No Regrets!

Flights are booked! Now it’s time to hammer out all the details.

ChatGPT has helped us fine-tune the itinerary for our 2 1/2 weeks in Japan, with a focus on making our route and even daily schedule as efficient as possible. This is… too easy. And all the planning culminates in the most beautiful nerdgasm when it’s neatly laid out in a properly formatted Google doc. Dave teases me about my love affair with AI and Google docs, but that’s OK. It really is a magical combination for trip planning.

Now it’s time to start booking things. Dave and I continue to go back and forth on the hotels. Dave, of course, wants to go all out with fancy suites at bougie hotels, while I don’t mind roughing it a bit at mid-range establishments. In the end, the trip will likely contain a mix of both. We agree that most important is making sure our hotels are conveniently located and in the best neighborhoods for activity and lively nightlife, something else ChatGPT is helping us with.

We’ve also collected restaurant recommendations from friends and pulled a list of the top-rated food establishments in every city. We’ll start making reservations at some of the fanciest places as soon as it’s feasible. One way or another, this trip is going to be legendary for our stomachs.

ChatGPT even helped curate a list of the most photogenic spots along the way, which is basically travel crack for me. We’re going to be visiting some beautiful spots, perhaps most famous is the iconic view of Mt. Fuji from Kawaguchiko. There’s the stereotype of Japanese people running around with the cameras. I wonder if that’s just the tourists or also the locals. Either way, it seems that everyone carries high-end gear, from digital cameras to tripods to drones, openly around Japan. In fact, in temples, shrines, or parks, apparently people are happy to give you space if they see you composing a shot, truly a photographer-friendly culture. I’ll fit right in!

We’ve packed as much as we comfortably can into our 2 1/2 weeks. It’s going to be a very active trip. We’ll do our best to pack lightly, and I’ve recommended that Dave get a suitcase with wheels. I’m used to this sort of pace on my international trips, and I hope Dave is OK with it.

The only question marks are the big sporting events that are bookending our trip. Indeed, we decided to schedule our trip to Japan precisely when we did because of these events: Nippon Series baseball in Tokyo on the front end and the Grand Sumo Tournament in Fukuoka, or Kyushu Basho, on the back end. We don’t yet have tickets for either because they are not available. Dave and I will have to be ready to pounce when they are.

Not too worried about the sumo, but apparently the Nippon Series tickets are available by lottery only, making them very difficult and expensive to snag. Whether we can get in on that lottery directly or if we will have to pay through the nose to buy tickets from a third party remains TBD. That, and we are also gambling on the fact that a Tokyo-area team will be in the Series. Fortunately, we have extended our trip on the front end to put us in Tokyo for the first four games of the Series, which greatly increases the odds that we will see a game with one of the Tokyo-area teams playing in the Series. Here are the Tokyo-area teams:

• Chiba Lotte Marines (Pacific League, ZOZO Marine Stadium)
• Saitama Seibu Lions (Pacific League, Belluna Dome)
• Tokyo Yakult Swallows (Central League, Meiji Jingu Stadium)
• Yokohama DeNA BayStars (Central League, Yokohama Stadium)
• Yomiuri Giants (Central League, Tokyo Dome)

Based on the current odds, ChatGPT says that if we’re in the Tokyo area for Games 1 through 4 of the 2025 Nippon Series, the chance of being there for at least one of the games is approximately 65%. This is a huge jump from the last time we ran the numbers for our shorter Tokyo stay. Dave and I are cautiously optimistic that we’ll be able to catch a game. This really is a bucket list item for both of us.

And while trips to Japan are generally expensive, we may be going at a good time. The US dollar buys 142 yen at the moment, the most favorable rate since 1998. If we’re trying to maximize our US dollars, this is a good time to go.

It’s all coming together.

As we hammer out the details, I continue my cultural preparation for the trip. Like perhaps most westerners, my impression of Japan is mostly shaped by movies, from the simplicity of the Godzilla movies, to the imagination of anime, to the tradition and honor of Karate Kid, to the quirks of Mr. Baseball, to the brutal history of The Last Samurai, to the subtle charm of Lost in Translation. I just watched Perfect Days, a weird one about a guy in Tokyo who cleans toilets for a living. That one gave me the impression that everyone there, regardless of status or occupation, treats each other with respect. I’m very curious to see how the real Japan strikes me differently.

We’re also very curious about what our social and nightlife experience will be like. I’ve read that younger Japanese people are often extremely interested in meeting and becoming friends with foreigners, and we should not be surprised if a Japanese person approaches us to try to initiate a conversation in broken English. At the same time, we may encounter moments when entering a shop causes the staff to seemingly panic, as they’re afraid that we’ll speak to them in English and they’ll be embarrassed because they can’t understand. So funny.

Time for another Japanese lesson. Now that I’m getting into it, it’s kind of interesting. Japanese is not a tonal language, so tones on individual syllables do not change meaning like Mandarin Chinese. And people will typically address each other by name instead of with pronouns. When talking to someone named Dave, you would say, “Does Dave-san want to go to lunch?”, even when talking face to face.

Some useful phrases to learn:

おはよう
Ohayō
Good morning

トイレ
Toire
Toilet

すみません、お酒の中に陰毛が入っています。
Sumimasen, o sake no naka ni inmō ga haitte imasu.
Excuse me, I found a pubic hair in my sake.

Just need to get a few more choice phrases down, and we’ll be good to go.