The 2007 World Science Fiction Convention will be held in Yokohama, Japan this year, and Kate and I are going. It’s a bit of a delayed celebration for my tenure– I’ll be on sabbatical in the Fall, so I won’t need to worry about prepping a class for September, and we can make it a nice vacation.
We’re planning to spend about three weeks there, and have most of the itinerary sketched out (details below the fold), but there’s a little time left unaccounted for. I’m pretty sure there are people reading this from Japan, and I know there are lots of people who have more knowledge of the country than I do (having spent three months there back in 1998), so let me throw this out to the Internet:
If you were going to be in Yokohama on a Tuesday morning in early Spetember, and needed to be in Osaka that Friday night (to get a Saturday flight back to the US), how would you spend your time?
More details of the Plan, such as it is, and various random thoughts are below the fold.
The (Highly Preliminary) Plan:
The con runs from Aug. 30-Sept. 3, which is Thursday to Monday. Our plan is to fly to Japan the previous week (probably arriving on the 19th), and go to Kyoto for about a week to do touristy things in that area. I’ve been told that Kyoto is pretty spectacular, but I didn’t make it there in 1998 (I stayed in the area of Tokyo).
The Sunday before the con (probably), we plan to relocate to Yokohama, and stay there through the end of the con. Yokohama is about half an hour by train from Tokyo, and we plan to spend a few days seeing stuff in Tokyo and Kamakura (which is half an hour in the other direction, and was really cool when I was there). Then there’s the convention, which will keep us pretty busy, depending on the programming.
And then there’s the post-con period. We currently plan to stay through the end of the week, and fly out on Saturday. As we’d like to keep the number of long-distance train rides to a minimum, we’ll probably fly in and out of Kansai International Airport, which is closer to Osaka and Kyoto, and it would probably be prudent to stay Friday night in Osaka, to be sure of catching the flight out.
Which supplies the constraints in the question above: Tuesday morning in Yokohama, post-Worldcon, and Friday night in Osaka. And in between…? Well, what would you recommend?
(I am aware that late August and early September are not the best time to be in Japan, climate-wise. There’s nothing we can do about that– the Worldcon dates were fixed by someone else.)
Thoughts on possible destinations (in no particular order):
Anything really far afield is probably out– Hokkaido may be lovely in September, but I don’t really relish the idea of spending two whole days on trains back and forth. Ditto the southern reaches of Kyushu. If we’ve only got four days, I’d rather not spend too much of that time in transit.
The longest day trip I took when I was there was to Nikko, which was pretty impressive, even in mid-December. (The picture on my work web page was taken there, and you can see the snow.) I managed to see most of the major sights in one (very full) day, though it might benefit from taking a more leisurely approach. Still, I’m not sure it would fill three days.
There are a couple of vaguely interesting-sounding spots on the coast between Tokyo and Osaka, in Izu and Ise. I don’t know any more about these than I’ve read in guidebooks. Not far past Osaka is Himeji, which has a castle that’s supposed to be really impressive, and I definitely think it would be cool to see a castle. Again, though, none of these really seem like three-day visits, and changing lodgings every day might be a bit rough toward the end of a long trip.
There are also “something completely different” options like shifting across to the west side of the island. Places like Nagano and Matsumoto (another castle) come to mind from leafing through guidebooks, but again, I know almost nothing.
One thing I’ve heard recommended is to check out some onsen (hot springs), which could be interesting, but I know absolutely nothing about the best places to go. I know there are onsen resorts scattered around most of the other areas that sound interesting, so checking into someplace like that, and making trips out to other sights might be a good way to go. I have no idea what to look for, though, and Kate’s a little dubious about the communal bathing thing.
That’s a sketch of the current state of our planning. We’re very much open to suggestions at this point, so if you have opinions or advice about sights that shouldn’t be missed, leave a comment.