We've both wanted to visit Japan for many years now but, like many people, we were put off by its reputation for being prohibitively expensive, difficult to get around and hard to cope without being able to speak some Japanese (see our page on myths later on). In addition to this, Japan has until recently been pretty much off the tourist trail and even now only a few tour operators include Japan in their brochures.

Well, last year we finally decided to go. Japan was actually our first choice for last year's August/September holiday but, when we checked the expected weather (in Fodor's World Weather Guide), we found that it would have been the typhoon season with high humidity and heavy rain and so we ended up touring Australia instead (we heard that there actually were floods in Japan while we were in Oz so we definitely made the right decision).

Obviously we weren't put off, we simply looked up when it would be a good time to visit and picked mid/late May as it would be relatively dry and not too hot plus we could make use of the Whitsun Bank Holiday. We would have preferred to have used the early May Bank Holiday but this coincided with Japan's Golden Week public holiday (29th April - 5th May) and most of Japan's hotels and trains would have been fully booked.

We started planning this tour in earnest in February. After successfully planning our own self-guided tour of Australia, we were quite tempted to do the same for Japan despite the obvious language issue. However, unlike Australia, we didn't really know what we should include in our tour. We knew we wanted to spend a lot of time in Tokyo and also visit the old Japanese capital of Kyoto. We were also keen to stay in a Ryokan (a traditional Japanese Inn) during the tour after reading about it in Dave Barry Does Japan - a hilarious and grossly exaggerated, but nevertheless excellent, introduction to Japanese culture for Westerners.

To try to get some more ideas we went to the Destinations 99 show at Earls Court in London and we found a lot more brochures covered Japan this year than when we went last year. We spoke to some people from the Japanese National Tourist Organisation (JNTO) who advised us against touring Japan by ourselves! - and then gave us some sample itineraries of escorted tours that they could organise for us!

None of the tours in the brochures and sample itineraries that we picked up were quite what we were after. The fundamental problem with all of them was that they didn't spend long enough in each location. They were fairly expensive too! We were initially tempted by the Bales 10-night “Japan Highlights” tour but this would have cost us a staggering £5196 for the two of us (with more to pay on arrival). This is over £1000 more than we actually paid in total for our tour which lasted twice as long! However, we did benefit from looking through these various brochures and itineraries as we gained a much better idea of what we wanted to see and do in Japan and we were subsequently better able to plan our own tour itinerary.

We were thinking of using Travelmood (again) to book the flights and hotels for us (they did quote a very tempting price for some Alitalia flights via Milan). However, they didn't sound at all confident about booking hotels in Japan and probably wouldn't have been able to make any recommendations.

We therefore looked through the brochures we had for ideas on which hotels to stay in and we spotted an unbelievable deal in a brochure from KR Tours. They were offering non-stop, return flights with Japan Airlines (JAL) (which normally cost over £1000 each) plus 5 nights in Tokyo from just £759 each. Their brochure said that they specialised in tailor-made holidays so we gave them a call and spoke to a very helpful chap called Mike Harris who confirmed that the hotel & flight deal was definitely available and that he would happily extend the duration and add in other hotels to the “package”. We gave him our itinerary and he put together some suggestions for hotels in each of the places that we wanted to visit as well as providing a lot of help with choosing a Ryokan.

We wanted to use Japan's famous bullet trains to get around the country as these were only slightly slower than flying but they more than made up for this by being extremely frequent and having no check-in time. We had read that these high-speed trains were quite expensive to use but that overseas visitors could buy a pass for unlimited travel over a 7-day period for ¥28,300 (~£149) - or a little more than the price of the return ticket from Tokyo to Kyoto (14- and 21-day passes were also available for ¥45,100 & ¥57,700 respectively). Our actual usage of our 7-day JR pass amounted to over ¥68,000 worth of rail travel so it saved us over £200 each!

These JR passes can only be purchased outside of Japan. They are available from many tour operators but usually only as an inclusive part of their tour package. Overseas Japanese tourist offices should be able to help you obtain one but you may encounter some resistance when they try to encourage you to take one of their tours. We obtained ours from KR Tours (but then they did also arrange our flights and hotels).

The guide book that we used while we were planning and touring Japan was Lonely Planet's Japan. We picked it because it looked the most comprehensive available and all of the place names and tourist attractions were also written in Japanese. This occasionally helped us to get around as we could either compare the Japanese in our book with signs or point to this Japanese writing when asking for directions or instructing a taxi driver where we wanted to go. This book was the most popular one we saw being used by other tourists but we didn't like it! Its biggest fault was in its directions - they were often incomplete or ambiguous (we met somebody else who was also quite lost while trying to follow directions from this book!). As an alternative, Rough Guide have since published their guide to Japan which might be better. You can find out more about it on their web site.

We used the web again to help with the planning of this trip and we found two sites that are definitely worth a visit: Roger & Marilyn's Photo Tour of Tokyo is an excellent guide to Tokyo. It contains loads of photos of Tokyo as well as scanned in images of tickets etc. It is also packed full of links to other useful sites for anybody planning a trip to Tokyo or Japan. The other site is Robert and Vicky's “Touring in Japan”. This one is more like our website as it describes their impressions of Japan during their tour along with some of their photographs. For a background to life in Japan see Schauwecker's Guide to Japan.