Escape From Tokyo: Day Trip Ideas

Above, the Great Buddha of Kamakura. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

For those who are visiting Tokyo, Japan and who want to take a day trip or two outside of the city, the Japan Times has some very good suggestions for places to visit that are relatively easy to get to.

They begin with:

In his 1921 book “A Diplomat In Japan,” written during the 1880s, British diplomat Ernest Satow (1843-1929) wrote widely about travel in Japan: How Japanese people traveled, where they stayed, what they ate and what happened during his own travels on the Tokaido (“Eastern Sea Road”) from Tokyo to Kyoto. 

Declaring Japanese people to be “great travellers,” Satow explains: “The booksellers’ shops abound in printed itineraries which furnish the minutest possible information about inns, roads, distances … and other particulars which the tourist requires.” 

To this day travel remains easy, or and fairly well documented. And, with increasing English signage and English-language proficiency of people positioned at traveler hotspots throughout the land, the country has never been more accessible. 

Just as it was in the days of the Gokaido (Five Highways), if Tokyo is where you choose to base yourself for your vacation, or if it is where you live, sightseeing certainly does not have to be limited to the confines of the capital. Ease of travel makes the humble higaeri-ryokō (day trip) from Tokyo definitively doable.

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