Having just come back from Japan I can say it's a most amazing and very strange country. A lot of things seem very familiar from any Western city, but everything is just slightly different. It's interesting just how similar some things are but how different others are. It's a lot more subtle than, for instance, we have pound shops and they have 99 yen shops (which is about 45p). There are the tunes that are played every time a train comes into a station that would drive most Londoners completely mad, the cutesy pictures, and the train conductors who bow on their way in and out of every carriage. Generally, it's just like England but weird.

Anyway, the interesting things are the pictures so I'm going to put those in separate posts for each part of the trip.

• Japan Trip, Part 1 - Tokyo
• Japan Trip, Part 2 - Nikko
• Japan Trip, Part 3 - Takayama
• Japan Trip, Part 4 - Shirakawago
• Japan Trip, Part 5 - Kanazawa
• Japan Trip, Part 6 - Kyoto
• Japan Trip, Part 7 - Osaka
• Japan Trip, Part 8 - Koyosan
• Japan Trip, Part 9 - Tokyo and home