As amazing as Tokyo Disney Resort is, it isn’t Japan. It isn’t even Tokyo. And while our plans to visit Japan began years ago as a fantasy about visiting Disney’s Far Eastern fantasyland, our 2024 trip to Thailand left us doubly hungry for an authentic, Asian adventure. Like most Americans, I had some knowledge of Japanese pop culture, and I knew a smattering of Japanese words. In fact, I knew just enough to know I didn’t know nearly enough to start planning a vacation like this. So that’s where my research began: with learning as much as I could in a single year about Japan’s terrain, language, culture and tourist opportunities.
First of all, Japan isn’t really Japan. In the native language, it’s Nihon (sometimes Nippon), more precisely
Those two kanji characters (more on that shortly) literally mean “origin of the sun,” which is why Japan is sometimes called “the land of the rising sun.” (‘Cause it’s in the far East, right? You get it.) When the Malay people of China saw those characters, they read them the way they’re pronounced in Wu Chinese, which is “Jepang.” The West, specifically the Portuguese, first heard about Japan and its culture from the Malay people they encountered along eastern trade routes. They transliterated “Jepang” as “Giapan” (Marco Polo called it “Cipangu”), and the rest is history — ignorant history, to be sure, but an ignorance that couldn’t be helped at the time.
Japan is a nation comprising four major islands and over 14,000 little ones. In our two and a half weeks of travel, everything we saw was on Japan’s largest island, called Honshu, originally a Chinese phrase meaning “homeland.” So when I say we’ve visited Japan, what I really mean is we visited Honshu — and not much of that. Japan covers about 146,000 square miles, which is almost as big as California. We started our travels in Tokyo, sometimes spelled
(more properly , “eastern capital”), with its official metropolitan population of over 14 million. The “Greater Tokyo Area,” however, is home to over 41 million people. That’s a ludicrous number of citizens, a fact we ran up against hour after hour, day after long day.
A lot of what you’ve heard about Japan is from people who haven’t been there in decades. Reflect for a moment on how much your hometown has changed over the last two generations, and you’ll get a sense of how outdated much of that “conventional wisdom” turned out to be. We heard, for example, that visiting Japan would be unpleasant because “everyone smokes there.” Well, seemingly “everyone smoked” in America in the 20th century, too, but times have changed both here and there. In our travels, we saw a few insulated smoking areas, but honestly, I saw only a handful of people smoking or vaping the whole time. Cannabis is extremely illegal there. The drinking age is 20, and yes, they do take advantage of that — but so do we.
Japan has a largely monolithic populace, by which I mean most people tend to look, well, Japanese. You see a lot of black, white, gray and dark blue clothing. But especially in urban areas, some people do express their individuality through unconventional dress, hair or clothing styles. You also see a fair number of people, especially women, walking around in yukatas and other traditional forms of kimono garments from the Heian period over a thousand years ago. (By the way, I just learned the word kimono means literally “thing to wear.” In a similar vein, sake is Japanese for “alcohol.” The drink we call sake is nihonshu in Japanese — an expression that means “Japanese alcohol.” This is what happens when a culture develops in relative isolation. Also, while we call sake a “rice wine,” it’s actually brewed more like beer.)
I knew I wouldn’t have time to become fluent in Japanese, and I was cognizant of the crazy math behind spending a year studying a new language for a trip that’d last a mere fortnight, especially as a fair number of Japanese tradespeople speak enough English to communicate with Western visitors. I did, however, listen to a 15-hour audiobook of Japanese language lessons and study Japanese Duolingo for over two months, so forgive my immodesty as I say with some pride that I, Gentle Reader, am a total dumdum dingaling when it comes to my knowledge of Japanese. Even so, if I used any Japanese expression other than konnichi-wa or arigato gozaimas, I was praised as if I’d invented the language. Again, the Japanese are extremely polite and deferential, cultural traits braided into their language the way youthful slang has been woven into ours.
Here’s what I can tell you about the Japanese language: It’s difficult in some ways and surprisingly easy in others. You won’t have to worry much about articles, pronouns or plurals, which mostly don’t exist. Adjectives come before the noun, not after as in many Romance languages. The functional Japanese vocabulary is limited compared to that of English because, while each language has as many as half a million words, the average Nihon native knows only a little over 10,000 Japanese words, while a native American might know over 200,000 English words. The challenge for an American trying to learn Japanese is, however, enormous and twofold.
First, most Japanese characters represent either a consonant and a vowel or an entire concept. For me, at least, that made memorization tricky. There are plenty of cognates between our two languages, as the Japanese happily adopt foreign words after quick transliteration passes, so, for example, a passport is a pasupoto and a hotel is a hoteru. That makes sense once you realize which sounds are in the Japanese character toolkit and which, like the sound of the letter L, aren’t. (Americans often make fun of that, but the sounds r and l are so similar even American toddlers have trouble learning and articulating the difference.) But there are also plenty of everyday Japanese words that sound nothing like their English equivalents — and often sound much like each other.
