hello again, one year later. i’ve got the trip planned out now! i will be visiting a bunch of cities this time, the most i have ever done in one trip (sorta). I stayed in 8 different cities last time (actually visited 10). this time, i will be staying in 8 different cities, but i have broken up the tokyo bit into two separate stops. i did this because 2 friends will be joining me for the first 9 days of the trip this time. while i have historically spent 2 weeks in tokyo at the start of my trips, the other travelers understandably want to see more than just tokyo. so, i will start in tokyo for a few days, then do a sort of (compared to my typical pace) “speedrun” of the golden route. we are going to try to fit tokyo (including the obligatory day trip to nagano for the monkeys), osaka (+kyoto and perhaps also +nara), and hiroshima into those 9 days. by my standards, that is breakneck pace.

we were originally going to try and fit fukuoka in at the very end of the trip for one night, but the mechanics of it made very little sense. we would have been leaving on the 7th from hiroshima, going all the way to fukuoka (2 hours), spend one night there, and then get up bright and early to go all the way back to tokyo (6 hours). given the limited time, it made much more sense to just cut that portion.

this will also be the first time i am not ending my trip in beppu. i am a little sad about that, to be honest. relaxing in the private onsen at the end of the trip is a really wonderful experience i have cherished every time. i’m sure at least one blog post on this trip will mention wishing i had gone to beppu. i am kinda hoping i can find something like that in sapporo.

once this trip has completed, i will have visited 7 of the 8 regions of japan. the only region i will be missing is shikoku, the large island the hiroshima line is going through. i am 100% confident that the next japan trip i take will include shikoku. i have gotten close enough to shikoku to see it a couple times. and the first trip included a flight over it, where i saw it from above. so i guess if i just carefully word my sentences, i will have definitely “seen all 8 regions of japan”. so that’s fun.

preamble

this very well might end up being the longest post i have ever written for this site, because it is one of the few times i will be writing about the trip while not being actively in the middle of doing it. most of the time, these blog posts are written in the evening, between arriving back home and going to bed. the occasional post has been done in the morning, but what i am saying is that most of these posts are composed under time constraints. that is not really the case for this one. so i am going to use the opportunity to go into excessive detail no one cares about. i realized a few months ago that the only really compelling reason to continue to pay monthly fees to have this website is that its a fun little record i enjoy curating. it happens to be publicly accessible, but that isn’t really super important to me. i think there are like 5 people who read this in total. there' is a stats page on the back end for this website where i think i could get the real answer to that, but that’s boring. i have decided it is 5 people, so it simply just is 5 people. hello family members.

i’ll start this off talking about all the gear i’m bringing, and then a breakdown of everywhere i’ll be going.

gear

i’m using a very similar setup to last year’s trip, with a nicer camera and the same 2 lenses as last time. or, at least, i will be arriving in japan with the same 2 lenses as last time. i have a tendency to pop into map camera in shinjuku and walk out a few hundred dollars poorer with a new lens in my backpack, so that may happen again.

