INTRODUCTION
The year is 2026. The month is January. Exact date not known, or to be more exact, has been forgotten. Our children are visiting us for Shabbat lunch, Keren with her husband Sagi, and the children Shalev and Sol, and Shai with his wife Tal.
As usual, the conversation flows through a number of subjects, and at some point it arrives to the subject of a trip to Japan. Lili asks about the best times to visit Japan, trying to catch a little from the experience of Tal and Shai, who have already been there twice. Shai answers that April is the time of the cherry blossom, and the autumn is the time of the fall of the leaves, the best known times to visit, if we don’t care to find the country full of tourists. Lili asks if the beginning of May is also good, and then he throws: “Why don’t you go at the end of May? We are also going at this time…”.
Thirty minutes after that we already had the flight tickets and were fully at the job of reserving the hotels according to their recommendations.
That day, after they went home, Tal began working on a plan for us that would let us see the most important parts of Japan, while being there for 22 days, staying with them in Tokyo in the beginning and the end of the trip, and meeting them for two days in the middle of it.
At the end, for personal reasons, Tal and Shai had to cancel their trip, and we decided to continue and follow Tal’s plan as it was made, doing it by ourselves. Twenty-two days in Japan using only public transportation, and passing through Tokyo, Kanazawa, Shirakawa-go, Takayama, Kamikochi, Matsumoto, Nagoya, Osaka, Himeji, Kurashiki, Hiroshima, Kyoto, Nara, Arashiyama, and back to Tokyo.
This is the way our adventure began.
The days before the trip
Some days before the trip, Lufthansa made contact with us and told us that our flight from Tel Aviv to Munich was cancelled due to the war with Iran. We called them and they suggested they would move us to an El Al flight leaving Tel Aviv to Munich, and the continuation would be with Lufthansa instead of the Japanese company ANA. Only that, for that purpose, we needed to advance our trip, leaving Israel and arriving to Tokyo one day earlier. We accepted the deal, and gained an additional day in Tokyo, for which we had to book another hotel there, since our hotel was too expensive for a last minute booking.
And the trip begins!
On May 21st, 2026, we left home at 02:15 AM to the Ben Gurion Airport, to catch our El Al plane to Munich. The plane left at 6 AM, landed in Munich at 9:05 AM in German time, and the next flight left at 12:30 PM, arriving in Japan in the next morning at 7:05 AM.
(the landing in Japan from the plane's camera - recorded in the entertainment screen)
