Jack's Japan Trip

After months of preparation and anticipation, Jack's week in Japan finally arrived. He spent the week with a roommate from Livermore named Atley and a host family with a mom, and dad, and a son his age named Junpei. I've turned the laptop over to Jack to document the trip himself. 

This is the costume I wore for the welcome party in Japan.

We went to the Imperial Palace in Tokyo with the host family. It was really cool to see all the buildings and old architecture. It started raining, but luckily, we brought umbrellas.

Later that day, we went to another place in Tokyo. First, we got lunch at the Tokyo Central Station. It was some kind of fried squid and fish over rice, and it was okay but not great. None of us loved it. We rode a lot of trains that day. Inside the Central Station, it was insane, so many people! I could have gotten lost for hours in there without the host family. We rode on so many trains, and sometimes we had to run to make the next connection.

The next day we woke up early to go to Nikko, a historic town about 3 hours away from Yotsukaido, where we were staying. I was surprised when, for breakfast, we stopped at a ramen shop on the way. It was really good, just not what I expected for breakfast.

After the ramen, we kept driving until we reached Nikko. There were so many shrines and temples there that it seemed like anywhere you looked, you would see another one.

This statue is supposed to bless you with a good partner.

This pagoda is very famous and really tall. It was really cool to just look up and see it at the same height as the huge redwoods growing there.

These carvings are also really famous. They're the original monkeys that see no evil, speak no evil, and hear no evil.

This one was my favorite. It's called Yomeimon Gate, and it is one of the most intricate shrines in Japan. There was so much stuff everywhere, I didn't even know where to look, but it somehow still seemed balanced. It leads to Toshogu shrine, the resting place of Toshogu Ieyasu, the founder of the Toshogu shogunate. One of the posts holding this gate up was carved upside down on purpose, because an old Japanese saying says that if something is truly perfect, it will always fall into ruin. They carved it upside down so that the shrine could never be truly perfect.

There were a lot of stairs leading up to the main shrine.

This is the main shrine that houses Toshogu's grave. You can't bring cameras inside, but it was very beautiful. There were paintings of dragons and phoenixes on the ceiling to represent power and nobility.

Once we left the shrine, we went to a waterfall that was also in Nikko. It was huge, and the area around it was super misty from all the water spraying.

We rented bikes to ride around Lake Chūzenji. It was sprinkling a little bit in Nikko, but once we got out of the rain cloud, it was sunny. When we got back into the cloud, though, it was pouring super hard. We all got soaked biking through the rain for 20 minutes. I could barely see the person in front of me, it was raining so hard.

After that, we drove about an hour to a place called Edo Wonderland. It's a replica of a street during the Edo period, Tokyo a long time ago. We made traditional rice crackers, tried soba, and learned how ninjas trained.

The next day was school. Their schools are a lot different from ours. They had uniforms, cleaned the school, and served each other lunch. All the kids stared at us, it was really funny. We'd get followed through the hallways and asked questions in really bad English. We got a lot of guys telling us to say who knows what in Japanese and a lot of girls saying they love us. We did some cool classes with just the four LYSCO kids there, like learning to play the shamisen, a traditional Japanese instrument sort of like a guitar, making sushi, and learning calligraphy. The kids would wait for us at the exits after school and follow us in a herd wherever we went. It was kind of scary. Me and Atley made them mac 'n cheese and brownies. We also gave them some gifts. They loved the Halli Galli game, and we played it multiple times every night after that.

That night, we had a really weird dinner. They put a skillet in the middle of the table and cooked meat and noodles on it. We each had bowls with an egg in it. We scrambled the egg with our chopsticks and then the host mom added meat and noodles to our bowl without cooking the egg. I had a really hard time mentally eating that meal; it kept setting off my gag reflex. 

Later that night, we also went to get tonkatsu ramen. It's made from boiling pork bones for a long time. It was one of the best things I've ever eaten in my life.

A picture of us in front of our host family's house.

On the last night with our host family, we went to get sushi at a conveyor belt sushi restaurant. All the plates circle around on a conveyor belt and there are so many options!

We also went to an arcade nearby and played Mario Kart. Unsurprisingly, I lost almost every time. We also went to a batting cage.

The next day, we drove to the city hall, took some pictures, said goodbye to our host families, and got on the bus.

We drove to another temple near the airport. We went inside and did a Goma prayer experience. Basically, we watched a bunch of priests chant and play drums in a super intricate temple. They also burned a fire and held our bags over it to ward off bad spirits. It was 45 minutes long, but I just looked around the whole time at all the carvings everywhere. We went shopping on a street near the temple, and I got a few chopsticks. They engraved my name in English and Japanese on one pair.

The flight home was shorter than the flight there, but for the next few days afterwards, I had really bad jet lag. I slept 15 hours when I got home, but the next day I couldn't sleep until 3 am.