Welcome to Travel Tips for Japan where I will be sharing my experiences of visiting Japan and trying to provide tips for places to visit, where to eat and how to survive on a budget.
I have been visiting Japan every year in August for more than 10 years now and have seen how the cost of my visits has spiralled over the years at first because of the financial crash nearly 10 years ago and now because of the fluctuating value of the pound (£) due to the uncertainty of Brexit. My most recent visit in August 2019 saw the value of pound at an all time low against the Yen (¥) so we had to be very careful to make our money last. I should point out that the costs in Japan have stayed the same over the last 10 years, if something cost ¥1000 in 2009 then it will still cost ¥1000 in 2019. The fact that the pound now only buys ¥132 as opposed to nearly ¥250 in 2007. For this reason I will try to find affordable places to visit and eat.
I visit Japan with my Japanese wife and our 3 children and I am lucky that they all speak Japanese fluently and I am never short of a translator, but as a non-Japanese speaker, I will try to highlight places that provide English menus or translation services.
We stay at my wife’s family’s home near Tsu City in Mie prefecture. Mie is a beautiful area close to the Pacific Ocean, very rural, lots of mountains and rice fields. As we are based in Mie most of our travels take place in this area, but we do sometimes venture to Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya. We even once went to Toyama on the Northern coast of Japan and you will find details of these trips in this blog.