Benassini-Lyons Travels

We had enough time in Japan to travel relatively far, to Nagasaki, and then we backtracked to our airport-departure city, Hiroshima.  After visiting places with too many sights for visitors to take in over shortish, weeklong stays (Tokyo, Kyoto-Osaka-Nara), our visits to Nagasaki and Hiroshima were definitely slower-paced.    Nagasaki I had a hard time deciding whether to stay in Nagasaki or in the much larger city Fukuoka. It seemed like Fukuoka would be a smaller version of Tokyo to me and that we would want more than a day trip to interesting Nagasaki, so we continued our long-ish train ride passed Fukuoka on down to Nagasaki.     Of course, the City’s     horror of the atomic bomb in 1945 makes it a place to see but it also has an interesting trade history (as Scott laid out in his post!).     Beginning in the 1600s through much of the 1800s, Nagasaki (and actually, just a small part of the city) was the only place that non-Japanese were ...

We just finished up three weeks in Japan. I last visited in 1992. I remembered the usual things--the bullet train, the fancy toilet seats--but also a clean, organized, and ultra-modern place. So I was excited to return and see how things had changed. We have seen lots of technological changes in the US (order by touchscreen at McDonald's!) so I wondered what they had cooked up in Japan!? The reality was somewhat striking. In many ways, the "look" of the place is still stuck in the 90s. There are vending machines everywhere, still, but they are mechanical and none take credit cards. In fact, credit cards are somewhat hard to use in general. For example, you can buy train tickets from 90s-style ticket machines, but only with cash. If you want to buy train tickets with a credit card you need to stand in line and talk to a human. The shinkansen is still very fast, but doesn't feel appreciably fancier than similar high-speed trains in Italy or Spain.  The electronics store...

We added Nagasaki to our itinerary at the last minute, but it was a very good choice. Far away to the southwest in Kyushu, it is probably best known these days for the plutonium bomb that the US dropped on it in August, 1945. But it has a much longer history (obviously) with some very interesting episodes.  Before and during the Tokagawa (Edo-) era, it was the only city that allowed Europeans to visit and trade, and there were Portuguese and Dutch living on Dejima island in Nagasaki from the mid-1500s up until the Meiji period. During the Napoleonic era in Europe, when the Netherlands was occupied by the French, Dejima is supposed to have been the only place in the world still flying the Dutch flag. The first Europeans to visit were the Portuguese, and English readers of the book Shogun  will remember the Portuguese priests and traders that pop in and out of the story. The Portuguese did what they did best and converted large numbers of people in Kyushu to Catholicism. The thr...

After our exciting train ride from Tokyo to Osaka (it was actually an easy train ride, it only exciting to go through Tokyo Station on a holiday weekend, by far the most crowded station I’ve ever been in), we made it to our apartment in Osaka.   Osaka is home to Universal Studios Japan (with the newish Nintendo World) and home to the beautiful and impenetrable Osaka Castle. The Castle figures prominently in the book (and, I assume, in the Netflix tv show) Shogun as a key fortress for one daimyo (regional leader) power player and ultimately must be overrun by the man who becomes The Shogun (Tokugawa, who unified Japan and whose descendants all are Shogun between 1603 to 1868).    I am excited to see the Castle.  I was also excited to plan Universal Studios and the kids were excited about Nintendo World.  However.... Mean researcher that I am, I was put off by the TripAdvisor reviews that note how crazy busy the place is; that you basically have no fun unless...