[Jetfire]

Excuse me if this is long winded, but I'm just going to rattle off a bunch of thoughts, suggestions, and a bit of travel advice mixed together.

I went last fall and it was incredible. Coming up with a travel plan really depends what you want to see, are you after shopping and all the glamour of a big city? Tokyo and Osaka are the places to be for that. Are you after scenery and monuments? There's incredible places across the whole country. My group opted for a bit of both.

I was there for about 18 days (not including travel), and what my group did was get the 7 day tourist-only Shinkansen (bullet train) pass. Yes it's damn pricy, but it's absolutely worth it if you want to see a bunch of places, and will save you a ton of money in doing so compared to paying the full train price from city to city. We went across the mainland starting in Hiroshima, trying to experience a little bit of a bunch of different cities with our final destination being Tokyo. (The scenery from the train as you crossed city to city was incredible too.)

If you want endless history, there's places like Kyoto and Nara with pretty much the most amazing ancient temples and gardens you could find there. Nara for example had Tōdai-ji which was a beautiful park and 1300 year old temple, it was an impressive structure to say the least. The same area was also overrun with tame deer that people could interact with safely, definitely unique considering the fear our Alberta deer have of us. It just added another unique layer to the place.

Nara, Kyoto and Osaka are all very close to each other so it makes planning a few days around them easy, and all have something different to offer. Osaka was an absolutely beautiful big city, the flashiest and most glamorous big city in Japan, for sure, and places like Dotonbori in downtown Osaka were very cool evening/night shopping experiences with a unique setting and great market streets all over. Shinsekai was another very cool Osaka market experience, though that one was largely food shops. Also in Osaka, Osaka castle was a great place to visit, beautiful castle and park with a lovely museum inside.

Hiroshima was a nice city, we saw the Genbaku Dome (the famous building that got pummeled by the atomic bomb yet stayed standing and became an iconic reminder of the devastation of nuclear war), and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum was extremely interesting, and powerful, though very sad. A less sad thing right near Hiroshima though was the island of Itsukushima, a national park with some great shops and it's particularly famous for its "floating" torii gate and shrine. That one alone made for a great day trip. There's even a small aquarium on the island with local sea creatures. Itsukushima was another place with tame deer all over the park, even friendlier than the Nara deer, it was awesome.

Tokyo, as to be expected, had a ton of stuff that you could do. One of the better places we saw there was the Sunshine City mall, which contained a bunch of great food, some decent shopping, as well as a world class aquarium, the Tokyo Sunshine Aquarium. About a block away from Sunshine City was a giant Sega arcade on the outskirts of the Ikebukuro district's shopping area, with stores of all kinds.

Also in Tokyo, the Shinjuku district had stuff like the robot bar as people mentioned above (it's very expensive so we didn't go in). Right near that were good food and drink areas like Omoide Yokocho and Golden Gai.

If you've got kids or enjoy anime, video games, toys, etc. the Tokyo neighborhood of Akihabara is a must. There's arcades all over, world class toy stores like Mandarake Complex, and lots of other miscellaneous fun shops. About 5 blocks over from Akihabara was the Ochanomizu neighborhood which had decent shopping, particularly music shops if that's your thing. A few blocks in the other direction from Akihabara was the impressive Yodobashi mall, like 9 floors of every kind of shopping imagineable, and some great food shops there too.

One thing with travelling Japan is that it doesn't need to be overly expensive at every turn, you can eat good food at reasonable prices pretty much anywhere, convenience stores at every turn, food stands, and even most restaurants themselves were pretty reasonable. It's when you start trying to find really good sushi places or wagyu beef or things like that it'll get really expensive quick.

One other thing I can think of, we didn't stay at an actual hotel at any point during our time in Japan, as we used airbnb rentals. There are many out there at great prices, and it helped us cut our costs way down for our trip, just pick places to stay that are within a reasonable travel distance from attractions you'd be interested in seeing.

It was a remarkable trip overall, and I definitely want to go again at some point. There's so much that can be done outside of the few things I've mentioned, it's worth making a big list of the things that your group might find interesting, for when you happen to be in that area.

Hope I could help just a little bit. If you've got any questions or anything, just throw me a PM and I'd gladly try to answer whatever it may be.