I just got back from a great trip to Japan: my mom and took a pilgrimage to see the snow cranes up in Hokkaido, and stuck around to play tourist for another couple weeks. It was oddly cathartic - after years of visiting Japan on business, I finally went for fun, and I feel like I've gotten to see a whole different side of the country.
I loved the traditional inns. I'd never stayed at one before - partly because I imagined them to be less friendly toward foreigners, and partly because I didn't know the rules around sleeping on tatami mats and using the traditional shared baths. But my mom and I are old hands now! We sat in one of the traditional baths outside during a snow storm, learned to properly tie our Yukatas through trial and error (my mom is now especially adept at it), and got extremely comfortable sleeping on the floor. I was also very pleasantly surprised by how much Japanese came back to me - I'll never find work as a translator, but I remembered enough to be polite to the people we encountered and order lunch in noodle shops, which is much more than I'd hoped.
Among the other highlights of our trip: we went to the snow festival in Sapporo, took a boat out onto the drift ice in Abashiri, hiked out to see the snow monkeys in Nagano, and spent the night in a temple in Koyasan (where we got to wake up for the dawn service and everything). My mom found a used kimono store in every town we visited, and came back with some absolute treasures. And I got to see some very old friends in Tokyo, and came back feeling like I'd reclaimed some part of my past that had been lost.
All told, maybe the best 3 weeks I've ever spent.
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