Sam's Travel Log: Japan 2024

Welp, it's July 18th and in just a few hours I'll be back at the Nagoya airport my trip started at. I'll be sleeping in a hotel inside the airport tonight so in the morning me and my fellow UK students can catch our early flight home. Almost six weeks ago I arrived in Japan and everything was new and the adventure unwritten and full of possibilities. Now the adventure's been had and done and written, and I have six week's worth of memories for a lifetime. I'm so thankful for this trip and that I got to go on it. I didn't know what to expect, but it was better than I could've imagined and I savored every day here in Japan. I'm super excited to return home, but I certainly haven't been "suffering" here in any way!  My favorite parts of my trip and time in Japan: Riding trains. Before this trip I'd been on a real, public-transit passenger train only one time in my life and I was only seven or eight years old, and on a subway system one...

For the final weekend of my trip here to Japan for the Nagoya University Summer Intensive Program (NUSIP), my friend Tim and I made an overnight trip to Tokyo, returning to see and do a whole bunch more stuff even though we were there for two nights just the week before. You can never run out of things to do in a city as massive as Tokyo. On this trip I finally got to ride the famous Shinkansen bullet trains of Japan. Each shinkansen travels over 150 miles per hour, and some up to 200, on express routes linking major cities. The track length to go from Nagoya to Tokyo is 227 miles in a route that hugs the coast. Driving that route would take at least four hours by car, but the shinkansen had us at Tokyo Station in just an hour and a half! It was very smooth and very nice, but you want to avoid looking out the window as much as you can, or pull the curtain down, because everything blurs by you so fast that if you're like me it'll make you feel motion-sick. I was fine, though. Li...

Last week might've been the best part of my entire trip. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday were the days of the highly-anticipated 2-night trip to Tokyo. All 40 of us and the program directors loaded up early Thursday morning onto two big buses and we drove off for one of the biggest cities in the entire world. A neat part of the trip were the various stops on the way there Thursday and on the way back Saturday that broke up the drive. Thursday we saw Suzuki's museum for their car-making as well as Yamaha's museum of their motorcycles, boats, jet-skis, and other stuff. Saturday's were of a different theme: we saw a geothermal hot spring near a volcano, took a ride on a pirate ship across a mountain lake, and saw Mt. Fuji from the Mishima Sky Walk bridge. All were really cool. I greatly enjoyed Yamaha's museum, and seeing an active volcano and a snow-capped mountain on the same day when I had never seen either before was really awesome! Mt. Fuji is very, very incredible...

Monday marked the halfway point of my trip, and also was my 21st birthday! I really enjoyed treating myself and celebrating throughout the day and thinking about all I’m grateful for.  One of my favorite things to do with birthday cakes and other cakes is eat them with my breakfast. A breakfast of peanut butter toast, waffles, or bagels combined with a small piece of cake is one of my favorites, and gives me a convenient time to enjoy cake other than the evening. So the day before I bought two slices of cake—one chocolate and one French crepe—and had the French crepe one with a peanut butter waffle before heading to class. After class I got dinner at KFC, and then back at my dorm had more cake and watched a new movie I’d been recently interested in: The Way of the Dragon (1972) featuring Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris. This is the fifth straight birthday where I picked and watched a movie that day. I also got a card from home Amazon-shipped that arrived that morning, which lit up and p...

On Saturday my fellow student Tim and I rode the train to the Nagoya bay coast to Legoland Japan! Visiting Legoland was one of the bucket-list must-do items for me on this trip, and the weather forecast was showing Saturday as the only rain-free day for the next week, so we jumped on the opportunity to make it happen.  We arrived mid-morning and started in the Miniland section, where staff spent thousands of hours constructing a sprawling recreation of Nagoya, Tokyo, Kyoto, Hokkaido, and other parts of Japan using millions of bricks to make city streets, temples, cars, trains, boats, famous buildings, historic sites, and all kinds of other stuff. Most impressive was the Nagoya Dome of the Chunichi Dragons model, which using hundreds of thousands of bricks and a massive crowd of minifigure spectators recreated the home of Nagoya’s beloved baseball team. I recognized some other places in Japan I’ve already been to recreated in Lego form: Kyoto’s Golden Temple, Port Nagoya Aquarium, a...

