Narita International Airport outside of Tokyo was the quietest airport we have ever been in, eerily so. We guessed that we were among the few people actually staying in Japan instead of transiting across the Pacific, but still. There was no line for our baggage, immigration, or customs. We traded in our JR Passes immediately and zoomed into Tokyo, navigated the metro system with ease and made it to our hostel without any complications.
We had planned two days in Tokyo at both the beginning and of our …

While it’s easy to spend a lot of time drinking beer on the beach, there are other places to see. The next stop was the mountains. We found a nice hotel with a view of some rice fields at the base of a couple volcanoes. It was nice and quiet, sometimes depressingly empty. A couple bus loads of old people showed up one night, but were gone the next day. They were on some sort of organized tour, and judging from the extremely sunburned beer bellies, they probably had spent …