camera - sony a7cr
- this is essentially just a nicer version of what i had last year. last year, i had the a7c. a very small form-factor, 24.2 megapixel full frame camera. i loved that camera, so this time i got the a7cr, which is basically the same exact camera, but 61 megapixels, better auto-focus, some fun quality of life changes, and some other stuff that i am not good enough at photography to care about. so in short, my photos will be higher resolution. i can more aggressively crop them without losing detail. there’s more to it than that, but i am talking to no one here.
lens 1 - sony fe 35mm f/1.4 gm
- this lens is an absolute hero. i of the ~1300 photos i took in 2025, 704 of them were with this bad boy. i adore this lens, especially for night photography. i dont think anyone reading this really cares at all or has any knowledge about camera gear, but this lens rocks because of the “f/1.4”. you know how when its dark, your pupils dilate to take in more light, and when its bright they get smaller? this lens can open up a lot, which is great for low light. its also 35mm, which i have found to be a really comfy focal length to shoot with. a lot of people like to claim that 35mm is a very close approximation of the human eye. so photos taken with this lens will have a similar perspective to me when i took it.
lens 2 - tamron 50-300mm f/4.5-6.3 di iii vc vxd
- the name of this lens is three or four mouthfuls, but its a great all-rounder. its not a fancy lens by any means. this is a “budget” zoom lens. i put budget in caps because its still $600. zoom lenses are very expensive. this one is not particularly remarkable, but the 50-300mm is extremely versatile, and the lens body itself is pretty convenient. on my “as small as a full frame camera can be” camera body, it still looks like a ship cannon, but it gets the job done in a form factor that works for me. if i was a millionaire, this would be the place to spend money upgrading, for sure. since i gave the stat for the last lens, might as well here too. i took 518 photos with this lens last year.
- i actually initially went with a tamron 70-180mm f/2.8 lens. i thought that with my new camera’s improved ability to crop in, this much more expensive, but far less zoom range lens might be a cool idea. this lens has a much wider aperture (2.8) than the 4.5-6.3 i am used to, but the focal length only goes up to 180mm, which may seem like a small difference. trust me, it isn’t. the difference between 180 and 300mm is pretty massive. i tried it out and was unsatisfied with the results, so i returned that lens and went with what i know. after all, this is the lens that takes 95% of the monkey photos.
various accessories
- new backpack - i’ve made some pretty significant changes to my gear this year. i got a smaller backpack, which may prove to be a serious challenge. the one i have used twice now is great, but it is huge. it is also designed to hold laptops and ipads and video game consoles. its like a tech bro backpack. despite being much larger, a lot of the space inside it is for thin rectangular objects, which i don’t tend to carry a lot of day to day. i also got a couple camera transportation accessories that connect to the backpack based on my experience the last couple times.
- tripod - i bought a super cheap travel tripod. it really isn’t anything to write home about, and its pretty low quality. but it sorta fits into the “water bottle holder” on my backpack, so i can try to get some tripod shots / mess with long exposure photography this year.
- backpack camera mount and wrist strap - i have historically transported my camera using a peak design leash, which is a sort of cross-body shoulder strap. it works great, and allows me to be “hands-free” with the camera hanging by my hip, easily reachable to take photos. i will still have this with me, but i don’t plan to use it 100% of the time. i got a peak design capture, which is a clip that allows my camera to fasten super securely to to my backpack strap or belt. i also got a peak design cuff, a wrist strap that uses the same clips as the shoulder strap i have for it, making them very quickly and easily interchangeable. the wrist strap also folds up into a neat little bracelet when i am not using it. the cross body strap starts to hurt after a while, and there’s an annoying process of which things go on first. i have to put the camera on first, then the backpack, and if i want to take the camera off, i have to take the backpack off, etc. mildly annoying. so i’m going to try out this backpack strap mount + wrist strap combo to see if it works out for me.

1 - tokyo (with friends!)

march 29 - april 4

the trip will, of course, start in tokyo. i have 2 friends traveling with me this time, so i imagine this trip will be a mixture of the “greatest hits” and some new experiences. tokyo is such an unfathomably vast place that i think i could spend every day there for 10 years and still find new interesting things to explore and see every day.

we only have 2 things already on the books for the tokyo area:

first, on the evening of march 31, we are going to teamlab planets. i’ve done this not once, but twice now. and it was a part of my blog post both times. so i don’t really feel the need to write about it a third time. its going to be great though. i love teamlab planets. over the years, a few people have asked me “hey i’m going to japan, what should i check out while i am there?” type questions, and teamlab planets is almost always one of the first things i say.

the second thing, and this will surprise literally nobody, is the day trip to nagano to see the monkeys in jigokudani. i do this every year, and its very seriously like…. at least 40% of why i keep going back to japan. we are doing that on april 2. this was my only absolutely non negotiable thing on the trip. when we first planned this, we were not going to do the tour i did in ‘24 and ‘25. we were gonna just go up there ourselves and do most of the things the tour does at our own pace. but i convinced the gang that was a bad idea because we would need to figure out a bunch of stuff, like the timing of buses, or how to take buses. i’ve been on one bus in all the time i’ve spent in japan, and i had a japanese person escorting me for it. i have no idea how any of that works. the tour isn’t even that expensive, includes lunch, and takes all the guesswork and anxiety out. plus i can vouch for its quality. so can my mom! hi mom!

that leaves a lot of free time in tokyo, i’m not quite sure what we will end up doing. i kinda like playing it by ear. i will be there for 3 times longer than my friends will, so other than my one non negotiable monkey day, i kinda defer to them on what they want to do. this is supposed to be a photography blog, so i guess i’m going to include some photos of tokyo from the last 2 trips now.