Second, the Japanese language actually has three different “alphabets.” The one Duolingo starts teaching you first is hiragana, a syllabary of 48 characters that mostly represent consonant-vowel combinations. That list also includes five isolated vowel sounds and one isolated consonant,
, which, conveniently, both looks and sounds like n. Gradually, Duolingo starts introducing kanji, which are imported, adapted Chinese glyphs that represent concepts — Essentially, they’re single-character words. There are over 50,000 of those, but good news, American travelers: Most Japanese citizens only know … well … over 2,100 of them. As for me, I know … four. Yeah. Not spectacular. Luckily, the kanji name for Tokyo is the reverse of another city we visited, Kyoto. Don’t ask me how to write Osaka; I have no clue.
What I can explain is why there are horizontal bars (technically macrons) over Japanese vowels as printed in several English-language guidebooks. The Japanese language often repeats identical or similar vowel sounds, so each gets its own spoken syllable. For example, the city we call Tokyo actually has a five-syllable name, “To-u-ki-yo-u,” which is why its hiragana name has five characters. But instead of writing “ou” or “oo” in English, each of which has its own singular sound(s) in our language, some purists prefer to write bars over doubled vowels to make it clear they should be given double length. In practice, it’s hard for English speakers to hear that double length and, as far as I could tell, even many Japanese speakers don’t always honor it. Transliteration gets complicated further by the third Japanese character set, romanji, which is Japan’s way of introducing and embracing sounds that appear in foreign languages like English but not, historically, their own.
I will say we didn’t notice any hesitation over cultural appropriation in Japan, which is often kind of flattering to us when you think about it. The Japanese love American food, pop culture, language and music, which made me feel patriotic even on days when our home country was embarrassing itself on international news: i.e., every day of our November journey.
We arrived in Narita Airport around sundown, giving us our first brief glimpse of what I believe to be a backlit Mount Fuji. Spoiler alert: We only saw the iconic volcano one other time, and for less than 30 seconds, from the window of a Shinkansen bullet train. It’s enormous but really good at hiding.
I have a terrible habit of underestimating how long it’ll take us to fully arrive in a new city, what with everything that has to happen first in the airport and public transit. In Rome, that delayed and shortened our visit to the Colosseum; and despite my best efforts I repeated my error in Tokyo. This time it postponed (and doubled the cost of) our planned visit to TeamLab Planets, an unusual art museum I’ll describe in my next essay. After passing through immigration and customs, we bought and eventually managed to install SIM cards on our phones. (I know e-SIMs exist, but they never seem to work on my unlocked Moto G Stylus. At any rate, you will definitely need constant phone service in Japan.) We’d already bought yen (actually en in Japanese — Who knew?) but needed to purchase Suica cards. What are those, you ask? Suica cards are a brand of IC (integrated circuit) cards, which can be used on mass transit in Japan but also many Japanese restaurants and konbini (convenience stores). You’ll need one; don’t argue. But don’t make the mistake we made, which is thinking we could buy one card for both our purchases. Nope. Every traveler needs his, her or their own SUICA or other IC transit card. Otherwise, you’ll be stuck making Japanese change all the time, and trust me, you don’t want that.
We also missed our “Limousine Bus” from Narita across Chiba Prefecture to Tokyo Disney Resort in the hour-away suburb of Maihama, which meant we needed to find our way around the Tokyo subway system earlier than expected. Thank Google for Maps, which did a pretty good job of showing the way. (I’d find it less helpful elsewhere.) We had our first bowls of true Japanese ramen at the Ikspiari location of Ippudo, a popular and critically well-regarded chain of ramen-ya (ramen shops). The food was oishii, delicious of course, and well worth the short wait outside. If you’ve only had the kind of ramen packaged and sold to starving American college students, the only kind I’d eaten till the late 1990s, then either find the real thing or watch the wonderful Japanese “noodle comedy” Tampopo or both to learn what you’re missing. You’re welcome on both counts.
Over the next four days we alternated between Tokyo DisneySea and Tokyo Disneyland, which I described in earlier essays. We slept in Saturday morning, Nov. 15, before trekking via subway, multiple bags in tow, to Nishi Shinjuku Hotel Mystays in the wonderful, multifaceted, endlessly fascinating Tokyo neighborhood of Shinjuku. That’ll be the subject of my next essay installment. In the meantime, please enjoy this photo of me in the pajamas and slippers provided by the amenity-rich Disney Ambassador Hotel.
If Tokyo Disney Resort interests you, and I honestly can’t imagine why it wouldn’t, I recommend YouTube vlog episodes on the subject posted by AllEars.net, Disney Food Blog, Mammoth Club, Ordinary Adventures and TDR Explorer, all of which were favorites of ours in the ramp-up to our own TDR explorations. In fact I’ve since rewatched many of Ordinary Adventures’ TDR videos as a happy reminder of what we ate, did, saw and otherwise experienced in the Tokyo Disney Resort, so special thanks to Kitra Remick and Peter Sciretta, who assured us that if they could make the journey, we could, too — and they were right. Similarly, if we can find our way to and through Tokyo Disney Resort, you can, too. Just don’t forget to see as much of Japan proper as you can while you’re at it.
Having said that, don’t expect any of those videos to fully prepare you for something as overwhelming as the futuristic, eyepopping, skyscraper-y city-ness that is the Tokyo neighborhood of Shinjuku …
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