My best friend Michael and I spent 14 days in Japan. We spent a majority of the time in Tokyo, four days in Kyoto, one day in Osaka, half a day in Hakone, and then back to Tokyo. I’ll be splitting up my travel diaries in multiple posts to share the places and restaurants that I visited and tried. Hopefully, this helps you in your planning!
BTW, these travel diaries are going to be image and text heavy.
We booked an apartment using Air BnB in Akasaka. Use my promo code so we can both save some money when you book!
After dropping our stuff off at our apartment, we headed out for dinner. I booked Sushi Tou for our first night. I used pocket concierge in order to get us a reservation. If you don’t have a pocket concierge account, use my link sign up! We’ll both get 2,000 yen ($20 roughly). It’s a good reservation service, and usually, pocket concierge handles the bill with the restaurant.
The experience was worth every penny. This was probably the most expensive meal we had in Japan, and yes I know the lunch menu is a fraction of the price in comparison to its dinner menu, but Michael and I really enjoyed it.
The next day, we spent half of it in Shibuya and the other have in Yokohoma. One of our friends lives in Yokohama, so we wanted to go see him and have him show us around his hometown. We weren’t able to get shown around, he had a last-minute thing he had to do, but we were able to meet later with him for some drinks and food.
Following day, we spent in Asakusa and visited our first temple. But before we went to go visit the temple, we went to go get our kimono rentals. The process of getting our kimonos was really fun. There was a long queue, even with our reservation, but the team got us in and out as soon as possible.
I didn’t realize that they were going to do my hair, so I was really excited! I normally don’t do my hair (every now and then I braid it but usually I leave it straight), but having someone do my hair was a really nice experience. We took a good amount of photos, and we also had people asked if they could take photos of us. Handsome Mikey~~
After we returned our kimonos, we went to Akihabara. Before hitting up the arcades and unleashing my otakuness, we went to get tonkatsu. We shopped a bit afterward, but since we were in Akihabara we went to @homecafe, one of the well-known maid café, for Michael. I can’t tell if he enjoyed the experience or not, but they gave us a master and mistress membership card though. Before leaving to go home, we spent time playing games at SEGA.
We had a more relaxing day the next day. We bought some food from Lawson (I think or 7-11) and cake brought it to Yoogani park to have a picnic. My feet were dying from all the walking that we have done the earlier days, so it was nice to sit and enjoy our surroundings.
The next day, we spent a good time in the Shinjuku era. Our first stop was the Meiji shrine. It was such a peaceful shrine. It wasn’t as crowded as I thought it would be, but there was also an archery match in one of the gardens. Afterward, we went to Kawaii Monster Café. We didn’t really eat there, but we got a good snack. The show there was really fun.
Once we were done with our food, we explored the area, did some shopping, and visited the Samsung Galaxy 8 booth to check out their VR and Michael hit me in the face about 3 times with his umbrella. We ended the night relatively early since we were leaving for Okasa/ Kyoto the next day, but we had sushi next to our apartment for dinner. There was a wait since it’s claimed to be one of the best sushi places ( but when you’re traveling those are usually the reviews though, no ? ). I don’t know if the wait was worth it, but most places around our area were pretty packed.
Thanks for reading if you got this far! There are two more parts of my Japan travel diaries. Next post will be a recap of my time in Osaka, Kyoto, and Hakone, so stay tune~
Travel Diaries: Going to Tokyo & visting Shibuya, Yokohama, Asakusa, Shinjuku, Harajuku ! My best friend Michael and I spent 14 days in Japan. We spent a majority of the time in Tokyo, four days in Kyoto, one day in Osaka, half a day in Hakone, and then back to Tokyo.
