A Wonderful Week in Japan - No. 391

ON APRIL 20, WHEN MANY OF YOU were asleep, I landed in Tokyo and plopped down on the loveseat in my 14th-floor hotel room, gazing out the window at emerald green trees and a fire engine-red bridge crossing the peaceful koi pond. Then, the room moved.

The windows swayed, beams in the ceiling shifted, and at first I passed it off as jet lag or vertigo, but when the movement didn’t stop for what must have been 10 to 15 seconds, reason whispered to move away from the window and toward the hallway. I was greeted by my sister, who had just come out of her room, and we asked each other in unison, “was that an earthquake?”

It was.

We would learn a 7.4-7.5 Sanriku earthquake had rumbled along Japan’s northeastern coastline, but tremors were felt across the country.

Welcome to a land of beauty, sushi, Shinto, shrines, sake, satsumas, samarais, yakisoba, earthquakes, and at the moment, someplace everyone in the world wants to visit. Throughout our week in Japan we wondered if the faint tremors under our feet were for real or if it was just our weary traveling legs.

This wasn’t my first trip to Japan. I had traveled here in 1989. As food editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper, I had been asked to judge Japan’s first national chicken cooking contest. As a special guest, I was picked up at the airport, whisked to the hotel, meeting rooms, event space, and fancy geisha dinners.

This time I was traveling with my sister who had promised a trip anywhere in the world to her five nieces and nephews when they graduated from high school. My son’s graduation had long passed, and life kept getting in the way of planning a big trip. My sister worried he would never get his dream visit to Japan.

So we found a week that worked for us to make a blitz trip—two nights in Tokyo, two in Kyoto, one in Kanazawa on the west coast along the Sea of Japan, and a final night back in Tokyo. It was fast, fun, food-filled, with plenty of gardens, culture, and woefully, crowds from everywhere on earth.

Our short trip kept us moving and sampling anything that passed our eyes, whether black sesame or melon ice cream at breakfast (yes!), tempura in the airport minutes before boarding, or sushi eaten from bento boxes on the trains. We ate, drank, walked, were soaked in rain, approached by curious Japanese who wanted to practice their English on us, but most of all charmed by a country that has held onto traditions and has much to teach the rest of us about manners and keeping things neat and tidy.