2 - osaka area (with friends!)

april 4 - 6

it turns out you actually legally cannot visit japan without going to osaka. the food is too good, its the law. osaka is what many consider to be the “food capital” of japan. it is also positioned in perhaps the most ideal tourism magnet area of the country. only a short train away from tokyo, right next to (and cheaper than) kyoto, close to nara, close to kobe… osaka just has a lot going for it. our friend tsukasa is tour-guiding us while we are in this area, and i think the plan is for us to stay in a fancy ryokan somewhere nearby on the 5th. but beyond that, i don’t know what the plan is. much like tokyo, osaka is an easy city to be entertained in, though. you can kind of just pick a direction and start walking in osaka and find something cool.

3 - hiroshima (with friends!)

april 6 - 8

this is the final leg of the journey for the two people joining me on the trip. i’ve technically “been to hiroshima” twice now, but i think this will feel like a totally different experience. the first year, i went to a museum and then the atomic bomb peace park. that experience took a lot out of me mentally, and i didn’t do much else there. the second time, i went to miyajima island, and didn’t spend any time at all in hiroshima proper.

4 - kamakura

april 8 - 10

my friends take off on april 8, and i ride most of the way back with them towards tokyo, but get off right before in kamakura. i don’t know much about kamakura. it is a very popular day trip destination from tokyo, but i decided to spend a couple days here. i think the pace of the first 10 days of this trip is going to be kind of a lot for me, and a couple days to just chill sounds pretty nice.

the one thing i know about kamakura is that there is a temple there that has a 43 foot tall, 260,000 pound bronze buddha statue built in the 1200s. the below image is from wikipedia user 663highland:

5 - tokyo again

april 10 - 13

im heading back to tokyo for a few days from here. i am used to spending 2 weeks here every year, so i have a feeling i will want to go back.

6 - sendai

april 13 - 16

it is at this point of the trip that i am heading in a direction i haven’t really gone before: north of tokyo. as a result, there aren’t any photos to post, and the amount i have to write about is falling off a cliff here.

i don’t really know what to expect in sendai. the only thing i really know about sendai is that the kanji in the name apparently translates to “hermit/wizard platform/plateau”. so i hope i run into some cool wizards at wizard plateau.

the wikipedia page for sendai has some interesting statistics. for example, it is the 12th largest city in the country. and apparently 88.5% of the population of sendai lives in a 129.6km area, or approximately 16% of it. fun facts!

7 - aomori

april 16 - 18

yet another city i know very little about. aomori is on the far northern tip of the “main island” of honshu. i think they are very into apples here? and theres a semi-famous castle.

8 - hakodate

april 18 - 20

on the southern tip of the island of hokkaido, right across the sea from aomori.i am finally going to hokkaido! this region is kinda famous for being cold. it may be snowing for part or even all of my trip through hokkaido. its been a while (like 10 years?) since i’ve seen snow, so that’ll be a fun experience.

i also know next to nothing about hakodate. i know there is a famous type of ramen from hakodate, called shio ramen. and i think they are pretty well known for sushi as well.

9 - sapporo

april 20 - 24

i like beer. sapporo beer is from here. there is also a ramen museum in sapporo that is probably pretty neat. it is the capital of hokkaido. thats the extent of my knowledge.

10 - tokyo part 3

april 24 - 25

not sure if this really counts as a leg of the trip when im just going back to the city i fly out of, but i do get one day in tokyo, i guess. i was going to take trains from sapporo back to tokyo, but the economics didnt make any sense. it would be approximately 14 hours of trains and around $220 to get back via train. or i can take a 90 minute flight for $54. so i’m taking a flight.

this took a very long time to write, and a bunch of it ended up pretty sparse. i am looking forward to this trip. i think i’ve done a pretty decent mix on the spectrum of touristy to non-touristy. im not spending really any time in the countryside on this trip, but that’s kind of by design. based on my experience in beppu (not countryside, but it still illustrates the point), when i go to a place without trains or super limited access to public transit, it makes it much more difficult for me to do things. access to public transit is huge for me, and it i can do more stuff if i stick to cities.

one day i hope to be fluent enough to just take a leap of faith and go out to somewhere in the countryside for an extended period of time. but that won’t be happening here.

that’s all for now! see ya from japan!

2026 warmup