Everyone has bowed to us as we’ve gone into and out of hotels, restaurants, shops, temples and museums all over Japan, and random people have sometimes even bowed to us in the street. We’ve very much got into the habit of bowing back, and sometimes we now even find ourselves bowing to people who haven’t bowed to us. We think that this is likely to be a hard habit to break, and we wonder how people will react if we start bowing to them when we get back home. I’ve known some people who would think it was only fitting that we bow to them whenever we see them, preferably as low and as frequently as possible. Fortunately I haven’t known too many of these people. I don’t think that many people could come to Hiroshima ... read more

Today we travel to Hiroshima. As we wait outside the hotel for our taxi we see a group of girls walk past along the footpath in single file, on their way to work. There is perfectly even spacing between them, and they are all identically dressed. They look like robots. We don’t think they’re too keen on individualism here in Japan. We've rarely seen anyone wearing outlandish clothes, or with unusual hairstyles, or even behaving unusually. Everyone just seems happy to conform and fit in. We decide to have breakfast at the station. I’m still hungry after last night‘s tofu hamburger fiasco, and I suggest to Issy that we have breakfast at McDonald's. She knows that I hate McDonald's, so she assumes that I’m joking. I assure her that I’m perfectly serious, and then add that ... read more

We decide that today we will take a day trip to Nara, which we read was the capital of Japan in the eighth century. It is about an hour by train south of Kyoto. We get off at Nara station and walk through the city towards the main attractions. We stop for breakfast. The restaurant has finished serving breakfast, so I order a pizza. I’m not sure that I’ve ever had a pizza for breakfast before. It is excellent and is certainly the best pizza I’ve had since we arrived in Japan. That said, it didn’t have much to beat. The only other pizza I’ve had here was a disgusting blob of melted cheese on a non-existent base. We keep walking. We‘re a bit surprised to see some deer standing on the footpath, and in a ... read more

We head off up the hill away from the city centre in search of temples. We don’t have to look too hard. Every second building here seems to be a spectacular temple. We walk up along Matsubara-dori Street towards the Kiyomizu-dera Temple. The street is wall to wall shops and is packed with tourists. We need breakfast, so we stop at a food stall. Issy says that other than sumo wrestlers there is no such thing as an overweight Japanese person, and therefore all Japanese food must be good for you. I wonder what sumo wrestlers eat. I try not to wonder about this too much, and instead try very hard to believe Issy’s line that all Japanese food is good for you as I munch on my breakfast of deep fried octopus cakes. The Kiyomizu-dera ... read more

We’ve just about run out of clean clothes, so we put some dirty shirts and pants in a bag and send them off to the hotel laundry. This costs us a small fortune. They come back individually gift wrapped in cellophane, and they’ve also been ironed. Most of my shirts have never experienced ironing before. I think that all hotels should offer a cut price laundry service where you pay by the kilogram, and you give them a bagful of dirty clothes, they chuck them in a washing machine, and they then come back to you in the same bag, only now hopefully slightly less dirty. I’m too stingy to get the hotel to wash our socks and undies, so we wash these ourselves in the hand basin, and then hang them up to dry. We ... read more