monkey bars
today was great. my annual trip to jigokudani + a tour of shinjuku nightlife.
to start, we went to nagano, a beautiful mountain city about 90 minutes from tokyo by bullet train. the plan is to join a tour group there.
i do this same tour every year. we actually considered not doing the tour this time, and maybe using just my memory of the city and tour to do basically the same thing. i convinced the gang this was a bad idea, because we would miss out on the sake tasting, and we would also have to figure out how japanese buses work. so we did the 10/10 excellent tour i have always done.
i did this tour myself in 2024, took my mom on it in 2025, and now have taken two more people in 2026. just because of me, this tour has sold 6 tickets. they should put me on the payroll.
nagano
our bullet train pulls into the station at 9:30. the meetup with the tour is at the station at 9:35, so the timing is perfect.
the tour starts with a walk around zenko-ji, a very old buddhist temple. i’ve written about it quite a bit on previous posts, so i wont really go into a lot of detail here.
sake tasting
next up is a stop at a local brewery, called yoshinoya. they have you try a bunch of different types of sake.
the red one on the far right in the close-up image is incredible. we bought a couple bottles of it.
on the way out, i got a really cool shot of the street outside the brewery.
monke
next up is the real highlight of the day. the bus takes us on a 50 minute drive up the mountain to jigokudani, the monkey hot spring.
it was freeeeeeeeezing cold today, and raining intermittently. and i found out i forgot my gloves back in america. terrible news. but mike made the absolutely insane decision to wear shorts, which must have been even worse. i was wearing my thickest jacket and was still dying.
on to the main event. after about a 40 minute hike up the mountain, we reached jigokudani.
there were far far fewer monkeys this year than there have been the previous years. i would say there were around 20 or 25 monkeys there. but they were almost all in the hot spring this time, because it was so cold. and there were a couple very tiny precious baby monkeys, because apparently they give birth in the early spring.
i took waaaay more photos than this, you can find them all in the gallery page if you want to see more. but these are definitely the cream of the crop.
back to tokyo
we headed down the mountain, grabbed some delicious apple ice cream (yes we ate ice cream even though it was freezing cold, the apple ice cream is just that good.), and began the journey back home to tokyo.
spoilers secret surprise, but we are leaving tokyo tomorrow, one day earlier than originally planned. we made an unexpected alteration to our trip to visit our japanese friend’s favorite city. so this is our last evening in tokyo. we wanted to experience some nightlife in tokyo, which is something i have somehow not managed to do in any of the ~five weeks i have spent in this city. so we took our train home, went back to the airbnb to change out of muddy / rain clothes, and immediately headed back out to bar hop in shinjuku.
our first stop was a rooftop terrace bar not far from golden gai, a popular bar area.
i took one more photo from this rooftop, and my camera freaked out and took over 5 minutes to write it to the sd card. i didn’t think much of it and continued on, but this is what happened to it:
no idea why it turned out this way, but i like it.
it was still freezing cold, especially up here on a rooftop with no buildings to block the wind. so we moved on after one drink. we walked over to a really small jazz bar called “dug”. its a very cramped little bar playing jazz music. smoking is allowed in this bar. it really improves the atmosphere of a jazz bar to be hazy with cigarette smoke, i think. i took an accidentally incredible photo here.
they sat us at a table with some other americans who were clearly upset by this, and almost immediately got up and left. we stuck around for a while, and when we decided to leave, we found out they were going to close in 5 minutes anyways.
we wanted to go to one more bar this time, and we had to check out golden gai. golden gai is a very very small street that is absolutely packed with the tiniest bars you can imagine. dozens of bars smaller than the average american bathroom. they have 5-7 seats and absolutely no open space. when you are sitting at the bar, your back is against the wall. tiny little bars.
we found one i did not get the name of and stopped in for a while. we had a few drinks here. the bartender and the manager both spoke fluent english, which was a relief. this bar doesn’t exist on google maps, which is frustrating. i can pinpoint the exact spot in golden gai where it is, but theres just nothing there on google maps. i didnt take any photos here because the place is so tiny you can barely move.
we would have stayed longer, but a swedish couple came in and started talking to us. the conversation quickly got kinda weird in a way i dont really want to go into details about, and we all decided “hey its midnight we should probably leave”.
10/10 day.
