No Regrets!

In just three weeks, Dave and I are off to Japan. We’ve both been working feverishly to fine-tune our itinerary, with my focus being activities and transportation logistics. This has been surprisingly tedious and complicated, as my assumption was that, in a country where toilets have more buttons than my TV remote, I assumed the online booking experience would would be sleek and efficient. But it turns out that many of Japan’s booking websites and apps look like they were built by a high school student in the mid-90’s, don’t work they way they should, and sometimes don’t work at all.

For some of the more popular attractions, there’s the added stress of logging in at just the right moment when tickets are released and hoping that the website doesn’t crumble with the intense traffic. The experience getting tickets for the Ghibli Museum was comical, as logging in at the precise date and time when tickets were released for the following month resulted in a screen telling me that there were 6,847 users ahead of me. Patiently, I waited for 30 minutes as that number ticked down. In the end, I was able to secure tickets for us, not quite at the time we wanted, but close enough that I was able to re-jigger our schedule to accommodate it. A few minutes after my tickets were secured, just for shits and giggles, I reloaded the website to see what the queue was like and saw that there were now 45,347 users in line to get Ghibli tickets. Suckers!

Booking tickets for the Owl Café Akiba Fukurou was similarly frustrating, but I got us in. I am looking forward to gazing into the eyes of an owl sitting on my shoulder and connecting with it in deep and soulful way, while Dave is looking forward to putting one in a headlock.

Another big booking was the Grand Sumo Tournament in Fukuoka, one of our can’t miss Japan activities that we planned our trip around. I logged in at precisely the moment sumo tickets were released and saw tickets available, only to find that the clunky website crapped out every time I tried to proceed to the shopping cart to complete the purchase. Of course, by the time I was forced to reload the site to select my tickets again, the tickets were gone. What followed was a argument with ChatGPT about the actual seating layout of Fukuoka Kokusai Center and the eventual purchase of once-in-a-lifetime ringside box seats from StubHub. There’s a pretty good chance we’ll be able to smell the wrestler’s perineal sweat from our seats. What’s interesting is that the ringside box seats 4, yet only 2 tickets were available on StubHub, so we might be sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers for several hours. Dave has set the over/under on the combined weight of our box partners at 412 lb, and I have taken the under. Should be interesting!

In addition to the activities, it was my responsibility to sort out our transportation options in Japan, both within each city and between cities. Many of the local train tickets and ferry passes can be purchased as needed, but ChatGPT recommended that we purchase some our most important shinkansen (bullet train) tickets between cities since our schedule is dependent on them and some of our routes that fall on weekends or holidays are especially busy. That became an exercise in adding a Suica card to my Apple Wallet, putting some money on it, getting the Suica app so that I could see my Suica user ID, and then signing into the smartEX app with that Suica user ID to review schedules, pick trains, and select seats. It took a while to navigate with clunky app interface, but now our important shinkansen trains are booked.

While I was taking care of all of this, Dave was in charge of restaurants. While most tourists probably go to Japan and wing it when it comes to food, Dave has particular tastes and is making sure we hit the fanciest, most exclusive restaurants in each city. Many of these restaurants require reservations well in advance that can only be made with hotel concierges, which is a little annoying, but I guess that’s how it has to be in a city of 41 million.

All of this has been a bit of a headache for Dave, as restaurant closures and time differences and language barriers have meant that there was a lot of tedious back-and-forth. For some of the restaurants, even menu selections needed to be made in advance. I told Dave that I’m basically not into anything with organs, tentacles, or fish eggs. Dave also made sure to clarify his debilitating fear of heights for our reservation at the dizzyingly high Sky Restaurant 634:

“There was one other request specific to Musashi Sky Restaurant that I forgot to inquire about. Would it be possible to note on the reservation that I would request a table further back in the dining room, away from the windows? I have a bit of a phobia of heights, but am very much looking forward to this reservation and the dinner!”

“As per your kind request, we duly contacted the restaurant today and duly informed them of your acrophobia which they are pleased to take over your request and will keep the farthest seat away from the window.”

In the end, thanks to the concierge’s aim to please and Dave’s persistence, we got all the reservations we wanted. Our tummies are looking forward to this.

Throughout everything, ChatGPT has been incredible. Whether it was which days to do activities, which order to do them in, choosing museum entry times, taking the the most efficient route for a walking tour, which trains work best with our schedule, or how luggage forwarding works, ChatGPT confidently had my back. I’m well aware that this has been one of the knocks against ChatGPT, that it can sometimes offer wrong or out-of-date information with absolute confidence, and that it can be overly validating and supportive when I make suggestions and ask questions about the itinerary. But at least until we are on the ground in Japan getting lost or going to the wrong places, ChatGPT has been an amazing tool for planning this trip.

As far as bookings go, really the only thing left to worry about… is baseball. Our original plan was to land in Tokyo just in time for the Nippon Series (Japan’s equivalent of the World Series), and if luck went our way, we’d catch a game or two right there in the city. It seemed like a pretty solid bet when we booked. Of the 12 NPB teams, five are based in the Tokyo area, and we only needed one of them to make the final.

Alas, the baseball gods had other plans. Most of the Tokyo teams sucked this year, and with a week left in the regular season, it looks unlikely we’ll be seeing baseball in Tokyo. The Yomiuri Giants and Yokohama DeNA BayStars are barely squeaking into the postseason, and they’re both longshots to go anywhere. That said, the playoff format, excitingly named the Climax Series, gives us a sliver of hope.

But we’ll have to wait and see. Up to this point, we’ve done everything right to make this happen. In the end, if we don’t end up seeing a baseball game in Japan, then the baseball gods just looked down upon us and decided it was not to be. What can you do?

In the end, this is probably the most intensely planned trip I’ve ever taken, and rightfully so. Japan has always been on my bucket list, and if I’m going to do it, I want to do it right. There’s just so much to see and do. Japan is travel-dense, like Italy. Even with 18 days, I still feel like we’re missing things. And this isn’t an organized tour with G Adventures or Intrepid Travel, like most of my recent trips. It’s just me and Dave. That puts the responsibility on us to get everything right. Fortunately, ChatGPT helped us pull it all together, resulting in a schedule that’s structured and thorough but also efficient and doable. Honestly, I don’t think we could have planned it this thoroughly or confidently without ChatGPT’s help.

The icing on the cake is that I’ve recently reconnected with Haruka, a cool Japanese girl I met on an trip through Croatia in 2016. It only occurred to me recently that I should reach out to her. It turns out she lives in Tokyo and is free to meet up. It will be great to see her again.

Over the last few weeks, as we finalize our packing lists, Dave has become obsessed about his luggage. What started out as my recommendation to get a suitcase with wheels has turned into ongoing discussion, intense research, and second-guessing about the perfect suitcase and perfect backpack. It’s weird, but I don’t have this impulse. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve done so much traveling, but I’m content going with what I have, even thought I know it’s probably not perfect. To me, there is something kind of fun about challenging myself to make do with what I have.

Before I go, another Japanese lesson:

窓から少し離れた席にしましょうか？街は美しいですが、眺める気にはなれません。
Mado kara sukoshi hanareta seki ni shimashou ka? Machi wa utsukushīdesuga, nagameru ki ni hanaremasen.
May we have a table farther from the window? You have a beautiful city, but I don’t want to look at it.

Dave and I are both vibrating with excitement. Nearly everything is booked and paid for, Dave’s got a new suitcase and backpack, and our always listening social media feeds have been hammering us both with videos about hidden gems, cultural quirks, and some of the exotic food we’ll likely see in Japan.

This is going to be epic.