A Love Letter to Japan

I went to Japan twice in 2024. First with friends, then alone. Both times I came back different.

This isn't a travel guide. I'm not going to tell you where to eat or how to use the train system. This is about what I found there, and why it stuck.

Tokyo

March 2024. I landed with two close friends, Tibor and Alice. We'd planned this trip for months.

What got me first wasn't the skyline or the neon. It was the small things. A train that arrives to the second. Streets that stay spotless even with millions of people on them every day. The way everything just works, quietly, without anyone drawing attention to it.

Japan pays attention to things the rest of the world has decided don't matter.

Then there were the arcades.

We spent entire evenings playing video games, laughing like we were twelve years old. Row after row of machines, people of all ages, completely absorbed. And the skill level. We'd watch players do things that didn't seem physically possible, and they'd barely blink. Gaming here isn't a niche hobby. It's part of the culture, and it carries no stigma. Just pure, unselfconscious play.

The restaurants were something else. Not just the food, though the sushi alone would justify the trip. The interactions. People started conversations with us. Strangers offered us food. Not because they wanted something from the tourists. Just because that's what you do.

The Japanese have a word for it: omotenashi. Selfless hospitality. Anticipating what someone needs before they ask. No expectation of return. I'd read about it before going. Living it is different.

The Forests

Between the days in Tokyo, we went to the places that don't make the travel brochures.

Forests that felt like walking into a Zelda game. I mean that literally. There were moments where light filtered through the canopy and hit moss-covered stone steps in a way that made three grown adults stop and just look at each other. We climbed mountains and stood at the top, not saying much.

Japan does something unusual with its landscape. Nature isn't separated from civilization. It's woven into it. You can be in one of the most advanced cities on Earth and within an hour be standing in a forest that hasn't changed in centuries.

The Philosopher's Path

After Tokyo, Tibor and Alice flew home. I continued south to Kyoto. Alone.

There's a stone path along a canal in the Higashiyama district. It runs about two kilometers, from the Silver Pavilion to Nanzen-ji temple. It's called the Philosopher's Path because Nishida Kitaro, Japan's most influential modern philosopher, walked it daily for eighteen years while working through his ideas at Kyoto Imperial University.

It's not spectacular. There's no viewpoint, no monument, no big reveal at the end. It's a path, a canal, cherry trees, and quiet. That's all it needs to be.

The Japanese have a concept for what I felt there: mono no aware. A gentle awareness that everything passes. Cherry blossoms bloom for about a week. By the time you've noticed them at their peak, they're already falling. A philosopher walked this path daily, thinking thoughts that changed his country's intellectual history. He's gone. The path remains. You walk it, and one day you'll be gone too.

That's not sad. That's what makes it beautiful.

Of everything I experienced in Japan, the Philosopher's Path left the deepest mark. Everything else in Kyoto, as wonderful as it was, paled next to it.

Going Back

I flew home. And about two months later, I booked another flight.

Japan does that to people. I needed to see the parts I'd missed, and I needed to see them at my own pace. This time I went to the Japan most tourists never reach.

The Japanese Alps. Matsumoto. A completely different country from the neon cities. Mountains, a castle town, clean cold air. The kind of place where things move slower and nobody minds.

The Language of Kindness

From Matsumoto I made my way to Shikoku, one of the four main islands. Fewer tourists here. You need a car to get around, and most visitors don't bother.

I met a man there. I'll keep his name to myself, but his kindness I won't.

He didn't speak English. I didn't speak Japanese. We communicated through Google Translate, typing messages back and forth on our phones, pointing, gesturing, sometimes just laughing at the absurdity of two people who couldn't share a single sentence trying to have a conversation.

He drove me around the island. For hours. Showed me places I would never have found. Wouldn't let me pay for gas. Was the most polite and generous person I'd met on either trip, and the competition for that title in Japan is fierce.

Shikoku has a tradition called osettai. For over 1,200 years, the island has hosted a pilgrimage route connecting 88 temples. Locals have a custom of offering food, shelter, and help to anyone making the journey. Refusing is considered disrespectful, because the giving itself is a spiritual act.

I wasn't a pilgrim. But I was a stranger, and this man helped me the way his culture has been helping strangers for centuries. Through a translation app, with zero shared language, and all the kindness in the world.

The Forest Spirits

South of the mainland, there's a small island called Yakushima. It's a UNESCO World Heritage site, and the reason Princess Mononoke looks the way it does.

Hayao Miyazaki and his animators visited Yakushima's Shiratani Unsuikyo ravine repeatedly while making the film. They reportedly needed two hundred shades of green to capture what they saw. Ancient cedar trees, some over two thousand years old, covered in thick moss from root to crown. Light that doesn't stream in but seeps.

In Japanese folklore, old trees house spirits called kodama. Miyazaki turned them into the small white figures with big rattling heads that watch from the branches in the film. But the belief is centuries older than any movie.

I walked through that forest and saw the little kodama figures placed among the trees by the people who maintain the trails. In the silence, with the moss and the filtered green light and the sound of nothing, you understand why people believed in tree spirits. You don't have to believe in them yourself. You just have to be there.

The Hot Springs

Across both trips, one experience kept coming back: the onsen.

Public bathing in Japan goes back over 1,300 years. The rules are simple. You wash yourself thoroughly at a seated station. You enter the hot water, naked, with everyone else. No swimsuits. No phones. No status symbols of any kind.

There's a phrase: hadaka no tsukiai. Naked relationship. When everyone is stripped of clothes, you're stripped of social hierarchy too. Nobody is performing anything for anyone.

The ritual forces presence. The deliberate washing. The slow entry into water that's almost too hot. Then nothing. Warmth and silence and steam rising off the surface. No agenda. No next thing. Just this.

In Kumamoto prefecture, near the active volcano of Mount Aso, the onsen are fed by volcanic springs. You sit in water heated by the earth itself, looking at mountains, and the rest of your life feels very far away. In the best possible way.

Okinawa

I ended in Okinawa, at the southern edge of the archipelago. Subtropical, laid-back, with its own culture rooted in the old Ryukyu Kingdom. A completely different Japan.

After the ancient forests and mountain hot springs, Okinawa felt like exhaling. Warm air, warm water, warm people. A fitting end.

What Stays

Two trips. Three months apart. The same country, seen from completely different angles.

What stays with me isn't any single moment. It's the feeling of being in a place where people have decided, collectively and over centuries, that the small things matter. That the way you prepare food matters. That the way you treat a stranger matters. That taking care of shared space is everyone's responsibility, not just the government's.

Japan showed me what becomes possible when an entire culture commits to that idea.