On Tuesday we loaded up on a bus for the Yokohama Rubber Company's Shinshiro plant, which is their main production facility for their tires. They make tires for passenger cars, trucks, buses, tractors, off-road vehicles, and almost anything else with four wheels. We were given a tour of the plant and saw every step of the tire manufacturing process, from mixing globs of rubber into sticky slabs to putting the treads on and preparing them for shipping. For someone who spent the five months before this trip working at a wheel manufacturing plant, touring a tire manufacturing plant was a blast. There were a bunch of similarities in layout, machinery, color schemes, sounds, etc. that reminded me of home. We weren't allowed to take any pictures, so all I have is the front sign. One of my favorite parts of the program schedule so far.  Not much else to report on this week, it's mostly been classes and day-to-day life in Japan, but I've had some fun lunches and dinners. Cafes ...

This weekend I was out and about a lot, riding trains on the subway, in the city, and through the countryside seeing lots of new scenery, enjoying some snacks and sweets at some cafes and restaurants, and taking whatever else came in two there-and-back-again full days. The biggest highlight was the visit to the Toyota Automobile Museum on Sunday: an absolutely spectacular museum with over 150 vehicles from all eras and manufacturers--not just Toyotas--from 1890s horseless carriages to Rolls-Royces to a Ferrari to the massive, tail-finned 1950s Cadillac Eldorados to one of the first Toyota Corolla models to the Tesla Roadster.  And that's just the vehicle exhibit: in another building you venture into the Automobile Culture Showroom, with license plates from over 75 different countries and all the unique international license plate styles, hundreds of miniature model cars all on one giant highway in formation, with famous vehicles from the early 1900s in the back to 2010s ones up at ...

On Friday night five of my classmates and I went to see the Chunichi Dragons (Nagoya's pro team) host the Hiroshima Carp in a Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) game inside the Nagoya Dome. It was a great way to end the first week of classes, and was even a victory for the underdog Dragons! We all had a great time and it was a really neat experience.  The Dragons' pitcher, Hiroto Takahashi, pitched seven shutout innings, their centerfielder Orlando Calixite hit an exciting solo-shot home run just over the wall into the Carp fan section in the 3rd inning for the game's winning run, and their closer Raidel Martinez got his league-leading 21st save completing the shutout. It was very cool seeing the home run: from what I've heard home runs are far less common in Japanese baseball, as they play a lot more small-ball strategies rather than power hitting. We were all quite surprised they won: they were last in their division heading into the game and the Carp were first in th...

In automotive engineering class, I have been making a lot of fascinating discoveries about the world's automotive industry, and in this post I want to present some of the most interesting facts and figures I've learned over the first four days of class:  Global map of the automotive industry: Japan: 9 major automobile manufacturers: Honda, Isuzu, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Subaru, Suzuki, and Toyota. United States: 3 major automobile manufacturers: Ford, General Motors, and Tesla. Europe:  6 major automobile manufacturers: BMW, Volkswagen, Fiat, Stellantis, Renault, and Mercedes-Benz. South Korea:  1 major automobile manufacturer: Hyundai (parent company of KIA). This was really neat to see where all the players reside, and how many brands each of them own. Sometimes it's hard to know whether a brand is its own company or if it's owned by another--Chevrolet, Cadillac, GMC, Buick, and others are all owned by General Motors, for example.  The Euro Car Segment sy...

Today for lunch I took the subway one station over between classes to try the Japanese KFC, which I had been itching to try ever since I got accepted for this trip in March, and today finally got to experience in all its glory! The menu is much different: no mashed potatoes, no gravy, no green beans, and no mac-n-cheese (and no disgusting Chizzas!), but way more chicken burgers types, a boneless chicken tender type, choco-pies, biscuits that look like tall donuts, chicken nuggets, fries, chicken twisters, melon soda, cranberry lemonade, and a whole bunch more that I'll need to try on return visits!  I got boneless chicken tenders (called Kernel Crispies), a biscuit, coleslaw, and melon soda. At the kiosk you can build your order with all kinds of combinations, so you can get exactly what you want and nothing you don't. The Kernel Crispies were DELICIOUS. Especially dipped in the coleslaw. I don't know if they were made with the 11 herbs and spices or not, but they sure tast...

Japanese class has involved a lot of studying in the mornings and evenings to make flashcards for all the new vocabulary, but the time in the classroom is very interactive and fun. Today we learned how to say any number between one and ten million. Like English, there's a system to it, so you feel powerful once you have the tools to say any one of ten million numbers just like that. We also practiced ordering at the "NUSIP Cafe", where one student would be the cashier and another would be the customer, and they would order coffees, orange juices, sandwiches, beers, etc. When it was my turn I ordered "Hyaku biru, teikuato shimasu." ("One hundred beers, to go.") For lunch today I found a new cafeteria inside my classroom building--a small stand on the first floor that only serves lunch and does so with bento boxes (to-go lunch boxes Japanese employees or students will take for their lunch breaks). I got to order my first bento box, and I really enjoyed i...