Japan 2025 - The Preparations

Welcome to the first post of this blog post series! Here, I'll be talking about the Japan vacation that me and my friends went on in October 2025. Throughout the posts, I'll throw in some of the pictures I've taken there.

How did it come to be?

Starting in 2020, me and my friends have become major fans of anime-related content. We'd (obviously) watch anime, play games, become interested in Japanese food etc. etc. At some point, an suggestion was made: Why not try travelling to Japan? While it would end up taking us quite some time to actually get it done, we started preparing the vacation in 2024.

The Initial Steps

Naturally, this would likely be a once-in-a-lifetime vacation. Because of that, we decided that we'd want to see as much of Japan as possible.

Our first idea was to visit a local travel agency for advice. The travel agent was advising us about the difficulty of Japanese language, and the poor likelyhood of us running into someone that could speak English. Because of that, they are warning us that we'd likely be lost in Japan and therefore ended up mostly focusing in on an completely preplanned package.

On the positive side, this would have meant that we'd be guaranteed to see a lot of Japan, aswell as have lots of experiences there. However, on the negative side, the package seemed to be very fast paced (with us moving to the next destination in maybe just 2-3 days, at most). Additionally, we've been hearing from some people that had travelled to Japan over the years, that they didn't have much trouble with the language barrier. Those points, aswell as lack of flexibility and the steep price, made us decide against it.

The Plan

We then decided to take matters into our own hands, sort of.

First, we had to decide on the season. Spring, especially cherry blossom season, is the most popular tourist season in Japan. Looks great, but it'll be expensive. Summer however, was also out the window, as Japanese summers are known to be hot, but also very humid. Something neither of us would have been prepared for.

That's why our focus then became Autumn. Compared to the Summer, Japan's climate would then actually play into our cards. Compared to Germany, Japan tends to be quite a bit warmer for longer. We therefore decided to go for October, hopefully hitting the nice period where the temperatures aren't too unreasonable in both directions.

The next contention point then became the Destinations. Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto? Certianly must-have. We've been hearing about overnight stays at a temple being a possibility. Sounds very interesting. But how long do we even want to stay in Japan - and what else would we like to visit?

One of my friends ended up taking a bit of lead on planning the trip. He had good connections to a different travel agent, who agreed to help us out on this. We very quickly agreed to a travel duration of three weeks.

Our first plan would have had us start our vacation in Tokyo. We'd visit Yokohama, the Mount Fuji, stay at a temple in Koyasan, take a detour via Shikoku, followed by Kyoto and ending the vacation in Osaka. Reasonable idea on paper, but I spotted a problem. Akihabara.

For those who don't know, Akihabara is the #1 destination for anything related to the so called "otaku culture". If you want to buy merch while you're in Japan, you'll likely want to visit it. Except it's in Tokyo, and if we'd want to go shopping - which we very likely absolutely would - we'd then have to carry everything to every single one of our stops afterwards. Yeah uh, let's not do that.

The second iteration was then the rough schedule what we ended up deciding on. Since we decided to close off with Tokyo instead, we decided to invert our schedule and instead start off in the west, heading towards the east. We sacrificed Shikoku to start off at Hiroshima instead, moving Koyasan in between Osaka and Kyoto as that would make more sense in terms of geographical location, and end off in Tokyo.

A few times shuffling days around made us lock in our final plan:

We ended up going with an layover in Shanghai, as this allows us to start our vacation in Hiroshima. Alternatively, we could have landed at Tokyo Narita and try to make it to Tokyo Haneda within 3-4 hours. Possible, but risky - and certainly not something we wanted to risk on our very first vacation like this.

With the plan being finalized in November 2024, we could book our hotels, flights, tickets for anything we'd want to visit, and await October with anticipation. Surely nothing can go wrong in Japan.

This is the first post of the series about my vacation in Japan 2025. In the next post, I'll showcase some of the pictures and sights we visited in Hiroshima. Check the blog again within the next few weeks, or subscribe below to have everything delivered to you like a newsletter.