I have just returned from Japan and feel extremely unqualified to talk about it. What could I possibly say after a 10-day trip to a unique, complex place with an extremely sophisticated culture thousands of years old? That Tokyo and Kyoto are indeed very different or that the toilets truly are superior to ours? Any tips I might have are bound to be trivial and any commentary I could possibly offer would by default be shallow and uninformed.

Yes, I could talk about whether I liked it or not, but that too seems largely beside the point. Honestly, I find it difficult to see how anyone interested in ANYTHING would not enjoy Japan. No matter if your thing is food, beauty, history, urban living, martial arts, technology, cartoons, weird subcultures, architecture, nature – Japan will have something fascinating for you, potentially the best in the world. I hear even the surfing and the skiing are fantastic, although maybe not great value for European travellers.

There will, however, be posts about some more tangible outcomes of my visit.* I bought an obscene amount of beauty products and plan to do overview/first impressions posts on it all. It feels like there is so much info on Asian beauty products out there, but when I was doing research for my shopping list, I found it wasn’t necessarily true for Japanese make-up and skincare (more so for Korean). Based on my own experience, I thought some shopping suggestions might be useful for people who don’t have time to trawl through gazillion Youtube videos. I’m afraid I need to break it down into several installments, otherwise it’ll take days to write. And read.

Ahead of the visit, I made a list (and a stack) of books I wanted to read before going: I still need to read about half of them, but once I’ve finished a decent amount, I’ll share my thoughts. If you’re interested, I can also talk about my maiko (apprentice geiko/geisha) makeover experience in Kyoto. Or the day at an onsen? Or the temples? Or the city life? Let me know in the comments if you have any particular wishes. And if you’d like to see some very trivial travel tips after all, I’ll do my best.

*I have written about Tokyo Disneyland already, a topic I felt I could more-or-less handle.