Japan

My first visit to this country which everyone says you must visit, but did it disappoint or wow?

“You really must go to Japan” is the refrain of pretty much everyone who has already been there.

Other people talk about it being on their bucket list but I refuse to use the term: as far as I can see, the list is not so much places you want to visit before you die, as places you need to see before your travel insurance becomes too expensive. Anyhow, it has been on my “pre-insurance unaffordable list” for a while.

The thing is, when I was growing up, Japan was the stuff of legend: it was the country that could produce goods with no quality defects, whose trains ran at a speed no-one else could match and that always arrived on time; innovation that left the rest of the world behind.

From a personal, family, perspective, it was a country that treated its prisoners of war brutally during World War II.

But its recovery from the atomic bombs dropped on it heralding the end of the war was nothing short of incredible.

Nowadays it faces new kinds of problems, among them the plummeting birthrate which means its workforce is shrinking, coupled with having one of the highest suicide rates in the developed world.

But despite all that, I wanted to go, and when a friend of mine was asked by their company if they would like to take three weeks annual leave because business was facing a downturn, I suggested we head together to Japan during the sakura/cherry blossom season.

So, at only four weeks’ notice, the trip was planned and booked and we found ourselves aboard an ANA flight bound for Narita airport in Tokyo.