2026 retrospective + stats
didn’t write any blog posts for the last couple days of my trip. i took it very easy for a few days, trying to manufacture a replacement for the relaxation i usually get sitting in an onsen in beppu, since i didn’t go to beppu this time.
retrospective
this was an excellent trip. i went into this one with a bit of anxiety over whether this trip would be as memorable or good as the first two, since so much of it was retreading ground i’ve already seen. but it didn’t turn out that way at all. adding 2 or 3 more people to the parts of japan i’ve seen before really changed the whole experience a ton. i saw things i never would have seen, did things i never would have done, and got a very different experience than i expected.
and for this trip, not only did i decide to head north of tokyo, but i also did the first part of the trip in a weird chaotic order. both previous trips have started in tokyo, then headed further and further west until the end, when i return to tokyo and fly home. this time i started in tokyo, went west, then doubled back, went to a city next to tokyo, then back to tokyo again, and then went north from there. i had 3 different stays in 2 different parts of tokyo this trip, all spaced weeks apart from each other.
in a sense, this trip was far less organized than before. i’ve previously gone into these trips with a general idea of the things i want to do in each city i am going to. i’ve gotten comfortable enough with navigating japan that i can do even less planning and logistics work ahead of time. other than accommodations, i arrived in japan with literally nothing planned. i would often arrive in a new city and decide what to do on the fly with a quick “things to do in (city name)” google search. and that level of non-planning turned out to be a godsend, because it let me do things like add an unexpected night in hamamatsu, and switch my second tokyo segment around to stay with my friend shinobu for a third time.
maps
on both the 2025 and 2026 trips, i used an app called findpenguins to take a gps snapshot of my location every few minutes. it has some other neat features i don’t use, too. if you take photos on your phone, it can use the timestamp metadata in the photo to put them on the map in the place you took them. since i was using a dedicated camera, i didn’t make use of that. but it did let me get these really cool maps.
the red lines for the 2026 and combined images are the exact gps tracking for the flights i took. i was able to use flight nerd websites to export that data and reformat it to the same file type this app uses.
it is worth noting that these gps locations, specifically for the segments on trains, are not perfectly accurate. there are definitely parts of the combined image that look like i took different train routes to get to some places when i actually took the same exact train and route. its snapshotting the gps location every few minutes, and sometimes gps location accuracy is bad. so its not perfect, but its pretty damn close.
i wish i had used this app in 2024 so i could have a more complete map of everywhere i’ve been. but honestly, the only place i went in 2024 that is not covered by the 2025 and 2026 maps is nagasaki. so it isn’t missing a huge amount of data.
i’ve also manually made a map of every place i’ve ever gone in japan, without the routing between each place.
safe to say i’ve seen a pretty enormous portion of this country. there are 8 “major regions” of japan, and i have been to 7 of them.
the only one of these i have never been to is shikoku, the island off the southern coast of the country.
to get more granular, there are 47 prefectures in japan, and i have visited 21 of them.
so, while it feels like i have seen “most of the country”, i’ve actually seen less than half the prefectures. this next statistic is the least useful one in the whole post, but i was trying to get a sense of like “which prefectures are the equivalent to the ‘flyover states’ in the usa.” i am trying to figure out how populated the areas i have not been to are, i guess.
the total population combined in all the prefectures i have visited is 74,938,883. japan’s total population is 124,946,789. so i have seen 44% of the prefectures, which contain ~59% of the population. there is still a lot to see. i’ve nearly exclusively gone to large urban areas on my japan trips. i’ve taken day trips outside of them for sure, but the ease of transport and likelihood that restaurants will allow foreigners / have english menus makes it hard to really branch out.
i will get into more about this in the final section of this post, too.
fun stats
like last year, i put an over the top amount of effort into making charts for some of the more interesting stats:
in this chart, the green bar is how many photos i kept, and the yellow one is how many i threw away.
this chart really highlights what an insane outlier matsushima was. i felt like i was just holding the shutter button down taking photos of tiny islands all day that day.
this chart was the least surprising to me. its pretty proportional to the number of days i spent in each city for the most part. matsushima, yamadera, and nagano are the only real outliers here. i took way too many photos in matsushima, and took quite a few on my walk up the mountain in yamadera. nagano makes sense as an outlier because i love monkeys.
had some absolutely monstrous days on the step count in the first half of the trip. you can pretty clearly see me dial it way back after just over the halfway point. i was definitely tired.
this one surprised me, if only because i did over 100k steps in tokyo alone. i spent a combined total of 8 days in tokyo. but the 1st, 3rd, and 5th highest step count days (4/12, 3/31, 3/30) were all in tokyo, which really skews the statistic. just those 3 days alone were 62k steps.
sendai makes sense as a low step count city because i separated matsushima and yamadera. i basically didn’t do anything in sendai, as i spent the 2 days i had there visiting the two others. and osaka makes sense as a low step count city because we were only had a single full day there and i spent 2/3 of it sick.
top 15 photos
so i wanted to include a list of my favorite photos of the trip.
great egret in nakajima park, sapporo. i think this is the best photo i have ever taken hands down. more than any other photo in this lineup, i am super thankful for my camera’s really high megapixel count because it allowed me to crop this without ruining it.
