The most famous cat island in Japan is Aoshima but we were unlikely to be heading that way so I searched for one near Okayama and found Manabe island, and it sounded like a good excuse to do a spot of boating so we decided to visit on the way to Fukuoka, making it quite…

Mihoko was a PhD student in the Pharmacy School when I was working there and also when Pauline was there, we both got on well with her. We thought it would be great to catch up since she’d been back in Japan about twelve years or so now. So we took the fast train to…

Pauline was keen to get our northern hemisphere flu vaccinations so we took an uber to an English speaking clinic where we’d made an appointment and got jabbed. We got an uber back to the railway station and headed off on a local train to Arashiyama for the bamboo forest and hopefully the monkey park…

After a couple of pleasant days in Tokyo we jumped on the Shinkansen to Kyoto. The highlight of this trip was the little boy in the seat next to us, he was about two, had a Thomas The Tank Engine top on and a backpack, and in his hand was what we thought was a…