I’ve been consumed in the last week with researching what to see, smell, and taste in Japan for our upcoming trip in July. I began by researching the history and sights of Hiroshima, then Kyoto, and now Tokyo and the surrounds. I suppose I left Tokyo to the end because I knew how overwhelming it would be. It’s a massive city with a population of over 36.9 million, which is almost double the population of New York City, the biggest city in the U.S. It’s famed for its high energy, fusion of the modern and the traditional, and endless eateries. Robot restaurants, rice cookers with 20 different settings, women with mile-long fake eyelashes, and matcha green tea-flavored everything abound.

Five years ago, Tokyo surpassed Paris for having the most number of Michelin-star rated restaurants in the world, which is pretty impressive given a lot of these restaurants are random no-ambiance sushi restaurants that don’t necessarily live up to the stereotypical image of the “ideal” in French culture. So when it comes to doing research on what and where to eat, it’s an endless list on every food blog and news site on what’s considered the best and what’s worth waiting for at multiple price points. To make matters more complicated, not all restaurants’ Romanized names are written on their store fronts, so I have to create a guide with both the Japanese name Romanized and the Japanese characters. And because of how large Japan is, we need to organize restaurants by location/neighborhood and food type.

I don’t think I’ve ever planned a trip where I was more overwhelmed by all the options that faced me. I guess I could have felt that way about cities like Shanghai and Paris, which have endless things to see and do, but for some reason, because I’ve been wanting to go to Tokyo for so long, especially after a failed planned trip when I was 21, that all the hype and energy has accumulated to a point where I want to make sure I see and do as much is humanly possible during my first trip there without not sleeping. 🙂