artist in shinjuku gyoen. i love this photo. i think this photo tells a story more than any other photo i’ve ever taken.
yamadera / risshaku-ji in yamagata. this photo is one of my favorites, but i think it is the perfect example of a photo where if i was better at photo editing, it would look better. this one was difficult to edit, and i spent quite a lot of time on it. i think i spent more time editing this photo than i did some entire day’s worth of photos. and i was not ultimately as satisfied as i would have liked with how it came out. you are your own worst critic, i suppose.
running monkey in jigokudani. this is objectively the “worst” photo in the lineup, but i love it so much anyway. i think the movement really captures something here that a still and sharply focused photo wouldnt. in an ideal world i would have loved if the monkey was more in focus and the background wasn’t, but what can ya do.
mother and child monkey in jigokudani.
despite there being 2 monkey photos on this post, i think this year resulted in by far the least number of good monkey photos. it was freezing cold and super rainy. there were less monkeys total than the prior years’ trips, but they were all actually using the onsen this time.
girl with a pearl earring on in susukino, sapporo. i really lkike experimenting with color in photos, and this one was really fun to do. sometimes i like to selectively remove all the colors except one or two from an image, but this one made it so easy to decide how to do it.
drunk tourist in golden gai. this is the most surprisingly good photo of the trip, i think. i think i wrote about it on the day this photo happened, but i was trying to take a photo of the bar signs in golden gai, and this girl walked into frame. i took a couple followup photos after she moved on because i assumed the one she was in was going to be a discard, but it ended up great.
kotoku_in temple, kamakura. full disclosure, i used ai to remove the other people from this photo. but it turned out great. i love the way the top of his head nearly matches the line of the trees behind him. in hindsight i would have slightly adjusted the angle to make that more perfect, but ya can’t win em all.
bartender in shinjuku. i took this one without even looking at the camera, just right as we walked into a bar. and it turned out awesome!
nezu shrine during the azalea festival, tokyo. this photo came out better than i thought it would at the time. the sunlight hitting the torii gates and plants, with the tree shadows behind the gates gives this image so much more depth than it would otherwise have.
matsushima bay. it was really hard to pick a specific photo from this place to include here, because i think there are 4 or 5 candidates. but i like the atmosphere of this one. feels like discovering something.
random street in osaka. this is probably the hardest to justify of all the photos i took. theres nothing about it thats particularly excellent compared to all the rest of the images. but i like this image because it really perfectly captures what its like to be out in the street at night. crowded but not too crowded, a mixture of yellow/golden lights and just barely too bright fluorescent lamps everywhere. this photo really feels like japan to me.
hamamatsu castle. the cherry blossom tree with the white petals next to the white castle came out so good. one of my better photos for sure.
yokohama at night. i think landscape photos are one of my weakest skillsets generally, but this one came out really good. in large part because i was on a dock with no one else around, so i felt like i had time to stand around and get the photo right.
tourists on mt. hakodate. this one is probably the artsiest photo here. and my impression of it might be different than other people’s because i was there to take it. but it really captures a feeling i get being in touristy areas in japan.
this section was originally titled “top 5” and then “top 10”. it was impossible for me to pick less than 15 favorites. and there are quite a few photos that were very close in the running for making this list.
the last thing i want to mention here is that i am working on a “best of 2026” album like i did for 2024 and 2025. it will take a while before thats done. the last 2 trips, the best of album was 100 photos. i am having a hard time narrowing it down to only 100 this time, so its taking longer than i would like. i will also be putting together a wallpaper collection, like last year. that will also take quite a while. i will make another blog post when both are done.
what’s next?
in both 2024 and 2025, i left japan thinking “definitely coming back next year.” i am not 100% sure that i will do so in 2027. i feel like i have seen a great deal of japan already, and a break might be good. i definitely want to take another month long photography vacation for sure. but i am not 100% sure that it will be japan.
the thing is, japan is such an easy country to travel in. the train system being incredible, the prices being super low, and the plethora of “tourist” content about japan make it a very compelling vacation. i think a month long vacation to most other places in the world would be significantly more expensive to do.
i am considering the idea of an american roadtrip instead, but the current price of gas makes me kinda grimace at that idea. accommodations would cost 2 or 3 times more as well.
so in all likelihood, i may choose japan again next year. and i have a plan that sort of ties into that.
i intend to take learning japanese much more seriously. i am planning to hire a tutor and really aggressively learn the language. there were so many opportunities this trip that would have been incredible if i had been fluent in the language. and i think any future japan trips will likely include much more countryside areas than i’ve previously gone to. that will need my japanese skill to be much better than it is.
i think i will also choose a different time of year for my next japan trip as well. i think it would be fun to be there for the new year. i worry about the weather doing that though. the primary reason i have chosen march-april as my japan trip time every year has been the weather. the cherry blossoms are obviously nice, but i am definitely not structuring my entire trip around that. i just want it to rain as little as possible, and not snow at all. if i do a new years trip, it almost certainly would be much rainier and possibly snowy. not sure how i feel about that.
all that being said, no matter what, whether i go to japan again next year or skip a year, i absolutely will be going to japan many more times in my life. it is a beautiful country that i have fallen in love with.
