centres, but we found very little in English covering the National Parks beyond the titles of the leaflets. The shrines and temples were different, usually having English-language leaflets, and a useful leaflet on the Sounkyo Ropeway gave us the names of the peaks we climbed in Daisetsuzan National Park, Hokkaido.
Elsewhere, we found information on the location of walks from various sources including the main Lonely Planet Japan Guide, which alerted us to the Kiso Valley walk and has a good section on Mount Fuji. The tourist office in Fuji-Yoshida had a useful free map of the route through the town and up to the summit of Fuji, whilst the modern tourist office in Nikko provided a hi-tech presentation on a variety of attractive-looking walks in the Nikko National Park (unfortunately we had no time to follow these). The walk around Kyoto was planned using a free city sightseeing map in English, and we found our route around Kamakura in an English-language booklet on the town’s shrines and temples.
The japan-guide.com website is a good, easy-to-navigate on-line source of information on Japan, covering visitors attractions, travel, accommodation, food, history and much more. http://www.japan-guide.com/
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Other walkers
We met a number of other walkers on most of the routes, although the only non-Japanese walkers seemed to be amongst the thousands queuing up to get to the top of Mount Fuji! Everyone was polite and pleased to see Westerners, and ready to provide a bit of advice when Catriona asked directions. They also usually seemed well equipped for the conditions, and often wore a head scarf to soak up the sweat, or a canvas flower-pot hat.
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Walking in the towns and cities
The “walking experience” isn’t restricted to the countryside and mountains, especially if you’re not sure how to use the public transport system. It’s a great way to see round the towns and cities and get a sense of the scale of them, although in somewhere as big as Tokyo you really need to use the train and metro to get from one district to another. There’s the advantage of being able to get street maps, but in Japan this is complicated by the difficulty of reading street signs. It can be a bit difficult sometimes, emerging from a station, to find your way to a particular building, as the pedestrian routes may go under or over roads and through buildings, and not be obvious. We found this when we were heading for the Metropolitan building in Tokyo, to get the lift up to the top for the view. We found it in the end, and it was well worth the effort.
The city maps in the Lonely Planet guide were generally useful – especially for finding banks with cash machines which we could use! Some of the stations have so many entrances that it’s difficult to use them as meeting places unless you’re really precise about which entrance you’re going to be at! Meeting Catriona’s friend for a meal after walking round the Shinjuku area, we ended up having to phone her up to explain where we were. A regular hazard is people on bikes using the pavement, which appears to be quite the norm in Japan. The locals seem to have a sixth sense about when a cyclist is coming up from behind, but we narrowly avoided collisions on several occasions!
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Japanese characters at Kamakura
Japanese dress in Kamakura
Inside our ryokan on Miyajima island
Japanese and Western toilets at Nikko
Plastic food on display outside a restaurant
Tucking in to the real thing in a Tokyo bar
Dressed for dinner in a ryokan on Miyajima
Japanese speciality liquor
Arriving to pick up the Japan Rail Pass at Osaka airport
Shinkansen arriving at Kyoto station
Recycling facilities at Kyoto station
Bus to Sounkyo
Walkers on the hill above Sounkyo
Hydrangeas
Waymarker on the Kiso Valley trail
Walking around old Kyoto
Colourful shop in Tokyo arcade
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